Patreon: / leadheadyt Discord: / discord Second Channel: / porkbrain Twitter: / leadheadyt The music in this video is from the Half-Life 2 OST by Kelly Bailey
Hey guys! If you wanna join in on some games, and get involved with this cool community, you can join my discord at discord.gg/PVvXESU7WU As long as I'm throwing out links, I've got new merch that you can pick up at leadheadshop.com/ plus you can support me over on Patreon if you wanna show some more love. www.patreon.com/leadhead
And yeah, I know I make a *lot* of Half-Life 2 vids. There's just a ton to dissect there. I mean I haven't even *touched* on the episodes yet. Plus, Source Engine's command console makes them super easy to edit together, and do cool shots and stuff with, so they kind of serve as a nice break for me. Even the writing is way easier than most stuff, because I just know these games like the back of my hand.
@@Leadhead And we love you for that! Take your time and keep up with the good work - I am sure that your videos for the episode One and Two will be Gems, can't wait to see them!! Much love Leadhead ❤️
@Leadhead i love that you mention how amazing humans were able to break the combine grasp. i feel it was humans uncanny nack for conflict that ended up saving themselves. the need for competitiveness. Our unpredictable nature
I'm really looking forward to what you have to say about LSD! It's one of my favorite games because of its unpredictability. Kind of makes my brain hazy though honestly. Something about the stepping sound effects and the bright colors and overall vibe just fucks with me.
Well the combine underestimated humanities creativity and determination although determination can be dead for a while but when someone like gordon comes around and shows humanity that if we do this then we can survive. But we need him to do this first ie. Close the portal from earth to wherever it leads to, to cut off reinforcements and stuff. As for our creativity the resistance used combine tech and weapons for their own. Like for example instead of using a human medkit we used the combines much more better medkits. Instead of using a human battery we use the combines battery against. Weaponry could be used as a double edge sword if used properly (I think)
@Дамир Птицын Nope, the Combine can't kill Gordon because he's both under the G-Man and the Vortessence's protection. Both entities far outmatch the Combine.
That is an interesting thing indeed. And it shows that their grip is far less strong that they think \ want to show. Of course it's needed for the game too, but the point is that there's this whole underground network in the Canals that is perfectly working for, apparently, years, as they have whole operation set down there that is being destroyed just as you're leaving the city. It looks like the whole thing wasn't important enough for Combine to look into for years. Maybe it's because Breen and Mossman were helping, and also G-Man was obviously working against Combine, though it seems that his team is even stronger than Combine - or at least on par and works differently.
@@TheWinjin also because truly they dont care that much for the mankind, they have earth, the resources and the citadel intact, some people trying to scape is really a mild inconvenience to them at this point... Until some crazy man with a crowbar started to fly through the region killinf everyone and literally destroying the Citadel in a matter of hours
As others commented, I don't think they actually care at this point. They know they have control of Earth resources, they're keeping humans around as a bonus but if the rebellion ever gets out of hand the Combine wouldn't even doubt of blowing up the remaining cities, striping the fee resources left, and on to the next planet.
@Matthew Rendenm they wouldnt spend all these resources just to fuck with us. they are the combine, they want to make every part of their empire act as one single organism, which is why they treat rebels as cancerous cells and gordon as an outside individual
@Matthew Rendenm you're comparing to animal slaughter for food, do you think the people who produce it do it to be cruel? no, they do it the most efficient way possible because people gotta eat, they dont think of the ethical implications of breeding animals just to kill them to eat. if your logic is that the combine do the same then you agree they're not doing it just to be evil
@Matthew Rendenm also your rebuttal is based just on your word, it would make sense depending on what you believe they're doing, but someone with a different opinion is gonna have a different view, such as they really use medical speech because, just like the slaughter comparison, they believe is the best and most efficient way to deal with the situation also be respectful, I havent offended you, so I expect the same from you if you wanna talk politely
i think its the advisors , their mechanical and ai systems and other enslaved races such as vortigaunts, and possibly striders, hunters and gunships could be the radically altered versions of enslaved species, i.e. what the stalkers are compared to humanity. I think the idea is that the combine is a machine in itself, soulless and leaderless
I remember someone on /v/ pointed out that the Civil protection officer that tells you to pick up the can may not have been trying to antagonize you for no reason. Rather he could've been making a mutual transaction, where he gets a stim boost for a show of power and you get a boost to your social standing for obeying the officer.
Not likely. If there's altruism motive, he wouldn't chuckle after you throw the can. He'd more likely say nothing or something like "thank you, citizen.". Besides, I don't think Valve would make it that complex.
@@williampan29 Valve does try to flesh things out a huge amount. The comment is supported by how complying with the CP in the trash can scenario at the start is followed by a CP/Overwatch reporting/acknowledging a compliant citizen. Leadhead's vid glosses over a lot of things that don't support their words lmao.
The fact that people are analysing and picking up on subtleties 17 years after HL2 released speaks volumes for the masterful worldbuilding that Valve created
@@microwaveno7368 Its more than a random youtuber you swine! Its the guy who made G-man dancing and singing the song "Once in a lifetime" and the guy who gave me nightmares with his Alyx model.
Considering how dark and hopeless this world seems, it kind of makes those sub 1h speedruns even funnier. While The Combine is throwing the entire force of its hive against Gordon, the guy is just flying through everything and breaking the laws of physics left and right, blowing up the citadel faster than The Combine can even realize what's happening.
The gman is guiding Gordon in half life 2 tho, so naturally Gordon can cause all these, a man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world
Given that Gordan only had to fight a tiny fraction of the Combine forces throughout the two Half-Life games, it makes sense he was able to go quickly.
This video helps explain perfectly why Gordan is feared by the Combine, and revered by Humanity, and the Vortugants. Gordan survived the Hell that was Black Mesa; then disappeared, and all of a sudden 20 years later, out of nowhere he shows up, and dismantles this system in a week.
*survives hell *disappears for 20 years *comes back *disappears for 1 week *hope is getting lost *appears again *destroys the combine *dissapears for 20 years again
In regards to “Civil Confusion” as you call it, in the original novel “Utopia” something similar was actually done in utopian society. People would constantly be moving from household to household and every home would be communally owned. This was supposed to make the utopians feel one with each other and break the desire for personal possessions and to form cliques.
But imagine all the families we've saved. We must all make sacrifices for the greater good. A million families, a billion comrades, there can be no price too steep for the survival of the Soviet Union! Uhm... i mean "The Human Species". That aside, am i the only one who thinks human wave tactics might be just what we need to beat the combine?
@@rey4874 All jokes aside, as i see it those families were already doomed. The combine wipes out humanity and then what? It's not like they'll reward the soldiers with long lives together with their loved ones in some utopian space city. As soon as they cease being useful the combine brings out the completely brainwashed troops to liquidate anyone in their armed forces who still knows what a family is. The only difference is that either you and your spouse die now as casualties of the liberation movement or you die in a few years in a far bleaker world. At least through the hard work of Gordon, his buddies and your sacrifice your family might be the last one to be killed. That's also what makes Half-Life so bleak. It's between an awful option or a really awful option. You can either die now and be 95% sure your family will be exterminated or you can die with them once the combine's done with their plans. Of course, you won't have the luxury of physically being there to die with them but you'll both die at roughly the same time when you're no longer deemed useful...
@@apotato6278 that's true, anyone who is sane would choose to die as part of a liberation movement instead, there isn't much to live for in the Half-life universe
“[Half-Life] isn’t just something [Valve] just threw together; it’s calculated, it’s actually thematically relevant. Imagine that! See what happens when you _hire writers?!”_ -Civvie 11
Have you ever read Gabe Newell's 2011 PC GAMER April fool's joke? The one where he says he got abducted by interdimensionals and they telepathically told him the write the Halflife story. P.S. Game Newell is a ponykin.
I can’t get over the fact that in Half Life Alyx, Alyx had a globe with the Americas crossed out. Basically implying that the Americas were completely eradicated.
Yeah, in the lore, America was nuked by the combine during the 7 hour war because the combine were having a pretty tough time dealing with it's military.
@@lilian-pvz5126 It would be cool if some American and Latin countries' militaries partially survived metro style. Maybe they became so much trouble that the Combine simply isolated the area and marked it as not worth the effort. They hunt the Combine troops in the nuclear wastes and sometimes supply the resistance when possible.
Half-Life 2 has always had my all-time favorite catastrophic event for mankind. The Universal Unions ultimate invasion and destruction of Earth and its Governments within 7 hours is astonishing. A force so incredibly powerful that most planets cannot last a day. The Combine are easily one of my favorite game factions created. They have such an evil yet well-developed governing power that just make them fun. I'm not always one for roleplay but HL2 and The Combine always make me drop by and have fun on HL2RP servers within Garry's Mod.
7 hours is pretty good! If their star or planet is bigger or older they already have a huge advantage, but they have a dyson sphere somewhere, so lil ol us lasting that long is actually respectable.
I made houndeye gaming to be this half life shit post A houndeye from half life 1 that throws a CP unit helment by throwing it on it Put puts on a tie with emojis
Really makes the pervasive isolation of Portal 1 hit harder when, just before you kill GladOS she says: "Are you trying to escape? Things have changed since the last time you left the building. What's going on out there will make you wish you were back in here."
@@nataliecameron I hope the saga concludes with Alyx/Gordon looking for a McGuffin, something that can cripple the combine and at least make them leave earth alone. from the leaked Episode 3 story outline, it could roughly keep the nature of the combine the same, that they are so vast and powerful, no nuke, no weapon, no jury-rigged portal machine could ever take them out. but they don't have to be destroyed... the player has to go into space, and they finally find a technology that can help them... Wheatley. They hook him up to a node in the combine's network, he redeems himself by mismanaging the combine's network of portals, reactors, military organization, so they are thrown into perpetual disarray with no way of detecting that he's doing it all. He's a bug in the system, and he finds joy in the work. That was everyone's role in this big 4D chess match, Chell, Wheatley, Glados, Alyx, Gordon, you. You get to say goodbye to the best damn character valve ever made as you head back to earth.
I think it speaks to how simultaneously useful and dangerous regular humanity is that the Combine didn’t simply either exterminate or forcibly integrate via technology all humans on Earth. They’re so threatened by the thought of humans working together against them that they put forth immense effort to prevent it. Yet, humans are so adaptable and skilled that turning them into a bunch of lobotomized slave cyborgs isn’t worth the loss in productivity. It’s actually impressive.
They didn't do that because Borealis and local teleportarion. If you just killed all humans you would lose precious information that would make travel in-dimension much easier. It's cool to glaze humanity in stories, but in Half-Life humanity is weak. Weaker than our enemies at least.
@@NicknameDSi think that the combine and others similar multi dimensional empires are the great filter so effective at Conquest Earth Was simple extremely Lucky allowing of sort of have some telaportation technology before invasion
This made me totally rethink the combine. My mind was blown when I heard that the people in the building were killed for having too many occupants. Does that mean that we the player doomed those citizens by simply wandering in?!?
No, it doesn't. The CPs were using stun sticks, so only the guy who held the door for you would have been killed, a point which went over Lead's head. At worst, they might get off-world relocation for not telling Gordon to bug off because he didn't belong. Maybe when they realized it was Gordon Freeman, they went back and made turned some people into stalkers, but otherwise if they murdered entire apartment blocks because someone wandered in, they'd run out of people real fast.
@@FormerBunsenBurner I doubt many people would wander where they weren't supposed to if it meant arrest leading to mutilation or death. Those two guys talking by the playground show how ready the combine are to raid a building or how ready the civilian population think they are. "They have no reason to come to our place. Don't worry they'll find one."
I remember seeing a youtube video that basically describes the Combines process of finding out about Gordan, and causing the Miscount announcement within minutes of Gordan arriving, its honestly really amazing.
They weren’t looking for Gordon specifically, they had noticed a “miscount” of people in the building and went in to determine who was the extra (and why he was there). I think it was in the “Anticitizen 1” chapter that they were able to name this...extra person.
What baffles me is that you made me become horrified of the Combine without even mentioning their inherently alien elements like the Synths or the Advisors themselves...
Well biologicaly ingeneered weapons and larva like advisors adds a little horror, cuz its nothing compare to combine doctrine and their views on other species, cuz living weapon is just living weapon, nothing more, what is important is who use it and how it used.
@@darkravenbest8970 I disagree, the Synths have a lot of morbid implications that foretell an impending doom for useful species under the Combine, to put it simply the creatures were rendered ambiguous in cybernetic/organic appearance and function, they ultimatley envision a horrible fate for humanity as to having any traces of their history and existence to clones of transhuman soldiers spread across dimensions, why else do you think the Combine have a stockpile of Striders and such on Earth? They grow them after they were done with the base premise of the species, the same will happen to humanity.
Cherry on the top if you want a lil extra nightmare fuel: the synths are most likely what's left of other species who've been through what humanity is going through. No one left to remember their names, their home planet, what their people (those that might've developed a culture) was like. No trace of identity or origin. All that's left are tools that serve the Combine. That's what humanity has to look forward to under them.
a thought i had on the bare minimum sustenance idea - it would also make sense why the civil protection are so easy to piss off. we all know how antsy people get when hungry. now imagine the constant stress, and demands, and BEATING QUOTAS. they don't even get actual food. they basically get pills that will allow them to survive. the amount of rations administered before battle is about the amount of a large pill. beating the shit out of someone for just bumping into you seems a pretty reasonable reaction.
