The Orange Box Dissected - with Valve

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WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD...
Valve's David Speyrer and Marc Laidlaw reveal the secrets of Half-Life 2's second episode to Jamie Sefton: why you can't lose Alyx, the tear-jerking ending and their plans for Episode Three

While the long delay of the game's release stretched the idea of what episodic gaming actually is, Half-Life 2: Episode Two remains a triumphant expansion to the universe, taking your character of Gordon Freeman and his sassy sidekick Alyx on an epic trek to the White Forest resistance base.

On an eventful journey, Alyx is attacked and left unconscious by a new deadly opponent - a Hunter - Gordon discovers a complex underground Antlion cave system with the Vortigaunts, and the battle for Earth is taken out into the open with the help of a new super-powered muscle car and a helping of lethal Strider Busters.

The man in charge of bringing Episode Two to your hard drive was project lead David Speyrer, who joined Valve just as work on Half-Life 2 started back in 1998. Speyrer began our interview by explaining how the development team always examined scenes carefully in Ep2 through playtesting, and ruthlessly cut anything that confused the player - even if it meant changing ideas already revealed to the gaming public...

"If you remember watching the trailer that we did for Episode Two, there was a bit where Alyx was dangling over the deep canyon. There were a lot of issues with that sequence, the worst being that Alyx falling as a result of the train crash didn't create any interesting tension between the player and the Hunters as an adversary.

"Testers mashed the use key to try and figure out how to catch her before she falls, and then they go down there, see her unconscious and really want to help her, but there was nothing they could do but wait for the Vortigaunt. We don't have an administer first aid button!"

Speyrer felt that the sequence they eventually created with the Hunter was infinitely more effective, as the player knew very clearly that Gordon was trapped and immobile, and simply had to watch helplessly as the enemy punctured poor Alyx.

CAVE STORY
The difference between a good and a truly great game is in the polishing, and Episode Two had numerous balancing issues throughout its development. For example, in the level where you're being chased by the Antlion Guardian, Speyrer found that finding the right balance of being just challenging enough was very difficult, and took months of work to get it right.

"The original version was a lot more maze-like and players would just get incredibly lost. So, we did a pass of adding unique landmarks so that the player would know if they ended up at the same intersection twice, and then we then tilted the whole map so that you'd know down was one way and up was the other - but still it wasn't enough. We then lopped off a couple of loops to simplify the geometry and added the drop-downs, which kind of force forward progression, because you can't get back up them. I also think reworking the lighting and making the little crawl tubes high-contrast really helped, as it led people into them."

At this point we were joined by the game's writer Marc Laidlaw, who as well as being the franchise's scribe, has also written many short stories and books, including Neon Lotus, which was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award. One of the burning questions we needed answering was why the team felt they needed to bring in a new character, Dr Arne Magnusson?

"In early drafts of the episode, Eli and Kleiner had warmed up White Forest all by themselves, somehow, in the brief time after fleeing City 17. This seemed ridiculous, so we developed a backstory in which Black Mesa had acquired an extremely cheap Cold War bunker and developed some projects in response to budgetary and oversight problems associated with basing all work in North America.

"Again, all the explanatory matter bogged down the game, so we ditched it. There may still be some old lines hanging around in the .wav files, but I haven't looked..."

ME AND MY GIRL
Later in Episode Two, when Gordon finally gets behind the wheel of the Hotrod, Alyx suddenly starts jumping in the car next to you, creating a problem for the game designer: what happens if you drive off without her?

"It really depends on the situation," explains Speyrer.

"If she's close enough she'll run after you and jump in to catch up. In the worst-case scenario, where we realise the player is being malicious and trying at break the game, we bring her ahead at the transitions.

"Also if you accidentally leave Alyx behind, and complete the whole map, we feel it would be an undue punishment to have to go back for her, and in that case we bring her forward to join you too. It's always a trade off, and we consider it a failure of the game if the player gets into a situation where they can't proceed. We try to make the guarantee that auto saves only are sufficient to play the game."

For the climactic level, Speyrer discovered that this gameplay freedom was challenging to build because they needed to provide for players, whatever tactics they chose.

"Some players would use the car exclusively, while others would fall back to the base, and do the whole fight there or even complete the whole level on foot. We originally required a lot of use of the Combine Assault Rifle's alt-fire as the primary way to dispatch the Hunters, but we found a large population of playtesters didn't know about it and didn't use it."

The sheer size of the final map was also a major problem for the Ep2 team, as players could get disorientated.

"We used the radar on the car, the loudspeaker announcements - where the guy tells you where the Striders and Hunters are coming from - and created these key visual landmarks, such as the saw mill. I was very happy with the final battle - we wanted people to feel that they barely snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, with the last wave pushing players right up against the ropes so that they were taking out the final Striders right as they marched up to the base. We didn't want it to be too difficult, though, and really didn't want players to be frustrated."

DIRTY LAUNDRY
So, how did the final scene become such an emotionally-charged moment? Marc Laidlaw: "I wrote as good a script as I could, then when we got into the recording studio, Merle Dandridge [Alyx Vance's voice] took the scene further than was possible on paper.

"The most powerful bit at the end was her improvisation; I just transcribed it. When we had that, the animator went to work with a level designer, blocking out the movements of the actors in the scene, then slowly getting into the details. Merle's raw performance could make people choke up - but it only came together at the very end, which always seems to happen..."

And finally - what can we expect in Episode Three? "We don't know entirely what's happening in the next episode, but we're gonna figure it out!" laughed Speyrer.

"There are always things we want to do that we can't because of the constraints of either the story or the arc we've laid out for the gameplay - or just time. So we shelve them and carry on. Ideas fly around here quite a bit, so we have this huge laundry list of things to try for the next thing..."

Jamie Sefton