I wish he'd been given all three movies.

I'd commit grave sins to be able to inhabit and play in Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. The bizarre post-human factions alone, so alien and horrifying in the best way. I'd *have* to go Ultra, though, no question. Could legit make for a really dark MMO. For sheer thrill and a tight looter-shooter game though, I'd be SO stoked for one using his Revenger universe. Ohhhh to crack those baubles, each a potential Pandora's box of hilariously dangerous relics involving hideous and unknown physics....one can dream.

He should go back to Oldmanmurray. He would be age appropriate now.

Wikipedia is not a reliable source, especially when it comes to general public opinion. It has the habit of magnifying minority/fringe opinions, or making tiny issues seem like they were a huge deal. According to the edit history of that page, that section did not exist on the page until 2023. Coincidentally, one of the 3 sources cited in that section was published in 2023. They also decided to add two Opinion Editorial articles, one from 2015, and the other from, take a guess, 2023. OpEds have no requirement to be factually correct, and therefore are in general, an awful source of actual information. Including these kinds of articles does not present an extension of good faith, and makes it look like the person adding them is doing it only to present a source, regardless of its credibility, so they can include whatever they are trying to add. All of those edits, including adding that section, were from the same person. That user never made an edit to that page until 2023. And they never made an edit to that page since. Since 2023, there have been 3 edits. One of them was apparently yesterday, which was instantly reverted. The second edit is interesting because it says "[...]presenting the controversy as being bigger than in reality would lend undue weight to fringe opinions." This edit was, of course, instantly reverted by the same person as before, but they are different from the person that added the Backlash section who was never seen again on this page since 2023. Looking at this new user's edit history on this page, they started editing the page in 2021 with only a single edit, 3 edits in both 2022 and 2023, and 2 edits in 2025. What is interesting about this user is that they only ever reverted changes to the page; they made no other edits except for reverting edits from other users. The point being, some users on Wikipedia will decide that they want a specific thing in a Wikipedia page, and will disregard any changes made to them in order to force what they want to be on that page. Sometimes this is warranted because of vandalism (which did not occur, from what I can tell, until yesterday), but most of the time it is because of personal bias from people who have more "trusted" Wikipedia accounts. Wikipedia listing opinions is of course, incredibly dangerous, as it can lead to the general public (who doesn't actually research something or check sources) believing whatever is on the page when they read it. This is why Wikipedia has a policy that doesnt allow individual/personal reviews of movies to be included in articles, for example. This is what makes Wikipedia such an unreliable source, and anyone quoting it should thoroughly review not only the sources cited but also the edit history of the page they are citing.

I felt bad for him because how do you make a good follow up to something that left you no questions to answer? No matter what he wrote, it was not going to be good. Nothing could have been written that would have been a home run. JJ didn't ruin the Sequels. 7 was a decent start, if overly safe with some minor problems. Rian ruined the Sequels with 8. 9 was a foregone conclusion. Everyone going into that theatre expected a movie they weren't going to like because of 8. Its evident by their appeal to a younger audience by shoving part of the story into Fortnite. The older audience wasn't very interested in seeing 9 after they saw 8, so Disney needed the disillusioned fan's kids to get them to bring them to see what they saw in Fortnite.

Wikipedia doesn't have to list opinions. It just has to magnify certain ideas and opinions from other sources, under the guise of impartiality and "Objective Journalism". “So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here–not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.” ― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

I think this is partially discounting the people that do genuinely try their best to keep Wikipedia factual. There are certainly many people that contribute to Wikipedia and do an excellent job trying to maintain factually correct articles all across the site. AFAIK, they are not paid for this. In particular, math related pages tend to be the most pure pages since there is little room for opinion in such a topic. The problem is that even just 1 user abusing their "control" over a Wikipedia page will throw the entire site's credibility into question. People like that, unfortunately, are often ones that seek out places where they can have "power." Controlling information, or globally accessible pages that document events in history, no matter how small, is incredibly alluring for this kind of person. It is an issue inherent to the Open-Source style approach of Wikipedia. Anyone can make an edit, but any edit can also be reverted. For topics where opinion is introduced, this often leads to Edit Wars, fighting in Talks, and the eventual locking of the page so no further edits can be made.

Au contraire... That is EXACTLY what we need for universe consistency and coherency

Yeah imagine if they went "ah gaben is old let's replace him. In fact let's just have a new company with only zoomers make the official hl3"