What interested me about the Combine was how it used trains. You'd expect it to put in some fancy new transport technology but no, the trains work great and the Combine even makes its own rolling stock. It realized that humans had good transport technology and simply took it over and expanded upon where it was needed, and let rot anything that wasn't deemed useful.
fancy new transport technology? i think you're missing the point of giving the combine trains. An enemy has to be reasonable to be fun. If they could just teleport 50 troopers around gordon it wouldn't be interesting. "realism" can be important in games. the same way horror movies can't let the antagonist be a god, it has to have some weakness or there's no real reason to be scared or feel tension.
I also love the idea of Combine conversions, of a sort, or even combine remakes of specific tech. For example, in Alyx, you can upgrade the pistol with combine resin and by the max upgrade it looks completely different. The AR2 is a good example as well, and showcases just how insanely powerful the combine are; that rifle fires 5.56mm, standard issue for Elites, but it casually comes with a dark matter projectile system that, in the words of a rebel, is "How you kill Hunters.".
the thing with the combine is that once they captured earth they used up as little of their own resources as possible. the soldiers are humans transformed into soulless husks. the other alien things they use like the gunships or the headcrabs are different races they captured. they develop their teleportation and gman's prison using vortessence. you can probably count on one hand the number of advisors you actually see on earth, and presumably one of them is actually dr breen. their homeworld probably has technology we can't even dream of. the only things that the combine actually created on their homeworld were probably the citadel and dark energy. the normal helicopters they use are probably still built on earth using plans humans left behind.
Alyx mentioned that The Combine have the tech to jump between universes but rely on local transportation once they are inside of it. This means that The Combine is a feared superpower however once inside the Milky Way, they have to use starships if they want to explore based on whatever tech they have or can find. On Earth, two resources are used for The Combine, water and humans, we make excellent foot soldiers for their military. I think trains just solve a problem they have, once again, they have to rely on local transportation once they are in our universe. Earth is covered in rails, it's a system already set up that works.
Imagine if the Combine use life extension to prevent their assets from dying. The only thing worse than being turned into a Combine synth would be existing as one for hundreds or thousands of years
I'm sure the combine can make people immortal from aging but not from sustaining damage. That's why they treat their soldiers so robotically, because they can store them when they need them.
Not like you'd be aware of the passage of time as a synth though, just about every even slightly modified combine asset is mind scrubbed. Save for CPs.
I think the scariest implication is that Dr Breen is the only thing keeping humanity from total extinction or integration into the Combine. Its not perfect, but he managed to negotiate with the Combine to spare some of humanity, maybe in the hope that it would one day be strong enough to fight The Combine, or maybe he knew Gordon would turn up one day. And we end up killing him, removing any sort of restraint the Combine had about killing every last human on Earth.
Breen was trying to sway the remainder of humanity to embrace transhumanism like he did, discarding our identity and history. He wanted time to convince humanity to CHOOSE integration and not be forced into it.
@@charlodynatimberheart4860Maybe but the combine's grip on earth isn't as strong as one might think. I mean the destruction of the citadel forced the Combine to try and open a portal, which we prevent to a degree in Episode 1. Episode 2 then has a super portal opening, but not being open yet and that is, because of the destruction of the citadel, the only entry point for more combine forces which leaves all the combine forces left on earth basically stranded and cut off making them very vulnerable until the Portal is actually open, which also gets prevented at the end of Episode 2. As we also find out the Combine haven't really gotten the hang of teleporting within earths borders yet, which is why they are so interested in the borealis and is also the reason why the borealis is so important and why Eli wants it destroyed. So yes in the 7 hour war without Breen, Humanity might have been destroyed but at the time HL2 plays out there is a very real possibility of ridding Earth of the Combine and thus Breen is no longer necessary for humanitys survival.
Breen is a scientist, not a good negotiator. Besides, with Eli and Gordon under his control, he wanted to dictate the terms of the deal to the CMB, logically, by offering them the technology of local teleportation, that milti-universe empire of course didn't had.
I think it's more an inversion of how Half-Life 1 starts: you start riding the tram, just another day at work. But the administrator of Black Mesa (Breen) has actually created the conditions for the Resonance Cascade to start, and when you push that cart you fulfill them. However, you don't know any of that yet, and it seems like nothing'll go wrong. 20 years later, in Half-Life 2, when you get on that coffin, Breen thinks he's got you right where he wants you and he's won again. However, he doesn't know that this coffin will give you an ace up your sleeve: the weapons disposal system, which supercharges the gravity gun, allowing you to defeat Breen. Even when he sees and briefly uses the gravity gun, he doesn't understand its power, but you do. It's all dramatic irony.
Ha, I like that. And the core at the bottom levels in EP1 sort of resembles a heart starting to fail, contracting rapidly and preparing to go into flatline (collapse) but Gordon successfully restarts it with his gravity gun.
I like how he didn't even touch on how the combine rolled over humanity in 7 hours and left the bare minimum of infrastructure once they were done with us. Conquering us was trivial and they couldn't care less about us past the resources they stole. Now we're just another spent resource that will rot away.
@@silver6kraid The only reason the Combine didn't exterminate all humans was because of the local teleport. Combine can travel universes but we rely on local transportation. Humans figured out how to teleport in our universe by accounting for the Dark energy equation and using Xen as a slingshot.
The pick up that can scene I realize has some interesting irony to it, seeing as picking up a can and putting it in a trashcan can be considered an act which is "environmentally conscious" but the combine are literally the opposite
Everytime I hear the word, "Combine", I immediately thought of the farming vehicle/tool and the Combine in Half-Life does kind of portray it at a much larger scale. To me, it boils down to a large "farming tool" harvesting resources till there isn't much left.
When you mentioned the miscount, i feel the need to mention that most of the CPs used stun-sticks. If you got hit by a stun-stick earlier in the game after getting too close to a CP the screen would go white and you would wake up a bit away from where you got hit. Most of those people aren't dead, just beaten down, probably viciously. I mean you meet the crying couple later in the game so they survived but probably got beaten down. To add to the CPs, You get beaten down constantly but hey, you got the chance to do some beating on your own. Barney even tells Gordon he is behind on his "beating quota" meaning they probably have to rough up a set number of civilians every month or so.
@@flintfrommother3gaming That skeleton was more like a running gag. You actually see them at white forest. They run out to a cliff and talk about how far they came. Along the lines of: Told you we would think of something.
It's even darker when you remember that Earth is just a little dot in the entire combine infrastructure. Even if the Earth wins, it would mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.
No it doesn't mean nothing. If the word that humanity managed to destroy the combine presence on Earth got out to other Combine occupied worlds, a universal widescale revolt could break out.
@@paulssss5463 that's... questionable. Remember that the Combine presence on Earth is basically a skeleton crew. It took them seven hours to crush our entire global military resistance when they first opened a portal in - everything we see is just the bare minimum required to keep order afterwards and oversee extraction and conversion procedures. Even if we liberated a HUNDRED similarly enslaved worlds (something I don't think a post-Combine resistance would necessarily be up to in the first place), that's... nothing to them. The Combine's industry is UNFATHOMABLY vast.
I’m both amazed and terrified at the CP’s AI tactics, never realized that when i played the game and it’s extremely impressive to see such thing from a game made in the 2000s!
I'd say that it's got more with the fact that moderner FPS all feature stupid enemies to cater to worse players. I specifically remember the fist Unreal game as having very different shooter situations - every enemy you face is a singular miniboss, basically. All of them aren't numerous, but are deadly and smart, but none are as deadly as Skaarj. They jump away from your line of sight, take you from multiple angles and everything else, especially if you encounter multiple from different clans - and it was like that in 1998. I remember being SO BAD at this game. Honestly I only got better at shooters in general after CODMW. No amount of CS before that really helped.
11:06 this whole sequence made me realize just how much more I love the combine's AI, not only from a gameplay standpoint but from a story telling standpoint.
The Combine as a whole are perhaps the most Lovecraftian-military faction. The more you look into them the more horrifying it becomes and the more hopeless and insignificant you start to feel.
I'm actually convinced that the Combine might be the result of a dumb AI being given sloppy instructions. The original creators just needed to make a dumb drone to go out with the instruction "Bring back resources", but forgot to tell it when to stop. Only to keep getting more and to adapt if some obstacle impedes them. It would definitely explain the weirdly automated way in which the Combine operates, organizes, and deals with obstacles: almost as if they literally can't learn in any way except by machine-learning.
@@nicholasmolberg1043 Whilst its possible that there is some 'great other' that the combine are at war with, I like the imagine that the entire war machine is kinda like the 'paperclip machine' metaphore. Their system may once have had a rational purpose, but now theyre in the loop of expansion for expansions sake, desperately consuming everything in fear of an enemy that never comes.
"It’s double barreled, with shortened barrel and a stock." "I can also load 100 shotgun shells into my classic shotgun which is supposed to hold an average of 4 to 6 shotgun shells."
I never used tactics when playing HL2, I just rushed in with the shotgun, and when the shotgun runs out, I rush in with the gravity gun and some objects
@@ther6sshieldmain937 Mistake of the game, its a spas-12 model, these things dont have double barrels, the tube below the barrel is the ammo reservoir. Firing 2 shells at once is not possible with a spas-12..
For all the Combine's horrific methodology and actions, it's evident that humanity (or at least some people) still tried their best to carry on like usual under the circumstances. I was just replaying chapter 8 of Alyx, set in the ruins of a zoo, and noticed a child's drawing of a Civil Protection unit on the wall among the other kids' illustrations of animals. Evidence that kids were allowed to visit the zoo and naively draw tributes to their oppressors does make me wonder what other facets of human society remained intact, at least for a time, before becoming irreparable. Banks/financial systems? Individual regions' governments? Other entertainment venues, like theaters or sports? 20-ish years is a lot of time for a lot of stuff to change, I'm certainly curious about how gradually it all could have happened between the Black Mesa Incident, Seven Hour War, and status quo seen from Alyx onward.
I'd assume that after the war the combine set up overwatch as a sort of world goverment that very remaining govermnet had to lay down too out of fear It was pretty bad qt the start but I'd assume base level jobs still existed and people could still live in the cities that weren't fucked up by portal storms Eventually Overwatch started assimilating governments and shepherding the remaining public into smaller cities around the globe and by then everybody had lost their "normal" job and was just doing shit for the combine at that point Amd by the time hl2 starts nearly everybody is just doing basic jobs for the combine with barely any food with overwatch acting as the government
Half life 2 is a masterclass in storytelling. The game doesn’t tell you much about the Combine, you’re slapped into this city, and things are horrible, and everyone is just so used to it that it means nothing to them, this is how life is.
I like to think of it more as an allegory of what our modern life could look like if we continue on the path we're on. Think about it for a moment. An average human today is working a job that's probably barely paying a living wage. He probably has a manager that yells at him and gives him mindless menial tasks for the privilege of getting a yearly bonus. Nobody's interested in having a family because they can barely afford to buy or rent a place to live in. All we're missing is the Civil Protection troops randomly showing up on your doorstep for a conformity check.
When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons BACK! Get Mad!!! I DON’T WANT YOUR DAMN LEMONS WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THESE?!?!? DEMAND TO SEE LIFE’S MANAGER!!! MAKE LIFE RUE THE DAY IT THOUGHT IT COULD GIVE CAVE JOHNSON LEMONS!!! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!?!? I’M THE MAN WHO’S GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN!!! WITH THE LEMONS!!! I’M GONNA GET MY ENGINEERS TO INVENT A COMBUSTIBLE LEMON THAT BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!!!
Actually, Breen himself mentions that The Combine is not its official name. It’s referred to ambiguously as a ‘Universal Union’. Breen says ‘the universal union that small minds call the Combine’. The small minds in this case being humanity, not referring to the Union as the combine for their combining things together, but more akin to a Combine Harvester or a thresher, taking in and chewing up anything in its way, and spitting out anything it doesn’t deem important.
Or it could just be a script of propaganda that Breen is being commanded to read from. The name "Universal Union" could just be a name made up on the fly to simply make the Combine seem more friendly than they actually are to the brainwashed civilians. He would describe their actions as giving humanity a shove into evolution, sugar coating the obvious tyranny as a tough love. For all we know, the Combine is probably just a nick name made up by the resistance. The idea of them being more like a nameless, faceless anomaly rather than an all-powerful empire that goes by the name "The Combine" makes them even more terrifying for me.
@@spoiledpasta977 Except only the rebels and Breen refer to it as the Combine every time it’s mentioned, the latter using it as a mocking term. It’s literally just a name they gave it. I never heard any CP, Overwatch or anything else related to the UU mention it as the combine.
What about all the “CMB” labels they use? Though it might actually be the origin of the term “combine” in universe and it actually means something else
@@DogsRNice Most likely it's some coded language, and everyone who belongs to Combine doesn't see "CMB", but instead sees something useful, like name of certain outpost. Kind of like QR code.
@@ceu160193 Yeah, I would say that the name "combine" actually came from confused people seeing the "CMb" written all over posters and equipment, reading that as if it was latin letters, and then turning it into a pronounceable word.
One with I find extremely messed up about Civil Protection is based on one of Overwatch's lines: "*Reward notice: CP Unit (insert here) your family cohesiveness is preserved.*" The idea that some work for the CP simply so they can keep their families together.
