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The early plans for HL2 called for a story that spanned the globe and covered many days, but this would have meant discontinuities in space, time and Gordon Freeman's consciousness. Many ideas arose, became our favourites and then eventually fell by the wayside. Laidlaw: "Levels, creatures, characters and gameplay elements were in flux for a long time. We try to satisfy both camps perhaps this is impossible, but we do try." Cutting-Room Floor In a game especially, some of our fans love looking for clues that help them piece together a sense of the world, others want to get on with the shooting. Guess which kind I prefer? We're trying not to be stingy, but to strike sparks and suggest more stories than can possibly be told. There's something skimpy and cheap about trying to extract full-scale entertainment from every single little detail, rather than just liberally scattering them about Some writers will take one idea and spread it very, very thin others will take that one and five others like it and stuff them ten to a page for hundreds of pages. Laidlaw: "It's a classic science-fiction technique to build your world with details, any one of which could be made into a story or a book in its own right. But the exact nature of the threat was left to be solved in Half-Life 2." The Half-Life 2 Univers

We knew that some immense threat had chased the Nihilanth and its creatures out of their own world and into Xen, from which location they were all too glad to seize the opportunity to continue on to Earth with suppression through the citadels. In other words, we knew that once you cleared out the Nihilanth (end-of-game boss), you were going to discover something worse beyond it. Lombardi: "We had a glimpse of the larger threat when we were working on Half-Life 1. However, the writing is no more (or less) important than any other element of the game, which is one obvious way in which it differs from a book, where the writing is everything." The writing of dialogue ends once all the English language voice-acting has been recorded and the script sent off to localisers but even then, there are many little decisions regarding how the game unfolds which each affect the way a player perceives the story. "Writing for a Half-Life-style game is an ongoing collaborative effort that starts in the earliest phases of project development and doesn't really end until the game is finished. For a long time, the character and animation systems were very rough, and those of us closest to the story had to live with a strong level of trust that the technology would eventually get to the point where we could actually implement the scenes we were sketching out.

Laidlaw: "One of the key story elements that hung on technology was the extent to which we believed we'd be able to develop strong, well-rounded characters and put them in dynamic, dramatic scenes. The only benchmark set for the team was quality: make the greatest game experience you can imagine in the Half-Life universe." Writing It was agreed that Valve would self-fund the project and time would not be a constraint. Once everyone was back from all that, the decision was made to pursue Half-Life 2. Immediately after the game was sent to replication, folks j here took a break to recoup from crunch time and spend some time with their families. Lombardi: "The first Half-Life was made available in November 1998. This issue, Valve's marketing director Doug Lombardi (with shades) and writer/game designer Marc Laidlaw (no shades) talk about the making of the best shooter ever - Half-Life 2. Just How are your favourite games put together? Each month, we sit down with a top developer and pick over the bones of their opus.