Can I just ask what people expect from a half life story? Like it's always been pretty thin on the ground, right? What was the first game? Experiment goes wrong, aliens notice us and invade, we kill a bunch of them, there's the occasional macguffin, travel to their planet, beat the big bad enemy, boom, mysterious gman puts us in the fridge. The two expansions seem like the same story from another POV, I have no memory of any important events from either one. Second game, gman drops us mysteriously back like 20 years later. We kill a bunch of enemies, there's some more macguffin, the vortigaunts were enslaved now they're on our side. There's a bit of intrigue, we beat the local bad guy, the vortigaunts save us. The following two chapters, apart from having to rescue people, I couldn't tell you what even happens. The world is implied to be so big that you are an insignificant player and you could never hope to grasp what's really gping on, and we never get more than glimpses of what's really happening. It seems more like the idea of a world that leaves open the possibility of more or less anything happening and within which to set games, than a coherent story with structure and tension and stakes, beyond "world in peril" or "friend in peril", which is pretty bog standard stuff. Like sure we might be a bit invested in Alyx & her dad's stories, but I always assumed people were hyped for sequels because the games play well and have an interesting backdrop. What exactly is the special sauce that mark laidlaw brings? Yes the environmental storytelling was novel and well done, but it's always been so vague because they're so committed to never leaving the players POV, and they spend so little time explaining the actual world.

Speaking entirely personally, I thought at least Half Life Alyx's story worked on two levels. It was about freeing the gman as Alyx but gman sorta represented... Oh man, now I'm worried I can't remember the game well enough to communicate my original thoughts. I remember playing it and feeling like the gman represented the writers or creativity, a bigger picture concept or something that went meta. And if that was the case it felt like Valve creating a piece of art that said Alyx and VR have revitalized our desire to tell stories and GMAN is free again. The moment they drop their new headset I'll buy it and play again just to relive the experience but I'd say I'm excited about Half Life because Valve makes A) good games B) they make solid diegetic games which I find to be kinda rare C) their games often feel like they came from a team of artists than just a team of coders. Maybe that's the polish or maybe that's the massive amount of testing I'm led to believe they do but when valve makes a new game it often feels like the guy who made Stanley Parable just made a new game - easy to recognize art because it's so good.

I think this is why I always loved System Shock and System Shock 2 so much more as the narrative building was so much bigger than any game I've played before I since. I wish someone would sort the licensing out for that game and bring us a System Shock 3.

This is the first I'm hearing of that specifically but would help explain the seemingly random pickup of Hoppoo games recently.

I don't understand the particular hate for 8 at all. I mean, I hated it, but slightly less than 7 and 9. Real fans only like the OT and Andor. Prequels were horse shit. 7 was absolute dog shit. 8 at least tried to do something interesting, but failed and ended up being cow shit. 9 was JJ slinging his own diarrhea on everyone.

Episode 4 if I remember correctly. He is credited as writer on the Wikipedia list of episodes. I can recommend the rest of the season as well, less than two hours

I agree the diegetic storytelling is very well done and that did push the craft of game storytelling forwards, but the actual world itself is a lot of texture with very little substance. Loads of cool ideas, but almost no decisions, like they want the freedom to add anything at any time without ever restricting themselves by saying "here is how this concept actually works", or even "this is who this person is". We never really meet the aliens or the antagonists, ever. The gman is an alien in a skin-suit, and Breen is just a collaborator. They are both essentially puppets. Like, what was the nihilanth? We killed it, then... what? I guess the vortigaunts were freed, but how does that tie into the slug beings, the human cyborg slavery, any of it? The vortigaunts could easily explain at least some of the world, What does any of it mean? I get the idea of being deep in and unable to see the forest for the trees, and that is definitely a style of story that you can do, but it's unsatisfying long term. Eventually you have to get at least a glimpse of the broader picture or nothing has any meaning. The world has no rules, which doesn't make good science fiction. I say this as someone who regularly replays HL2 because I enjoy the texture so much, I just acknowledge it's very limited.

I'm working up the courage to try those for the first time, but as very old games now, I'm a little apprehensive about all the friction they're likely to have.

I mean, I guess you're right as far as I'm willing to debate the point. Does that change anything? I don't feel like the franchise has done the Lost thing where every episode (in this case game) only asks more questions and never answers them. I also don't feel like I'm dying to learn more about the world or that the small scope of their answers takes me out of the experience. Like, it's perfectly encapsulated to what I need to enjoy the "movie" that is this game. I completely agree that this has costs, and that it probably can't go on for forever. Like one of the costs is I don't super care about this world, it's not a world I want to run a TTRPG in, or could envision a hundred spin-offs. I want the end of this story and I'd be okay if it stopped. Idk, that's a fine thing to make imo. And again, it's been top of it's class in execution since it's inception (never played the smaller games like Blue something or other) so idk - hard for me to nitpick the world or the game. Now Valve please release your new VR set so I can buy it or the Big Picture 2 and get back into VR.

Yeah, I think we more or less agree, and I'm not trying to say it's a bad game or even a bad story, just that there's not a lot I need closure on. I think the only thing that could be done to "ruin" it would be to pile on a bunch of unsatisfying answers to the open questions about the world. I'd definitely play HL3 just to experience more of the world, I just don't care that much about where the story goes and I don't think that's ever been the main draw. It would be nice to get some explanations of the world that would extend it and allow people to tell more interesting stories within it, but I honestly doubt that those answers exist. It really feels like they're kind of just riffing and they don't have a bigger vision for where it all goes, if I had to guess.

Not bad but not what I expected