@@valance10 cohesive just means all together and working together doesnt mean they kill their family probably just immediately break it up beyond what it already is. Them being together is a oddity (i.e not a cohesive family unit), them being broken up is how the combine naturally has it and also since new kids hasnt been a thing for decades family cohesion is in itself probably just your spouse alone, you dying probably breaks it entirely naturally and they simply leave or relocate said spouse.
You describe The Combine as a singular group. I always saw it as it's other definition: an agricultural machine that cuts, threshes, and cleans a grain crop in one operation; a combine harvester.
this made me realized that half life is much darker as i original imagine. I mean the original beta story was dark but the implications of the entire combine invasion is..out this world
To be honest I find the current half life 2 story to be just as dark, if not even darker than the beta story. The current story is just more subtle and less cartoonish in how dark it is. It isn’t just child murder and genocide in the way we typically think about an evil oppressive force, but instead a total suppression of the human spirit and soul
@@unchpunchem8947 Yeah, the beta story was dark but was literally dark. Was very obvious, this story is dark but not as obvious as the first one. And i love it
@@unchpunchem8947 thank you. This is exactly my thoughts whenever someone says they wish we got the beta story instead. The beta's atmosphere is, as you described, cartoonishly dark. I absolutely love how unique the atmosphere of half life 2 is compared with any other piece of media. It's probably my favourite aspect of the game tbh. The feel of it is entirely its own
When you were talking about how the combine views humanity as a singular and you pointed out how they refer to Gordon as a singular, that Fucking shook me to my core.
Aye, it's like having the eyes of a giant peering down between the clouds. You're the only man in the entire world who has managed to capture his murderous and individual, undivided attention, and he's doing everything he can to strike you down.
the combine is one of the most evil and unsettling ideas i have ever known which definitely gives a whole knew meaning to the game that i didn't realise on my first playthrough where i didn't understand what the combine were and just saw them as fairly generic bad guys crazy how many signs i missed that there was something even more sinister going on the combine might also be a metaphor for humanity in real life how we are draining and destroying earth and how we kill indiscriminately when things like insects get in our way
Another thing to mention is the Combine synths. You know those Gunships, Striders and Hunters you fight in game? Well they aren't really just robots, or rather they didn't use to be. They were living alien creatures the Combine enslaved and cybernetically altered them to the point they were unrecognizable from their living counterparts. Humans were awaiting the same fate if they were to be reigned for a few more decades.
Humanity is basically already in that state in-game. Overwatch Combine, Elites, and Stalkers are all human Synths-in-progress, proto-Synths if you will, part of Breen's bargain with the Combine to try and preserve the human race. HL:A shows us even earlier versions of "synth" humans, the Grunts, Ordials, etc. are all progressions of humans being turned into cyborgs connected to the greater Combine whole; they're just not as advanced as "successful" mass-produced synths like your typical Dropship or Strider. It'd be very interesting to see what new developments of human proto-Synths we might see in Half-Life entries to come.
At least one of the synths, the strider, has been confirmed to be a synthetic copy of a living creature that the Combine scanned and then synthetically cloned for use as a living war machine.
It's also worth thinking about the species that get integrated into their arsenal without as much/any synthetic alteration. When they shell a place, they let headcrabs run rampant and make droning, simple-minded cannon fodder out of a smart, sapient enemy. Had the Combine figured out bugbait, they'd likely have made squads out of antlions before the resistance did.
_"It views all of humanity as a singular organism, a single body. If views dissident citizens as malignant and when sentencing one, it orders its troops to diagnose, amputate, and coagulate."_ Reminds me of the human body identifying viruses, damaged cells, or cancerous cells and attacking them.
I think thats basically the premise of the Combine, they consider themselves doctors and whatnot and they consider the resistance to be the cancer cells and viruses
"As you can see from this diagram, it's almost as if the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell." "Reminds me of powerhouses." I'll just choose to believe you were high when you wrote that.
@Jess H The human body is just one huge dictatorship, cancer is, after all, begun when cells freely multiply and refuse/don't receive their orders to commit suicide
In case you're curious, there actually is a historical term for the relocation! It's called diaspora. While I don't believe it was ever implemented exactly like the combine did it, with the constant and periodical relocation, I know the Roman Empire did it a lot whenever they conquered a new land. Once conquered, they would force the people of the region to relocate and spread out all across the empire, effectively preventing them from forming any organized body of resistance.
@@Autrx_ From what I've read they instead utilized snitching, propaganda and growing mistrust to reward people for basically killing each other off for the regime and their own survival. It resulted in cultivating generations of people who are suspicious, biased and mean-spirited toward their neighbors
The most recent book in the (we are Legion, we are Bob) Bobiverse series has a similar concept used for similar reasons, just less severely, they refer to it as a "scattering". It's only really done when hints of rebellion are noticed and everyone gets nonlethally knocked out and redistributed over a wide area with no idea where they ended up, all orchestrated by an AI that's just trying to prevent its alien makers from whipping themselves out. Deffinitly not as malicious as the combine but the effect and intent to confuse is the same. Course it gets the even more confusing problem of a bunch of post-human digitized minds running around in android copies of said alien race trying to find something and just generally causing a mess as they go. The book is called "Heaven's River" and I am most certainly not doing it justice, I'd recommend starting with "We are Legion, We are Bob" first though otherwise it's hard to know what's going on, all and all though much more lighthearted and optimistic than Half life, love both either way
The combine *combine* all the species they conquer to add to their ranks. Gunships, the assorted random creatures, are all conquered species. The combine probably see humanity as good mobile foot soldiers, so they don't want to exterminate humanity, they want to farm them
Earth is probably a very good resource planet. It has an abundance of water and a high population Also, it’s probably clear to them that humanity is one of the more intelligent species they’ve encountered, since they have even managed to figure out local teleportation before them.
I think the same. Humans are not big a threat as IE a strider, but they are versitle and smart enough to use different weapons and operate equipment. Kind of how they use vortigaunts for sweeping streets.
I always thought of what other crazy alien species that the combine have enslaved and added to their ranks. Just imagine what kind of crazy shit the combine is capable of doing.
Were the police killing everyone in that apartment, or knocking them out with stun batons? As far as I know, stun batons aren’t lethal according to the lore.
realistically they're gonna die either way. even if the civil protection didn't kill them then and there, if they were taken in for questioning they were gonna die anyways. we've all seen the interrogation chair at the start of the game
I also heard in the beta storyline children were collected and besides being enslaved they were also forced to play some "video games". In reality they were controling the Manhack drones, those flying razor-bladed robots ans hunting down people. Of course they had no idea and they were even awarded if they could score high points.
"When you see an insect lying on the ground, do you stop to consider it a fool? No. Because the life of an insect is so beneath you that it would be a waste of your time to even consider judging it. That would be an accurate summation of my feelings towards you humans."
Except, you don't stop to talk to an insect. That's why those dialogues always seem silly to me. If the antagonist really thought of themselves as such a higher being, they wouldn't even bother to explain shit nor give them a second of their time.
Imagine what this must be like for Gordon. He was once just some tardy, nerdy scientist, and is now the last "human". He went from just some guy with a crowbar to the absolute last hope for humanity in the span of (for him) just a few minutes. He basically woke up to find everything he ever loved or cared about gone, and now he has to fend off a massive space empire basically on his own.
And if he didn't feel passage of time in stasis, it's even worse. He pushed a cart into a laser and few days later humanity is nearly extinct. HL1, HL2 and Episodes felt like the worst week of his life.
@@Gnidel He hasn't even slept this whole time unless you count being knocked unconscious in HL1. At least his suit gives him stimulants just like the Overwatch soldiers.
No, there are several wrong people that could end potentially in the right place, Alyx is another. The G-Man uses these gifted individuals to destroy the Combine, but he and his 'employers' (representatives of his race - he is obviously not human) use humanity rather than working with it.
Going through the voice lines in half life alyx, you see even more of this. Here are some of the interesting ones: When you hear them say "echo-one", that's not a squad designation, that's the term for "me", they never use pronouns as direct objects. The term for a soldier's biological body is "bodybag", they'll report to overwatch on the status of their bodybag if they get shot, for example. All of the death lines are cutoff midway by that iconic flatline sound, including lines like "I'm sorry-". This makes me think the flatline sound is actually just to drown out their screams, to further dehumanize them and prevent the squad from losing morale from hearing their squadmate scream. The vocoder will also cut off profanities, like "Holy shi-!" The lines don't use consistent codewords, its up to speculation whether that's due to some in-universe explanation of the early regime being less organized, or just the devs trying to make the voice lines more diverse.
Pick up the can! Throw it right in the humanless face of a traitor! Be free even in the face of death! Great vid! Got me thinking about IngSoc from 1984 by George Orwell. I think Valve took inspiration from it and tried to imagine if The Party was alien invaders from outer space. Great lore. Maybe that leak that they had, made them rethink and enrich storytelling with environmental clues! Hats off to Valve.
What I love about Dr. Breen as an antagonist is that he is eloquent in how he rationalizes surrender. He's not a cartoon collaborator-and that's why he is believably dangerous.
I really wish there was a canon alternate timeline where Eli was the one who was in charge of humanity. It would be interesting to see how he would be different than Breen, but also the same. Say Breen didn't even exist, and Eli was the next best candidate to negotiate humanity's surrender. Eli would likely see our surrender as a temporarily, necessarily evil, while it seems like Breen is less optimistic and sees the surrender as permanent (or if you really don't like Breen, it's easy to read how he just negotiated the surrender to ensure himself a better life at the expense of everyone else). Eli probably wouldn't accept a spacious, luxurious suite at the top of the citadel in exchange for giving the CP more power. Maybe he could've agreed to just be a step above the average citizen in terms of quality of life, in exchange for making the CP go a little easier on humanity. It would also allow him to be closer to the citizens, slowly and secretly weaving a plan of rebellion that would only be sprung once everything was in place. The story could revolve around you helping to set up this rebellion, and only really starting the uprising when it's ready (or perhaps when the Combine find out about Eli's plans, which could blend seamlessly into the Nova Prospekt chapter where they capture him). If Breen took Eli's place, I also wonder what he would do... would he be helpful, like Eli? Or would he be secretly working with the combine, like Mossman? Maybe the teleporter "malfunction" at the start of the game would really have been _his_ doing, and after he realized you weren't captured and/or killed, he disappears.
@@juanausensi499 Honestly, there's a moment where Breen had the chance to prove his ultimately benevolent intentions... and he failed. It was when he learned that Freeman had the opportunity to actually close off the portal and free humanity from the Combine... that was the perfect opportunity to melodramatically declare, "of course I could never participate in such a scheme... oh no, I seem to have accidentally pushed the button freeing Gordon! I'd better call for help... woops, I just slipped and fell down, I think I hurt myself... I sure hope Gordon doesn't rush off to shut down the portal while I'm recovering..." (notice how this way he can claim Freeman was an independent agent, a "tumor" as it were, so even if Freeman fails he can still try to protect humanity) Instead, he not only refuses to even entertain the notion, but later screams and begs the Combine to save him personally, making it clear that he's mainly focused on saving himself.
@@Mrbird321 I think they're equally subtle. In both, you can just pay attention to gameplay and ignore the lore and nothing would feel wrong, and yet they also present horrific details right to your face if you wanna look at it. I like media like that, where you don't have to think about it but you can, and there's emotion to be found in both approaches.
The combine are really lovecraftian in a way. What you see in Half-Life 2 and the episodes is only a sliver of their power. Remember, the combine are a multi-dimensional empire, so imagine the kind of power they hold in their prime.
People call so many different pieces of media "lovecraftian" at this point that the term has lost all meaning. It can apply to anything at this point, ive even seen the flood from halo being called lovefartian like what?
@@jaxonsevero1045that's like saying halo as a whole was derived from half-life because they both have an alien species who go from friendly to hostile and have bent legs.
Interesting interpretation of "The Combine." I always thought of it as like a farming combine. The Combine is a giant machine, harvesting planets, sorting the resources, whether people, or whatever, like wheat from chaff. It feels like a farm, in which people are moved about like cattle, and corralled into butchering stations.
The best thing about all of this is that its almost entirely speculation. The game gives you just enough hints to connect the dots yourself and theorize about what's happening around you which is a great way to keep you invested in the world, as well as it just being fun to come up with ideas of what's happening on your own and share them with other people.
@@theknight1573 I just found out about the little nighrmares series and it features a really similar method of storytelling. It's really fun to see all the different theories and interpretations people come up with to explain the universe of the games
I tried showing this game to my stepdad years ago and he was like "What's the point of this? You're just walking around. There's no action" near the beginning parts of the game. I skipped to the chapter with the copter dropping bombs on me but I felt he completely missed the point, or I didn't give enough context. I might show him this to explain why I stopped at a playground for a couple seconds before moving into an apartment and being chased and having characters talking to me about stuff instead of instant action. He doesn't play videogames so I can't blame him too much but I wanted to show him that videogames could be more than fighting stuff, that they could have story and meaning, and he was just confused about there not being action so that failed.
Just found this channel - and it's amazing! I can't wait to watch more and find out what makes your content tick. So far I enjoyed it immensely, thanks for putting in the great work.
I don't usually gush over video essays, but this one is really well done. It's one of the few I consistently come back to every few months. It's funny, I don't even really like Half-Life all that much, but the implications of the Combine's takeover is just so alluringly bleak that I can't help myself.
i've finished this game numerous times for more than ten years and this is the first time i hear about the line overwatch says to the CPs "family cohesion is preserved"
it surprised me that there are even lines for killing Gordon at all. Based on how allies like Alyx ignore your death I just assumed the game just pretends it didn't happen.
@@commodore7331 Allies don't ignore your death. Rebels have various lines like "Someone grab his crowbar" when you die. Only main characters have no lines because it wouldn't make sense in the story.
My dudette, your videos are so fantastic that I'm watching them all even though I've never played any of the portal or half life games. The presentation is everything and I love learning about them and hearing your opinions and theories on them. Keep it up!!
Really great work on all the videos, I have just started listening to your videos and I love how your commentary and your explanation. I'm just now listening through your Half-Life "series" and absolutely love them! Keep up your Great work! Best Regards, Swedish Nerd! :D
It's important to remember that we know very little about Gordon's intentions. G-Man awakens him, and we find Gordon silent on the matters of the world and those around him. He acts, but for what purpose? Resistance? Compassion? Survival? Gordon has been inserted into circumstances unknown and is too controlled by something beyond him--the player.
@@ther6sshieldmain937 You are, of course, correct. But I'm thinking about Gordon in terms of the narrative specifically--to the Vortigaunts, he's "The Freeman," and also a folk hero to what remains of mankind. There's some dramatic irony in the fact that G-Man pulls Gordon in and out of space and time to serve some unknown purpose. The Resistance interprets that as a messianic mission, but one for which they're largely just cannon fodder. Without any voiceover or dialogue, we don't know what Gordon cares about. Gordon could just be some reluctant hero propelled along by the expectations of those around him and/or a man with the simple will to survive (what we see in the first Half-Life). That's what makes the series so great for me, that narrative ambiguity. Does he care for Alyx? Does he care about humanity? Or is he just some dude with a gravity gun trying to launch a gnome into orbit? As the player, I get to decide--but that's about all the control I really have because it's just a linear world. I can choose to play a part or not, and that's all Gordon Freeman can do too.
@@ACatCalledBaudelaire And what really wonders me, is Gordon even in control or is he just G-Mans puppet and simply fulfills his wishes? Is he even a "free" man?
When you were talking about how freaking intelligent the AI was in terms of movement and coordination...DUDE... i was literally thinking about the INTELLIGENT programmers behind it, hats off to those people!!
A cool little fact: When writing the AI of the game the developers had designed a degree of self-preservation into the enemies. When this was play-tested they saw that the Combine Gunships would deprioritize Gordon and turn their fire to incoming rockets which were deemed a greater threat. This surprised the developers and led to them including the behavior into the game by making the rockets destroyable. The enemy AI in HL2 was, just like HL1, way ahead of it's time.
@@comraderave thats really cool. Give different things a different threat level and make the enemy AI prioritize self preservation. Basicly, a rocket coming right at your face is indeed clearly at that moment a higher threat level then Gordon who stands there reloading a gun.
In half life 2, the scanners are always right in your face. In real life, drones can take high res pictures with face rec / license plate rec from a great distance as shown by the aussie police these past two years. Surveillance is never so obvious.
10:52 they've been scrubbed of everything that made them human, their will, their emotions, ect. hell if the info we learn on combines from half life alex is anything to connect to this, then their eyes, ears, possibly nose/mouth, & larynx (voice box) have all been replaced with Combine Implants making them less human & even more dependent on the Combine & their Tech.
They have done this to billions of words turning everything into mechanical puppets. The only thing with true individuality are seemingly the advisers, with their addiction and worshipping of technology have turned themselves into fat husks who need artificial arms and telekinesis to move while everything else are basically a hivemind all in but name. The Universal Union is one of the most terrifying sci fi empires to ever exist and make the borg look like pussies. They conquered universes. UNIVERSES!!!! They have uncountable trillions upon their beck and call. They will stop at nothing until all existence has been combined into one cohesive union. They are even elderich in aspects. The 7 hour war was the most important war in its existence. But for the combine, it was Tuesday.
I think it would be interesting if whatever is the top of the chain of command of the combine was an advanced AI. Like, advisors, administrators like breen and maybe some beings who are part of the original species(there could have even been multiple og combine species in my view) that started the UU are more spread out parts of leadership, but the mastermind or whatever is an AI, or something alike. Kind of like The Supreme Intelligence for the Kree species in Marvel comics/movies, but not necessarily the same.
This video is outstandingly well done and it made appreciate even more HL2, the explanation about how Gordon is seen as the only individual gives a whole new meaning to his name too, the Freeman.
It's really fun how you mention that the Combine architecture is like a tumor to the planet it invades. I am an industrial electrician, and one of the things i simply cannot get over is HOW LITTLE SHITS the Combine give. Look at what they do. They slam a hole in a wall and put a bridge there. They bolt a terminal to a wall and call it a control center. In HL:A we see a construction Strider simply drop cables over rooftops. When do you do these things? When you don't care about the system. The most orderly construction we see in HL2 is the citadel, and even that one feels kind of uncoordinated and random at times. None of this empire is built to last. Can't even imagine that the overworld of this collective of species looks like. Imagine how they got there? Augmenting themselves, others, invading and aquiring, discarding all morale for cold practicality. How strong must their overarching goal be?
@@cherrydragon3120 More like keeping it tidy is completely foreign to them. Combine is all about functionality - functionality pushed to absolute. They do not do more, than is necessary. Even when it comes to local forces, they simply adapted existing human concepts everywhere, where it would be sufficient.
In Sandtraps there is a house with two burnt corpses outside after you exit the tunnel which could imply that Combine forces executed resistance members in barbaric ways like they did in Ravenholm with headcrab shells.
Or hey: The seemingly fried body at that one checkpoint in Water Hazard (15:33) Perhaps he was being interrogated/tortured and they finished by melting his face ala Indy 1
I think that the combine executed them with their guns and then burned the bodies for some reason, perhaps they wanted to put an outpost there and needed to clean it, otherwise it could atract xen creatures searching for food
@@larrydaboi1841 they most likely just wanted to clean everywhere so its not infested with rotting corpses or skeletons that the land is completely rendered unusable for new structures to be constructed, and because of potential mass xen infestation. for existing defensive structures, they would definitely clean up corpses to prevent further xen infestation and to add more needed supplies and other things
I absolutely LOVED this video! It completely shown me the dire situation the combine presents. I just bought Half Life Alyx but have never played 1 or 2, so I am doing research before i start the game to get brought up to speed. I have played maybe 30 minutes into HLA, (up to the button puzzle with the eye, if you know what part that is) but really didn't know how bad my situation was.. I am going to restart it with this new knowledge...and no I will not be picking up that can.
1:23 humanity's ability to pack bond with strangers in a crisis situation is our main defense against this tactic. we need intentional cultural structures to reinforce it
@@thesha7447 theres prob no such thing as an actual combine, whatever was the original species may have been completely consumed by the combine they created and no longer exist in any recognizable form. The combine could just be the sum of its parts.. yknow.. we live in a society.
@@fruitylerlups530 Nah, there must be a capital solar system of the Combine. They must have a centralized government of sorts. The original species, the powerful invaders that took over other species.
11:50 The AI in HL have always been really damn good for it's time. That's where the whole NextBot name comes from. Sucks that it was turned into placing a brainrot image that's supposed to follow you. Especially when people like to use the NextBot name on other games that aren't even Soruce engine related (ROBLOX...)
if cave johnson had been around the 7 hour war would have ended with cave johnson executing the combine leadership in the combine capital with a sawed off shotgun and some lemon grenades
This video is super well made! From the short yet complete backstory of HL1 and how the combine got to earth to events pertaining HL2 and the individuals within City 17, all the way to how The Combine drained moral, deemed those together as threats and forcefully kept them apart, as well as how they drained “Earths Moral”, too, as waters were low, polluted, such as the minds of the people. Thank you for this great and informative video!
@@wilsonno9675 From the perspective of the Combine, Gordon is the Cancer. Hes a virus, turning everything he comes into contact with against the Combine. Where others become martyrs or are brought to heel, this one measly, insignificant biped has managed to go toe-to-toe with an entire occupation force.
@@JamesJJSMilton Also probably because the Combine is so massive that thinking and framing it in terms of biology is most appropriate. We have a currently estimated 30 trillion cells that makes us up, and each of those cells function like a city on a microscopic level.
It's not that the AI is smart, it's that in the encounters the Combine are in are scripted and made in a way that makes them look smart. Put Half Life enemies in a open field and they'll most likely act like the usual dumb video game AI. What makes the Combine feel smart is that the encounters there in are handcrafted and beautifully designed, and they also do what FEAR does where they make them feel dynamic with the huge amounts of voice lines.
Funny thing is because most negative criticism of this game was the AI. A game called Vietcong made by a small Czech company in 2003 had better AI and of course Stalker that came out a couple of years later. HL2 is really just a visual and atmospheric experience but you hardly feel it because it requires you to move always that it was exhausting and arcady.
6:18 I disagree with this. Remember, some people (like Eli) were helped by the Gman. Also the combine don't have total control over everything on Earth, all it takes is one person finding a place hide in like the Canals, Ravenholm, The Quarantine Zone, an abandoned facility like White Forest or Black Mesa East, or a mineshaft. The Combine are shown to have very limited control outside of the cities, hence why you're able to go virtually undetected by the Combine throughout Episode 2 when you aren't in an area used by the Combine.
5:59 yeah some of the citizens say Something along the lines of I don’t want to be caught talking to you like I don’t know I don’t remember but I think I remember that
I read an article on something like this- it was about artificial intelligence, and why it needs to be well-monitored. It wasn’t because of rogue AI, but talked about what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands. Spoke about a dystopia where every action is monitored and reported to the people in power. I forget the exact term used, but it was something like an S-class end of the world. In contrast to the standard X-class scenario where life is just wiped out, S-class scenarios are where suffering is so immense that being dead would be better. A net neutral of everything being wiped away by catastrophic events, is worse than a net negative of a worldwide oppressive regime, where there’s not even a place to escape to. Half-life 2 is a perfect representation of this. Humanity is doomed to death- or, even if Gordon succeeds, a few decades of societal collapse. But in the meantime, every person waits for a death that may come minutes or years from now. Suffering on a catastrophic level. The end of the world.
Hey guys! If you wanna join in on some games, and get involved with this cool community, you can join my discord at discord.gg/PVvXESU7WU
As long as I'm throwing out links, I've got new merch that you can pick up at leadheadshop.com/ plus you can support me over on Patreon if you wanna show some more love. www.patreon.com/leadhead
And yeah, I know I make a *lot* of Half-Life 2 vids. There's just a ton to dissect there. I mean I haven't even *touched* on the episodes yet. Plus, Source Engine's command console makes them super easy to edit together, and do cool shots and stuff with, so they kind of serve as a nice break for me. Even the writing is way easier than most stuff, because I just know these games like the back of my hand.
@@Leadhead pick up that can
@@Leadhead And we love you for that! Take your time and keep up with the good work - I am sure that your videos for the episode One and Two will be Gems, can't wait to see them!! Much love Leadhead ❤️
@Leadhead i love that you mention how amazing humans were able to break the combine grasp. i feel it was humans uncanny nack for conflict that ended up saving themselves. the need for competitiveness. Our unpredictable nature
I'm really looking forward to what you have to say about LSD! It's one of my favorite games because of its unpredictability. Kind of makes my brain hazy though honestly. Something about the stepping sound effects and the bright colors and overall vibe just fucks with me.
The combine is bad in both ways:
1. Torturing an entire species.
2. Can't kill a jumping scientist in an orange suit.
Well the combine underestimated humanities creativity and determination although determination can be dead for a while but when someone like gordon comes around and shows humanity that if we do this then we can survive. But we need him to do this first ie. Close the portal from earth to wherever it leads to, to cut off reinforcements and stuff. As for our creativity the resistance used combine tech and weapons for their own. Like for example instead of using a human medkit we used the combines much more better medkits. Instead of using a human battery we use the combines battery against. Weaponry could be used as a double edge sword if used properly (I think)
Also eugenic supporting fascism. That’s a pretty big red flag haha
@@mrswishadank2329 i don't think the combine are fascist, i think thy are beyond fascism.
@@stachman9531 Very far beyond that. This isn't a system of government they've built, it's a slaughterhouse with us as cattle on the conveyor belt.
@Дамир Птицын Nope, the Combine can't kill Gordon because he's both under the G-Man and the Vortessence's protection. Both entities far outmatch the Combine.
“yo why he hopping like that”
-combine soldier, moments before death
its only been 3 hours but this still needs to be top comment
@@sami_irl haha thanks
Overwatch, he's doing it sideways.
Citizen, you're breaking the speed lim-*riddled with buckshot from both barrels of a spas-12*
@@cozonacel36 *Thé á la Menthe plays in the background*
Shoutout to that one guy in the apartment who managed to hold the door down and give you just barely the time you needed to escape
He's an unspoken hero, even more considering he probably died in a gruesome way right after you left the building
You can hear the sound of them breaking through the door, and a gunshot if you're close enough to the staircase.
@@TheGabrielryuhe's really REALLY lucky if they finished him there :/
Rest in piece Legend!🫡
@@lmao_lol_xd he is actually killed, you can return and see it
With how much the Combine wants to prevent rebellion, it's surprising that Barney is able to work undercover without being detected immediately.
He barely does his beating quota.
That is an interesting thing indeed. And it shows that their grip is far less strong that they think \ want to show. Of course it's needed for the game too, but the point is that there's this whole underground network in the Canals that is perfectly working for, apparently, years, as they have whole operation set down there that is being destroyed just as you're leaving the city. It looks like the whole thing wasn't important enough for Combine to look into for years. Maybe it's because Breen and Mossman were helping, and also G-Man was obviously working against Combine, though it seems that his team is even stronger than Combine - or at least on par and works differently.
@@TheWinjin also because truly they dont care that much for the mankind, they have earth, the resources and the citadel intact, some people trying to scape is really a mild inconvenience to them at this point...
Until some crazy man with a crowbar started to fly through the region killinf everyone and literally destroying the Citadel in a matter of hours
I don't think the Combine itself really monitors them that closely, as long as no anomalous behaviors trip Overwatch's system.
As others commented, I don't think they actually care at this point. They know they have control of Earth resources, they're keeping humans around as a bonus but if the rebellion ever gets out of hand the Combine wouldn't even doubt of blowing up the remaining cities, striping the fee resources left, and on to the next planet.
I once saw someone describe Half-Life as "when you're playing a first person shooter but the antagonist is playing Stellaris."
So this is what it feels like being on the opposite end of my boot😂
@@keerf255 Shut up.
So Freeman is the Crime Boss adding Deviancy and Crime to our colonies...
@@macklinbutcher3145 no. Purge the xenos.
@@keerf255 smh just use the colossus on earth lol
This makes GLaDOS seem like a caring mother.
well, glados is cruel, but the combine believes they're doing the right thing, hence all their medical speech
@Matthew Rendenm they wouldnt spend all these resources just to fuck with us. they are the combine, they want to make every part of their empire act as one single organism, which is why they treat rebels as cancerous cells and gordon as an outside individual
@Matthew Rendenm except you cant prove they are. I just showed the medical speech and the way they make breen talk to the citizens. what do you have?
@Matthew Rendenm you're comparing to animal slaughter for food, do you think the people who produce it do it to be cruel? no, they do it the most efficient way possible because people gotta eat, they dont think of the ethical implications of breeding animals just to kill them to eat. if your logic is that the combine do the same then you agree they're not doing it just to be evil
@Matthew Rendenm also your rebuttal is based just on your word, it would make sense depending on what you believe they're doing, but someone with a different opinion is gonna have a different view, such as they really use medical speech because, just like the slaughter comparison, they believe is the best and most efficient way to deal with the situation
also be respectful, I havent offended you, so I expect the same from you if you wanna talk politely
One of the spookiest parts is that we have never actually seen in cannon what the real intelligent life behind the combine look like.
Well, we have the advisors, so that’s something
i think its the advisors , their mechanical and ai systems and other enslaved races such as vortigaunts, and possibly striders, hunters and gunships could be the radically altered versions of enslaved species, i.e. what the stalkers are compared to humanity. I think the idea is that the combine is a machine in itself, soulless and leaderless
They're too busy playing inter-universal chess with the G-Man's "employers".
@@aprender1952yeah
The advisors are definitely high up in the combine but they might not even be the actual leaders of it. They could just be high ranking officials
I remember someone on /v/ pointed out that the Civil protection officer that tells you to pick up the can may not have been trying to antagonize you for no reason. Rather he could've been making a mutual transaction, where he gets a stim boost for a show of power and you get a boost to your social standing for obeying the officer.
That is a painfully /v/ prospective.
Interdasting
This is the most elaborate way to say that the cop gets off on a power trip
Not likely.
If there's altruism motive, he wouldn't chuckle after you throw the can. He'd more likely say nothing or something like "thank you, citizen.".
Besides, I don't think Valve would make it that complex.
@@williampan29 Valve does try to flesh things out a huge amount.
The comment is supported by how complying with the CP in the trash can scenario at the start is followed by a CP/Overwatch reporting/acknowledging a compliant citizen.
Leadhead's vid glosses over a lot of things that don't support their words lmao.
The fact that people are analysing and picking up on subtleties 17 years after HL2 released speaks volumes for the masterful worldbuilding that Valve created
I love all of your videos :3
Oh it's a random verified TH-camr guess I'm a fan now
holy shit at first i thought it was an exaggeration but it's actually been 17 years
yea
@@microwaveno7368 Its more than a random youtuber you swine! Its the guy who made G-man dancing and singing the song "Once in a lifetime" and the guy who gave me nightmares with his Alyx model.
Considering how dark and hopeless this world seems, it kind of makes those sub 1h speedruns even funnier. While The Combine is throwing the entire force of its hive against Gordon, the guy is just flying through everything and breaking the laws of physics left and right, blowing up the citadel faster than The Combine can even realize what's happening.
"7 hour war? I can do better."
Combine: we defeated all the worlds militarys in 7 hours
Gordan: hold my beer
The gman is guiding Gordon in half life 2 tho, so naturally Gordon can cause all these, a man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world
Amazing.
Given that Gordan only had to fight a tiny fraction of the Combine forces throughout the two Half-Life games, it makes sense he was able to go quickly.
This video helps explain perfectly why Gordan is feared by the Combine, and revered by Humanity, and the Vortugants. Gordan survived the Hell that was Black Mesa; then disappeared, and all of a sudden 20 years later, out of nowhere he shows up, and dismantles this system in a week.
*survives hell
*disappears for 20 years
*comes back
*disappears for 1 week
*hope is getting lost
*appears again
*destroys the combine
*dissapears for 20 years again
@@ELIXFUDIDOGordon Chadman in the flesh or rather...in the suit
@@VexxThePrecursor07 Gorgeous Freeman...
In regards to “Civil Confusion” as you call it, in the original novel “Utopia” something similar was actually done in utopian society. People would constantly be moving from household to household and every home would be communally owned. This was supposed to make the utopians feel one with each other and break the desire for personal possessions and to form cliques.
Sounds horrific.
@@MuantanamoMobile nah, free vacations and moving, sounds great
@@destroyer1667 😐
Utopia, by whom? I may read it.
yep communists do it too. Move populations away from their homes to divide and confuse them.
imagine the amount of families died because of your gameplay
Oh my god
But imagine all the families we've saved. We must all make sacrifices for the greater good. A million families, a billion comrades, there can be no price too steep for the survival of the Soviet Union! Uhm... i mean "The Human Species". That aside, am i the only one who thinks human wave tactics might be just what we need to beat the combine?
@@apotato6278 actually that's pretty true. You raise some good points! Also r/suddenlycommunist
@@rey4874 All jokes aside, as i see it those families were already doomed. The combine wipes out humanity and then what? It's not like they'll reward the soldiers with long lives together with their loved ones in some utopian space city. As soon as they cease being useful the combine brings out the completely brainwashed troops to liquidate anyone in their armed forces who still knows what a family is. The only difference is that either you and your spouse die now as casualties of the liberation movement or you die in a few years in a far bleaker world. At least through the hard work of Gordon, his buddies and your sacrifice your family might be the last one to be killed.
That's also what makes Half-Life so bleak. It's between an awful option or a really awful option. You can either die now and be 95% sure your family will be exterminated or you can die with them once the combine's done with their plans. Of course, you won't have the luxury of physically being there to die with them but you'll both die at roughly the same time when you're no longer deemed useful...
@@apotato6278 that's true, anyone who is sane would choose to die as part of a liberation movement instead, there isn't much to live for in the Half-life universe
“[Half-Life] isn’t just something [Valve] just threw together; it’s calculated, it’s actually thematically relevant. Imagine that! See what happens when you _hire writers?!”_
-Civvie 11
@fucku weebsnfurries he wrote the entirety of hl1 and hl2, and gave specific instructions to the other writers regarding the story
@fucku weebsnfurries “they’re cringe” says a person with “weeb” and “furry” on his name.
@@sipeb587 what does that have to do with anything? How is his nickname affecting his right to tell his opinion because I don't get it.
@@0D_D0 if you have 'weeb' or 'furry' as part of your username, your opinion is automatically invalid.
Have you ever read Gabe Newell's 2011 PC GAMER April fool's joke? The one where he says he got abducted by interdimensionals and they telepathically told him the write the Halflife story. P.S. Game Newell is a ponykin.
I can’t get over the fact that in Half Life Alyx, Alyx had a globe with the Americas crossed out. Basically implying that the Americas were completely eradicated.
Yeah, in the lore, America was nuked by the combine during the 7 hour war because the combine were having a pretty tough time dealing with it's military.
@@lilian-pvz5126America just being based
Even at the end of the world, the US refused to go down without a fight.
Perhaps they got a merciful fate compared to the rest of the world.
@@lilian-pvz5126 It would be cool if some American and Latin countries' militaries partially survived metro style.
Maybe they became so much trouble that the Combine simply isolated the area and marked it as not worth the effort.
They hunt the Combine troops in the nuclear wastes and sometimes supply the resistance when possible.
@@JakeBaldwin1thats my new hl2 headcanon, thank you!
Half-Life 2 has always had my all-time favorite catastrophic event for mankind. The Universal Unions ultimate invasion and destruction of Earth and its Governments within 7 hours is astonishing. A force so incredibly powerful that most planets cannot last a day. The Combine are easily one of my favorite game factions created. They have such an evil yet well-developed governing power that just make them fun. I'm not always one for roleplay but HL2 and The Combine always make me drop by and have fun on HL2RP servers within Garry's Mod.
7 hours is pretty good! If their star or planet is bigger or older they already have a huge advantage, but they have a dyson sphere somewhere, so lil ol us lasting that long is actually respectable.
@@freshrot420tbf, they more than likely used restraint since they didn't want us fully dead
I made houndeye gaming to be this half life shit post
A houndeye from half life 1 that throws a CP unit helment by throwing it on it
Put puts on a tie with emojis
reminder that what the combine used to Bring Earth to it's knees is not even 2% of the combine's forces.
Careful leadhead, or you'll have a civil protection team kicking down the door of your current residence.
Permanent Off-World Relocation
@@fatis2745 off world relocation to the underworld lmao
@@axiolot5857 actually, probably their overworld
That’s how it always starts. First a building, then the whole block.
@@Gideon_the_Seraph if they don't have a reason, they'll find one
Really makes the pervasive isolation of Portal 1 hit harder when, just before you kill GladOS she says:
"Are you trying to escape? Things have changed since the last time you left the building. What's going on out there will make you wish you were back in here."
God I wish portal and half life overlapped a little bit more
@@nataliecameron There should be comics or books of that tbh, would be really profitiable or something
She also says something like "I am the only thing standing between us and them. Well I was.." right before she dies.
Fun fact: the Overwatch voice is voiced by Ellen McLain, the same voice actor for Glados!
@@nataliecameron I hope the saga concludes with Alyx/Gordon looking for a McGuffin, something that can cripple the combine and at least make them leave earth alone.
from the leaked Episode 3 story outline, it could roughly keep the nature of the combine the same, that they are so vast and powerful, no nuke, no weapon, no jury-rigged portal machine could ever take them out. but they don't have to be destroyed...
the player has to go into space, and they finally find a technology that can help them... Wheatley. They hook him up to a node in the combine's network, he redeems himself by mismanaging the combine's network of portals, reactors, military organization, so they are thrown into perpetual disarray with no way of detecting that he's doing it all. He's a bug in the system, and he finds joy in the work. That was everyone's role in this big 4D chess match, Chell, Wheatley, Glados, Alyx, Gordon, you. You get to say goodbye to the best damn character valve ever made as you head back to earth.
I think it speaks to how simultaneously useful and dangerous regular humanity is that the Combine didn’t simply either exterminate or forcibly integrate via technology all humans on Earth.
They’re so threatened by the thought of humans working together against them that they put forth immense effort to prevent it.
Yet, humans are so adaptable and skilled that turning them into a bunch of lobotomized slave cyborgs isn’t worth the loss in productivity.
It’s actually impressive.
They didn't do that because Borealis and local teleportarion. If you just killed all humans you would lose precious information that would make travel in-dimension much easier.
It's cool to glaze humanity in stories, but in Half-Life humanity is weak. Weaker than our enemies at least.
@@NicknameDSi think that the combine and others similar multi dimensional empires are the great filter so effective at Conquest Earth Was simple extremely Lucky allowing of sort of have some telaportation technology before invasion
This made me totally rethink the combine. My mind was blown when I heard that the people in the building were killed for having too many occupants. Does that mean that we the player doomed those citizens by simply wandering in?!?
Yes, yes it does.
The Combine were reluctant to let Humanity even live on. So yeah, they look for any reason to kill as many people as possible.
No, it doesn't. The CPs were using stun sticks, so only the guy who held the door for you would have been killed, a point which went over Lead's head. At worst, they might get off-world relocation for not telling Gordon to bug off because he didn't belong. Maybe when they realized it was Gordon Freeman, they went back and made turned some people into stalkers, but otherwise if they murdered entire apartment blocks because someone wandered in, they'd run out of people real fast.
@@FormerBunsenBurner I doubt many people would wander where they weren't supposed to if it meant arrest leading to mutilation or death. Those two guys talking by the playground show how ready the combine are to raid a building or how ready the civilian population think they are. "They have no reason to come to our place. Don't worry they'll find one."
@@FormerBunsenBurner They are running out of people real fast and pretty much every single time you show up somewhere, people die.
Oh I never realized that miscount was Gordon, I thought it was just the police making an excuse to sweep the house for Gordon
I mean, it can probably be interpreted that way
I remember seeing a youtube video that basically describes the Combines process of finding out about Gordan, and causing the Miscount announcement within minutes of Gordan arriving, its honestly really amazing.
They weren’t looking for Gordon specifically, they had noticed a “miscount” of people in the building and went in to determine who was the extra (and why he was there).
I think it was in the “Anticitizen 1” chapter that they were able to name this...extra person.
@@MrSadisticLlama do you recall the name of that video?
@@MrSadisticLlama What was the video?
What baffles me is that you made me become horrified of the Combine without even mentioning their inherently alien elements like the Synths or the Advisors themselves...
Thanks
Well biologicaly ingeneered weapons and larva like advisors adds a little horror, cuz its nothing compare to combine doctrine and their views on other species, cuz living weapon is just living weapon, nothing more, what is important is who use it and how it used.
@@darkravenbest8970 I disagree, the Synths have a lot of morbid implications that foretell an impending doom for useful species under the Combine, to put it simply the creatures were rendered ambiguous in cybernetic/organic appearance and function, they ultimatley envision a horrible fate for humanity as to having any traces of their history and existence to clones of transhuman soldiers spread across dimensions, why else do you think the Combine have a stockpile of Striders and such on Earth? They grow them after they were done with the base premise of the species, the same will happen to humanity.
Cherry on the top if you want a lil extra nightmare fuel: the synths are most likely what's left of other species who've been through what humanity is going through. No one left to remember their names, their home planet, what their people (those that might've developed a culture) was like. No trace of identity or origin. All that's left are tools that serve the Combine. That's what humanity has to look forward to under them.
well, "living weapons" could mean any animal used in combat.
4:00
Everyone says it is laughter. I hear screaming. No, not like children's laughter screaming... hellish, painful screaming.
Its supposed too be a memory
I also just heard screaming.
a thought i had on the bare minimum sustenance idea - it would also make sense why the civil protection are so easy to piss off. we all know how antsy people get when hungry. now imagine the constant stress, and demands, and BEATING QUOTAS. they don't even get actual food. they basically get pills that will allow them to survive. the amount of rations administered before battle is about the amount of a large pill.
beating the shit out of someone for just bumping into you seems a pretty reasonable reaction.
What hit me the hardest was when you mentioned how The Combine refer to Gordan as an individual. That was deep.
The FREE.MAN.
Meanwhile when you are near death and the Overwatch AI sentences you to death, she calls you an infection or something like that.
What interested me about the Combine was how it used trains. You'd expect it to put in some fancy new transport technology but no, the trains work great and the Combine even makes its own rolling stock. It realized that humans had good transport technology and simply took it over and expanded upon where it was needed, and let rot anything that wasn't deemed useful.
That's because trains are the most efficient (weight / energy) ground transport we have.
fancy new transport technology? i think you're missing the point of giving the combine trains. An enemy has to be reasonable to be fun. If they could just teleport 50 troopers around gordon it wouldn't be interesting. "realism" can be important in games. the same way horror movies can't let the antagonist be a god, it has to have some weakness or there's no real reason to be scared or feel tension.
I also love the idea of Combine conversions, of a sort, or even combine remakes of specific tech. For example, in Alyx, you can upgrade the pistol with combine resin and by the max upgrade it looks completely different. The AR2 is a good example as well, and showcases just how insanely powerful the combine are; that rifle fires 5.56mm, standard issue for Elites, but it casually comes with a dark matter projectile system that, in the words of a rebel, is "How you kill Hunters.".
the thing with the combine is that once they captured earth they used up as little of their own resources as possible. the soldiers are humans transformed into soulless husks. the other alien things they use like the gunships or the headcrabs are different races they captured. they develop their teleportation and gman's prison using vortessence. you can probably count on one hand the number of advisors you actually see on earth, and presumably one of them is actually dr breen. their homeworld probably has technology we can't even dream of. the only things that the combine actually created on their homeworld were probably the citadel and dark energy. the normal helicopters they use are probably still built on earth using plans humans left behind.
Alyx mentioned that The Combine have the tech to jump between universes but rely on local transportation once they are inside of it. This means that The Combine is a feared superpower however once inside the Milky Way, they have to use starships if they want to explore based on whatever tech they have or can find. On Earth, two resources are used for The Combine, water and humans, we make excellent foot soldiers for their military. I think trains just solve a problem they have, once again, they have to rely on local transportation once they are in our universe. Earth is covered in rails, it's a system already set up that works.
Imagine if the Combine use life extension to prevent their assets from dying. The only thing worse than being turned into a Combine synth would be existing as one for hundreds or thousands of years
Don't give valve ideas
@@ManiacMayhem7256 Immortality is mentioned by Breen as being very close to being an actual thing in the game
I'm sure the combine can make people immortal from aging but not from sustaining damage. That's why they treat their soldiers so robotically, because they can store them when they need them.
Not like you'd be aware of the passage of time as a synth though, just about every even slightly modified combine asset is mind scrubbed. Save for CPs.
The combine actually can do this. Read Breengrub. They can make multiple copies of people’s consciousness and upload them into advisor host bodies.
I think the scariest implication is that Dr Breen is the only thing keeping humanity from total extinction or integration into the Combine. Its not perfect, but he managed to negotiate with the Combine to spare some of humanity, maybe in the hope that it would one day be strong enough to fight The Combine, or maybe he knew Gordon would turn up one day. And we end up killing him, removing any sort of restraint the Combine had about killing every last human on Earth.
Breen was trying to sway the remainder of humanity to embrace transhumanism like he did, discarding our identity and history. He wanted time to convince humanity to CHOOSE integration and not be forced into it.
@@barf2432
Your final sentence is probably what breen thought
Breen's line, "you need me" is true. Without him, humanity would've been completely destroyed by the 7 hour war.
@@charlodynatimberheart4860Maybe but the combine's grip on earth isn't as strong as one might think.
I mean the destruction of the citadel forced the Combine to try and open a portal, which we prevent to a degree in Episode 1. Episode 2 then has a super portal opening, but not being open yet and that is, because of the destruction of the citadel, the only entry point for more combine forces which leaves all the combine forces left on earth basically stranded and cut off making them very vulnerable until the Portal is actually open, which also gets prevented at the end of Episode 2.
As we also find out the Combine haven't really gotten the hang of teleporting within earths borders yet, which is why they are so interested in the borealis and is also the reason why the borealis is so important and why Eli wants it destroyed.
So yes in the 7 hour war without Breen, Humanity might have been destroyed but at the time HL2 plays out there is a very real possibility of ridding Earth of the Combine and thus Breen is no longer necessary for humanitys survival.
Breen is a scientist, not a good negotiator. Besides, with Eli and Gordon under his control, he wanted to dictate the terms of the deal to the CMB, logically, by offering them the technology of local teleportation, that milti-universe empire of course didn't had.
Freeman riding the coffin to Breen's office is like a blood clot heading straight for the brain.
Breen’s a neurocluster at best, not a brain cell.
*stroke time*
@@CubicApocalypse128 Stroke the administrator for more time on the clock
I think it's more an inversion of how Half-Life 1 starts: you start riding the tram, just another day at work. But the administrator of Black Mesa (Breen) has actually created the conditions for the Resonance Cascade to start, and when you push that cart you fulfill them. However, you don't know any of that yet, and it seems like nothing'll go wrong. 20 years later, in Half-Life 2, when you get on that coffin, Breen thinks he's got you right where he wants you and he's won again. However, he doesn't know that this coffin will give you an ace up your sleeve: the weapons disposal system, which supercharges the gravity gun, allowing you to defeat Breen. Even when he sees and briefly uses the gravity gun, he doesn't understand its power, but you do. It's all dramatic irony.
Ha, I like that. And the core at the bottom levels in EP1 sort of resembles a heart starting to fail, contracting rapidly and preparing to go into flatline (collapse) but Gordon successfully restarts it with his gravity gun.
The combine is really scary, and the more you look into it the scarier they are
What's amazing is that even though they are an interdimensional army, they resemble the tyrannical forces that our world has!
leadhead is the throat GOAT frfr
I like how he didn't even touch on how the combine rolled over humanity in 7 hours and left the bare minimum of infrastructure once they were done with us. Conquering us was trivial and they couldn't care less about us past the resources they stole. Now we're just another spent resource that will rot away.
That's why I love learning more about them
@@silver6kraid The only reason the Combine didn't exterminate all humans was because of the local teleport. Combine can travel universes but we rely on local transportation. Humans figured out how to teleport in our universe by accounting for the Dark energy equation and using Xen as a slingshot.
The pick up that can scene I realize has some interesting irony to it, seeing as picking up a can and putting it in a trashcan can be considered an act which is "environmentally conscious" but the combine are literally the opposite
I just realized that
Entirely irrelevant to the interaction.
@@egorepifanovNo it isn't
@@concept5631 Study behavioural biology then return here to tell me I turned out to be right.
@@egorepifanov 🤨
Everytime I hear the word, "Combine", I immediately thought of the farming vehicle/tool and the Combine in Half-Life does kind of portray it at a much larger scale. To me, it boils down to a large "farming tool" harvesting resources till there isn't much left.
"I've seen better sides of beef run over by a combine." - The Engineer
@@ThePostalDude2077 yeah, by the winglet, it’s the taunt fortress video. It literally has a combine driven by a combine soldier
_They_ have the combine harvester.
And _NOBODY_ is given the key.
That analogy is.. horrifying. And adds another meaning to the name.
I'm also pretty sure there's a track made by Valve for Half-Life called "Combine Harvester"
When you mentioned the miscount, i feel the need to mention that most of the CPs used stun-sticks. If you got hit by a stun-stick earlier in the game after getting too close to a CP the screen would go white and you would wake up a bit away from where you got hit. Most of those people aren't dead, just beaten down, probably viciously. I mean you meet the crying couple later in the game so they survived but probably got beaten down.
To add to the CPs, You get beaten down constantly but hey, you got the chance to do some beating on your own. Barney even tells Gordon he is behind on his "beating quota" meaning they probably have to rough up a set number of civilians every month or so.
The crying couple actually died in like Half Life: Episode Two or One I think.
@@flintfrommother3gaming That skeleton was more like a running gag. You actually see them at white forest. They run out to a cliff and talk about how far they came. Along the lines of: Told you we would think of something.
@@mattstorm360 Oh thanks for the explanation, sorry for misunderstanding
I think the "beating quota" is sarcasm on Barny's part.
@@duckfilms3662 It could be just cruel joke from Barney, or it could be actual quota, that you have to complete for promotion.
It's even darker when you remember that Earth is just a little dot in the entire combine infrastructure. Even if the Earth wins, it would mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.
damn...
Epistle 3 from Mark Laidlaw touches on that subject near the end
And if the combine decides to retake earth... Humanity wouldn't even last 7 seconds.
No it doesn't mean nothing. If the word that humanity managed to destroy the combine presence on Earth got out to other Combine occupied worlds, a universal widescale revolt could break out.
@@paulssss5463 that's... questionable.
Remember that the Combine presence on Earth is basically a skeleton crew. It took them seven hours to crush our entire global military resistance when they first opened a portal in - everything we see is just the bare minimum required to keep order afterwards and oversee extraction and conversion procedures.
Even if we liberated a HUNDRED similarly enslaved worlds (something I don't think a post-Combine resistance would necessarily be up to in the first place), that's... nothing to them. The Combine's industry is UNFATHOMABLY vast.
I’m both amazed and terrified at the CP’s AI tactics, never realized that when i played the game and it’s extremely impressive to see such thing from a game made in the 2000s!
I'd say that it's got more with the fact that moderner FPS all feature stupid enemies to cater to worse players. I specifically remember the fist Unreal game as having very different shooter situations - every enemy you face is a singular miniboss, basically. All of them aren't numerous, but are deadly and smart, but none are as deadly as Skaarj. They jump away from your line of sight, take you from multiple angles and everything else, especially if you encounter multiple from different clans - and it was like that in 1998. I remember being SO BAD at this game. Honestly I only got better at shooters in general after CODMW. No amount of CS before that really helped.
11:06 this whole sequence made me realize just how much more I love the combine's AI, not only from a gameplay standpoint but from a story telling standpoint.
I love stuff like that in games where the gameplay isn't just there to be fun but it also act as another detail in the story.
The Combine as a whole are perhaps the most Lovecraftian-military faction. The more you look into them the more horrifying it becomes and the more hopeless and insignificant you start to feel.
And you almost have to wonder.
What horrific pressure forced such a nightmarish adaptation.
@@nicholasmolberg1043 Gabe Newell's inner demons
I'm actually convinced that the Combine might be the result of a dumb AI being given sloppy instructions. The original creators just needed to make a dumb drone to go out with the instruction "Bring back resources", but forgot to tell it when to stop. Only to keep getting more and to adapt if some obstacle impedes them.
It would definitely explain the weirdly automated way in which the Combine operates, organizes, and deals with obstacles: almost as if they literally can't learn in any way except by machine-learning.
@@nicholasmolberg1043 Whilst its possible that there is some 'great other' that the combine are at war with, I like the imagine that the entire war machine is kinda like the 'paperclip machine' metaphore.
Their system may once have had a rational purpose, but now theyre in the loop of expansion for expansions sake, desperately consuming everything in fear of an enemy that never comes.
Lovecraftian-military faction. Imma coin that. Thank you.
“But I have a shotgun...” is one of the most powerful versions of “and?” I’ve ever heard
"It’s double barreled, with shortened barrel and a stock."
"I can also load 100 shotgun shells into my classic shotgun which is supposed to hold an average of 4 to 6 shotgun shells."
I never used tactics when playing HL2, I just rushed in with the shotgun, and when the shotgun runs out, I rush in with the gravity gun and some objects
“Screw you! I’m going to go play Minecraft!”
AND? AND I´M ALL OUT OF GUM
@@ther6sshieldmain937 Mistake of the game, its a spas-12 model, these things dont have double barrels, the tube below the barrel is the ammo reservoir. Firing 2 shells at once is not possible with a spas-12..
For all the Combine's horrific methodology and actions, it's evident that humanity (or at least some people) still tried their best to carry on like usual under the circumstances. I was just replaying chapter 8 of Alyx, set in the ruins of a zoo, and noticed a child's drawing of a Civil Protection unit on the wall among the other kids' illustrations of animals. Evidence that kids were allowed to visit the zoo and naively draw tributes to their oppressors does make me wonder what other facets of human society remained intact, at least for a time, before becoming irreparable. Banks/financial systems? Individual regions' governments? Other entertainment venues, like theaters or sports? 20-ish years is a lot of time for a lot of stuff to change, I'm certainly curious about how gradually it all could have happened between the Black Mesa Incident, Seven Hour War, and status quo seen from Alyx onward.
I hope at some point someone writes a book about the Combine Occupation
@@valance10Hopefully.
I'd assume that after the war the combine set up overwatch as a sort of world goverment that very remaining govermnet had to lay down too out of fear
It was pretty bad qt the start but I'd assume base level jobs still existed and people could still live in the cities that weren't fucked up by portal storms
Eventually Overwatch started assimilating governments and shepherding the remaining public into smaller cities around the globe and by then everybody had lost their "normal" job and was just doing shit for the combine at that point
Amd by the time hl2 starts nearly everybody is just doing basic jobs for the combine with barely any food with overwatch acting as the government
Half life 2 is a masterclass in storytelling. The game doesn’t tell you much about the Combine, you’re slapped into this city, and things are horrible, and everyone is just so used to it that it means nothing to them, this is how life is.
I like to think of it more as an allegory of what our modern life could look like if we continue on the path we're on. Think about it for a moment. An average human today is working a job that's probably barely paying a living wage. He probably has a manager that yells at him and gives him mindless menial tasks for the privilege of getting a yearly bonus. Nobody's interested in having a family because they can barely afford to buy or rent a place to live in. All we're missing is the Civil Protection troops randomly showing up on your doorstep for a conformity check.
"Are you gonna pick up that can?"
Fuck dude...Came for half-life, stayed for the existencial crisis
Damn right, dude.
Pick up that can and punch a CP in the face with it.
When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons BACK! Get Mad!!! I DON’T WANT YOUR DAMN LEMONS WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THESE?!?!? DEMAND TO SEE LIFE’S MANAGER!!! MAKE LIFE RUE THE DAY IT THOUGHT IT COULD GIVE CAVE JOHNSON LEMONS!!! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!?!? I’M THE MAN WHO’S GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN!!! WITH THE LEMONS!!! I’M GONNA GET MY ENGINEERS TO INVENT A COMBUSTIBLE LEMON THAT BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!!!
Actually, Breen himself mentions that The Combine is not its official name. It’s referred to ambiguously as a ‘Universal Union’. Breen says ‘the universal union that small minds call the Combine’. The small minds in this case being humanity, not referring to the Union as the combine for their combining things together, but more akin to a Combine Harvester or a thresher, taking in and chewing up anything in its way, and spitting out anything it doesn’t deem important.
Or it could just be a script of propaganda that Breen is being commanded to read from. The name "Universal Union" could just be a name made up on the fly to simply make the Combine seem more friendly than they actually are to the brainwashed civilians. He would describe their actions as giving humanity a shove into evolution, sugar coating the obvious tyranny as a tough love. For all we know, the Combine is probably just a nick name made up by the resistance. The idea of them being more like a nameless, faceless anomaly rather than an all-powerful empire that goes by the name "The Combine" makes them even more terrifying for me.
@@spoiledpasta977 Except only the rebels and Breen refer to it as the Combine every time it’s mentioned, the latter using it as a mocking term. It’s literally just a name they gave it. I never heard any CP, Overwatch or anything else related to the UU mention it as the combine.
What about all the “CMB” labels they use?
Though it might actually be the origin of the term “combine” in universe and it actually means something else
@@DogsRNice Most likely it's some coded language, and everyone who belongs to Combine doesn't see "CMB", but instead sees something useful, like name of certain outpost.
Kind of like QR code.
@@ceu160193 Yeah, I would say that the name "combine" actually came from confused people seeing the "CMb" written all over posters and equipment, reading that as if it was latin letters, and then turning it into a pronounceable word.
One with I find extremely messed up about Civil Protection is based on one of Overwatch's lines:
"*Reward notice: CP Unit (insert here) your family cohesiveness is preserved.*"
The idea that some work for the CP simply so they can keep their families together.
When a cp unit dies you can hear overwatch say the unit is "non-cohesive". They kill your family if you fail.
@@valance10 cohesive just means all together and working together doesnt mean they kill their family probably just immediately break it up beyond what it already is. Them being together is a oddity (i.e not a cohesive family unit), them being broken up is how the combine naturally has it and also since new kids hasnt been a thing for decades family cohesion is in itself probably just your spouse alone, you dying probably breaks it entirely naturally and they simply leave or relocate said spouse.
You describe The Combine as a singular group. I always saw it as it's other definition: an agricultural machine that cuts, threshes, and cleans a grain crop in one operation; a combine harvester.
Both!
Makes plenty of sense.
this made me realized that half life is much darker as i original imagine.
I mean the original beta story was dark but the implications of the entire combine invasion is..out this world
read about the breengrub, its so much worse. The Combine don't want just you to become part of them but your soul.
This also made me ralise how well written HL2 is and how sad we never got to so episode 3 in the form of a fully made addition to the Game
To be honest I find the current half life 2 story to be just as dark, if not even darker than the beta story. The current story is just more subtle and less cartoonish in how dark it is. It isn’t just child murder and genocide in the way we typically think about an evil oppressive force, but instead a total suppression of the human spirit and soul
@@unchpunchem8947 Yeah, the beta story was dark but was literally dark. Was very obvious, this story is dark but not as obvious as the first one. And i love it
@@unchpunchem8947 thank you. This is exactly my thoughts whenever someone says they wish we got the beta story instead. The beta's atmosphere is, as you described, cartoonishly dark. I absolutely love how unique the atmosphere of half life 2 is compared with any other piece of media. It's probably my favourite aspect of the game tbh. The feel of it is entirely its own
When you were talking about how the combine views humanity as a singular and you pointed out how they refer to Gordon as a singular, that Fucking shook me to my core.
same
Makes us seem as if we are the last human alive.
Aye, it's like having the eyes of a giant peering down between the clouds. You're the only man in the entire world who has managed to capture his murderous and individual, undivided attention, and he's doing everything he can to strike you down.
Gordon Freeman, the one free man.
They view Gordon as their only equal. That's a scary thought.
the combine is one of the most evil and unsettling ideas i have ever known
which definitely gives a whole knew meaning to the game that i didn't realise on my first playthrough where i didn't understand what the combine were and just saw them as fairly generic bad guys
crazy how many signs i missed that there was something even more sinister going on
the combine might also be a metaphor for humanity in real life how we are draining and destroying earth and how we kill indiscriminately when things like insects get in our way
2:50 the woman actually found her husband in the part where you fight your first guardian
Another thing to mention is the Combine synths.
You know those Gunships, Striders and Hunters you fight in game? Well they aren't really just robots, or rather they didn't use to be. They were living alien creatures the Combine enslaved and cybernetically altered them to the point they were unrecognizable from their living counterparts. Humans were awaiting the same fate if they were to be reigned for a few more decades.
Humanity is basically already in that state in-game. Overwatch Combine, Elites, and Stalkers are all human Synths-in-progress, proto-Synths if you will, part of Breen's bargain with the Combine to try and preserve the human race. HL:A shows us even earlier versions of "synth" humans, the Grunts, Ordials, etc. are all progressions of humans being turned into cyborgs connected to the greater Combine whole; they're just not as advanced as "successful" mass-produced synths like your typical Dropship or Strider. It'd be very interesting to see what new developments of human proto-Synths we might see in Half-Life entries to come.
i always wondered why they looked so
alive
And let’s not forget the Stalkers, if things weren’t bad enough for humans.
At least one of the synths, the strider, has been confirmed to be a synthetic copy of a living creature that the Combine scanned and then synthetically cloned for use as a living war machine.
It's also worth thinking about the species that get integrated into their arsenal without as much/any synthetic alteration. When they shell a place, they let headcrabs run rampant and make droning, simple-minded cannon fodder out of a smart, sapient enemy. Had the Combine figured out bugbait, they'd likely have made squads out of antlions before the resistance did.
I for one can't wait for Monday to receive my next water flavored Desiccated Sustenance bar!
Now we just need a rat to mix it up
God, i wish I had pre-ordered that
I would genuinely buy a water flavored sustenance bar just for the novelty.
Just make sure you eat it in the next 9000 years
@Epic Man Darling Yep, in that game, you can find desiccated sustenance bars that claim to be "water-flavored".
I really like that idea that Gordon is considered the only single organism against the Combine BY the Combine.
_"It views all of humanity as a singular organism, a single body. If views dissident citizens as malignant and when sentencing one, it orders its troops to diagnose, amputate, and coagulate."_
Reminds me of the human body identifying viruses, damaged cells, or cancerous cells and attacking them.
I think thats basically the premise of the Combine, they consider themselves doctors and whatnot and they consider the resistance to be the cancer cells and viruses
…That’s what they were saying??
Yeah, what do you mean it reminds you of that? That’s just what she said.
"As you can see from this diagram, it's almost as if the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
"Reminds me of powerhouses."
I'll just choose to believe you were high when you wrote that.
@Jess H The human body is just one huge dictatorship, cancer is, after all, begun when cells freely multiply and refuse/don't receive their orders to commit suicide
In case you're curious, there actually is a historical term for the relocation! It's called diaspora. While I don't believe it was ever implemented exactly like the combine did it, with the constant and periodical relocation, I know the Roman Empire did it a lot whenever they conquered a new land. Once conquered, they would force the people of the region to relocate and spread out all across the empire, effectively preventing them from forming any organized body of resistance.
bovine spongiform encephalopathy
Huh... I wonder if Diaspar from 'The City and the Stars' got its name from this...
I might be completely wrong but the USSR employed similar tactics when they had control over the Eastern Bloc.
@@Autrx_ From what I've read they instead utilized snitching, propaganda and growing mistrust to reward people for basically killing each other off for the regime and their own survival. It resulted in cultivating generations of people who are suspicious, biased and mean-spirited toward their neighbors
The most recent book in the (we are Legion, we are Bob) Bobiverse series has a similar concept used for similar reasons, just less severely, they refer to it as a "scattering".
It's only really done when hints of rebellion are noticed and everyone gets nonlethally knocked out and redistributed over a wide area with no idea where they ended up, all orchestrated by an AI that's just trying to prevent its alien makers from whipping themselves out.
Deffinitly not as malicious as the combine but the effect and intent to confuse is the same.
Course it gets the even more confusing problem of a bunch of post-human digitized minds running around in android copies of said alien race trying to find something and just generally causing a mess as they go.
The book is called "Heaven's River" and I am most certainly not doing it justice, I'd recommend starting with "We are Legion, We are Bob" first though otherwise it's hard to know what's going on, all and all though much more lighthearted and optimistic than Half life, love both either way
The combine *combine* all the species they conquer to add to their ranks. Gunships, the assorted random creatures, are all conquered species. The combine probably see humanity as good mobile foot soldiers, so they don't want to exterminate humanity, they want to farm them
Earth is probably a very good resource planet. It has an abundance of water and a high population
Also, it’s probably clear to them that humanity is one of the more intelligent species they’ve encountered, since they have even managed to figure out local teleportation before them.
I think the same. Humans are not big a threat as IE a strider, but they are versitle and smart enough to use different weapons and operate equipment. Kind of how they use vortigaunts for sweeping streets.
I think it also means like a combine on a farm, churning up anything it finds
I thought the reason the combine were interested in Earth is the teleportation technology of humanity, which was superior to combines at the time.
I always thought of what other crazy alien species that the combine have enslaved and added to their ranks. Just imagine what kind of crazy shit the combine is capable of doing.
Were the police killing everyone in that apartment, or knocking them out with stun batons? As far as I know, stun batons aren’t lethal according to the lore.
they die because game mechanic
realistically they're gonna die either way. even if the civil protection didn't kill them then and there, if they were taken in for questioning they were gonna die anyways. we've all seen the interrogation chair at the start of the game
I also heard in the beta storyline children were collected and besides being enslaved they were also forced to play some "video games". In reality they were controling the Manhack drones, those flying razor-bladed robots ans hunting down people. Of course they had no idea and they were even awarded if they could score high points.
Seems to grimdark
I mean, yeah, the BEYDA was edgy garbage for boys who like to soyface at other over the top edgy settings like Warhammer 40k
I’m so glad the beta was never made… the real story of hl2 is so much more subtle and atmospheric
Honestly not having children in Half-Life 2 was probably one of the best things Valve ever did with the series.
"When you see an insect lying on the ground, do you stop to consider it a fool? No. Because the life of an insect is so beneath you that it would be a waste of your time to even consider judging it. That would be an accurate summation of my feelings towards you humans."
Ironic, considering most people wouldn’t explain to the insect how lowly they consider it.
Reminds me of that dialogue in HxH in the chimera ant arc
For some reason I read this in the voice of Bender from Futurama.
@Anti Everything Father, from Fullmetal Alchemist.
Except, you don't stop to talk to an insect. That's why those dialogues always seem silly to me. If the antagonist really thought of themselves as such a higher being, they wouldn't even bother to explain shit nor give them a second of their time.
Imagine what this must be like for Gordon. He was once just some tardy, nerdy scientist, and is now the last "human". He went from just some guy with a crowbar to the absolute last hope for humanity in the span of (for him) just a few minutes. He basically woke up to find everything he ever loved or cared about gone, and now he has to fend off a massive space empire basically on his own.
And if he didn't feel passage of time in stasis, it's even worse. He pushed a cart into a laser and few days later humanity is nearly extinct. HL1, HL2 and Episodes felt like the worst week of his life.
@@Gnidel He hasn't even slept this whole time unless you count being knocked unconscious in HL1. At least his suit gives him stimulants just like the Overwatch soldiers.
@@eddyheaddrascal1858 And quite possibly between Episode One and Episode Two.
Shit happens real fast for Gordon huh.
No, there are several wrong people that could end potentially in the right place, Alyx is another. The G-Man uses these gifted individuals to destroy the Combine, but he and his 'employers' (representatives of his race - he is obviously not human) use humanity rather than working with it.
Going through the voice lines in half life alyx, you see even more of this. Here are some of the interesting ones:
When you hear them say "echo-one", that's not a squad designation, that's the term for "me", they never use pronouns as direct objects.
The term for a soldier's biological body is "bodybag", they'll report to overwatch on the status of their bodybag if they get shot, for example.
All of the death lines are cutoff midway by that iconic flatline sound, including lines like "I'm sorry-". This makes me think the flatline sound is actually just to drown out their screams, to further dehumanize them and prevent the squad from losing morale from hearing their squadmate scream. The vocoder will also cut off profanities, like "Holy shi-!"
The lines don't use consistent codewords, its up to speculation whether that's due to some in-universe explanation of the early regime being less organized, or just the devs trying to make the voice lines more diverse.
for the bodybag thing, i think you're mishearing 'bodypack'. bodypacks are their armours.
It’s bodypack, not bodybag.
Pick up the can! Throw it right in the humanless face of a traitor! Be free even in the face of death!
Great vid! Got me thinking about IngSoc from 1984 by George Orwell. I think Valve took inspiration from it and tried to imagine if The Party was alien invaders from outer space. Great lore. Maybe that leak that they had, made them rethink and enrich storytelling with environmental clues! Hats off to Valve.
the beta was heavily inspired by 1984
What I love about Dr. Breen as an antagonist is that he is eloquent in how he rationalizes surrender. He's not a cartoon collaborator-and that's why he is believably dangerous.
True. Not only that, he maybe was right all along, and he is the only thing that prevented human extinction at that point.
@@juanausensi499 exactly my point.
I really wish there was a canon alternate timeline where Eli was the one who was in charge of humanity. It would be interesting to see how he would be different than Breen, but also the same. Say Breen didn't even exist, and Eli was the next best candidate to negotiate humanity's surrender.
Eli would likely see our surrender as a temporarily, necessarily evil, while it seems like Breen is less optimistic and sees the surrender as permanent (or if you really don't like Breen, it's easy to read how he just negotiated the surrender to ensure himself a better life at the expense of everyone else). Eli probably wouldn't accept a spacious, luxurious suite at the top of the citadel in exchange for giving the CP more power. Maybe he could've agreed to just be a step above the average citizen in terms of quality of life, in exchange for making the CP go a little easier on humanity.
It would also allow him to be closer to the citizens, slowly and secretly weaving a plan of rebellion that would only be sprung once everything was in place. The story could revolve around you helping to set up this rebellion, and only really starting the uprising when it's ready (or perhaps when the Combine find out about Eli's plans, which could blend seamlessly into the Nova Prospekt chapter where they capture him).
If Breen took Eli's place, I also wonder what he would do... would he be helpful, like Eli? Or would he be secretly working with the combine, like Mossman? Maybe the teleporter "malfunction" at the start of the game would really have been _his_ doing, and after he realized you weren't captured and/or killed, he disappears.
@@bugjams I'm only getting into the Half-Life lore but this idea seems to be SO good
@@juanausensi499 Honestly, there's a moment where Breen had the chance to prove his ultimately benevolent intentions... and he failed. It was when he learned that Freeman had the opportunity to actually close off the portal and free humanity from the Combine... that was the perfect opportunity to melodramatically declare, "of course I could never participate in such a scheme... oh no, I seem to have accidentally pushed the button freeing Gordon! I'd better call for help... woops, I just slipped and fell down, I think I hurt myself... I sure hope Gordon doesn't rush off to shut down the portal while I'm recovering..." (notice how this way he can claim Freeman was an independent agent, a "tumor" as it were, so even if Freeman fails he can still try to protect humanity)
Instead, he not only refuses to even entertain the notion, but later screams and begs the Combine to save him personally, making it clear that he's mainly focused on saving himself.
I recognized how messed up the world is in portal but never realized how horrifying it is in Half Life 2
Half LIfe 2 was a little more in your face about it, that's funny.
@@Mrbird321 I think they're equally subtle. In both, you can just pay attention to gameplay and ignore the lore and nothing would feel wrong, and yet they also present horrific details right to your face if you wanna look at it. I like media like that, where you don't have to think about it but you can, and there's emotion to be found in both approaches.
they're the same world lol
Chell want back in after seeing the world
Same universe. So no surprises there.
shoutout that time Gordon got a whole apartment block killed because he walked into it
The combine are really lovecraftian in a way. What you see in Half-Life 2 and the episodes is only a sliver of their power. Remember, the combine are a multi-dimensional empire, so imagine the kind of power they hold in their prime.
In the episodes they arent even a sliver it's the shedded hair and skin molecules that fell off the sliver
People call so many different pieces of media "lovecraftian" at this point that the term has lost all meaning. It can apply to anything at this point, ive even seen the flood from halo being called lovefartian like what?
@@John_HaloI mean the gravemind is pretty lovecraftian lol
@@jaxonsevero1045 bruh how? all I can think of is the tentacles and lovecraft did not invent those
@@jaxonsevero1045that's like saying halo as a whole was derived from half-life because they both have an alien species who go from friendly to hostile and have bent legs.
Interesting interpretation of "The Combine." I always thought of it as like a farming combine. The Combine is a giant machine, harvesting planets, sorting the resources, whether people, or whatever, like wheat from chaff. It feels like a farm, in which people are moved about like cattle, and corralled into butchering stations.
it is! it’s supposed to be a double entendres
The moving walls around the citadel also invoke the image of a wheat combine, the way they trample down and take in everything in front of them
@@salsamancer I was thinking a bit about that too!
when i first heard engie say the line i thought he ment combine from half life lmao
@@sami_irl same lol
The best thing about all of this is that its almost entirely speculation. The game gives you just enough hints to connect the dots yourself and theorize about what's happening around you which is a great way to keep you invested in the world, as well as it just being fun to come up with ideas of what's happening on your own and share them with other people.
Couldn't agree more. Its the same reason I am so invested in Hollow Knight lore, nothing but crumbs and it is up to us to connect the dots
@@theknight1573 I just found out about the little nighrmares series and it features a really similar method of storytelling. It's really fun to see all the different theories and interpretations people come up with to explain the universe of the games
i really love that about half life
I tried showing this game to my stepdad years ago and he was like "What's the point of this? You're just walking around. There's no action" near the beginning parts of the game. I skipped to the chapter with the copter dropping bombs on me but I felt he completely missed the point, or I didn't give enough context. I might show him this to explain why I stopped at a playground for a couple seconds before moving into an apartment and being chased and having characters talking to me about stuff instead of instant action. He doesn't play videogames so I can't blame him too much but I wanted to show him that videogames could be more than fighting stuff, that they could have story and meaning, and he was just confused about there not being action so that failed.
@@limited3502 A war that lasted only 7 hours because of the Combine's technology! What did that look like!?
Just found this channel - and it's amazing! I can't wait to watch more and find out what makes your content tick. So far I enjoyed it immensely, thanks for putting in the great work.
I don't usually gush over video essays, but this one is really well done. It's one of the few I consistently come back to every few months. It's funny, I don't even really like Half-Life all that much, but the implications of the Combine's takeover is just so alluringly bleak that I can't help myself.
Those CPs act all cool and tough until they get that _non-mechanical reproduction simulation_
It’s what all CP’s strive for.
@@robertsmalls2293 your never gonna break my stride
@@robertsmalls2293 Dr. Breen to Gordon: Mai boi, this peace is what all true humans strive for
@@destubae3271 I just wonder what Gman’s up too?
Until they are so mechanized that they don't need it
i've finished this game numerous times for more than ten years and this is the first time i hear about the line overwatch says to the CPs "family cohesion is preserved"
Let's be real, who gets killed by the CPs?
it surprised me that there are even lines for killing Gordon at all. Based on how allies like Alyx ignore your death I just assumed the game just pretends it didn't happen.
@@commodore7331 Allies don't ignore your death. Rebels have various lines like "Someone grab his crowbar" when you die. Only main characters have no lines because it wouldn't make sense in the story.
@@commodore7331 Played through it recently and when I died at the lighthouse fight I heard a rebel say "Dibs on the suit". Was a good one
these words are so far away from english that they feel like an entirely different language, so they probably do that a lot
My dudette, your videos are so fantastic that I'm watching them all even though I've never played any of the portal or half life games. The presentation is everything and I love learning about them and hearing your opinions and theories on them. Keep it up!!
Really great work on all the videos, I have just started listening to your videos and I love how your commentary and your explanation. I'm just now listening through your Half-Life "series" and absolutely love them! Keep up your Great work!
Best Regards, Swedish Nerd! :D
Oh I get it now, Gordan 'Freeman' is the only Free man.
It's important to remember that we know very little about Gordon's intentions. G-Man awakens him, and we find Gordon silent on the matters of the world and those around him. He acts, but for what purpose? Resistance? Compassion? Survival? Gordon has been inserted into circumstances unknown and is too controlled by something beyond him--the player.
In other terms, about 97.85% of main characters? (if not more)
@@ther6sshieldmain937 You are, of course, correct. But I'm thinking about Gordon in terms of the narrative specifically--to the Vortigaunts, he's "The Freeman," and also a folk hero to what remains of mankind. There's some dramatic irony in the fact that G-Man pulls Gordon in and out of space and time to serve some unknown purpose. The Resistance interprets that as a messianic mission, but one for which they're largely just cannon fodder. Without any voiceover or dialogue, we don't know what Gordon cares about. Gordon could just be some reluctant hero propelled along by the expectations of those around him and/or a man with the simple will to survive (what we see in the first Half-Life). That's what makes the series so great for me, that narrative ambiguity. Does he care for Alyx? Does he care about humanity? Or is he just some dude with a gravity gun trying to launch a gnome into orbit? As the player, I get to decide--but that's about all the control I really have because it's just a linear world. I can choose to play a part or not, and that's all Gordon Freeman can do too.
@@ACatCalledBaudelaire And what really wonders me, is Gordon even in control or is he just G-Mans puppet and simply fulfills his wishes? Is he even a "free" man?
@@kommentier9884 Are you saying that...
G-man is a representation of the player?
When you were talking about how freaking intelligent the AI was in terms of movement and coordination...DUDE... i was literally thinking about the INTELLIGENT programmers behind it, hats off to those people!!
A cool little fact: When writing the AI of the game the developers had designed a degree of self-preservation into the enemies. When this was play-tested they saw that the Combine Gunships would deprioritize Gordon and turn their fire to incoming rockets which were deemed a greater threat. This surprised the developers and led to them including the behavior into the game by making the rockets destroyable.
The enemy AI in HL2 was, just like HL1, way ahead of it's time.
@@comraderave that’s so cool!!!
As someone taking a university class on AI, this part had me truly appreciative of the game!
Even HL1 had remarkable AI. This may have already been said a hundred times, but these games were ahead of their time.
@@comraderave thats really cool. Give different things a different threat level and make the enemy AI prioritize self preservation. Basicly, a rocket coming right at your face is indeed clearly at that moment a higher threat level then Gordon who stands there reloading a gun.
In half life 2, the scanners are always right in your face. In real life, drones can take high res pictures with face rec / license plate rec from a great distance as shown by the aussie police these past two years. Surveillance is never so obvious.
probably not scanning your face. it's scanning thru/past your face. it's scanning your dna/molecules/cells/atoms.
10:52 they've been scrubbed of everything that made them human, their will, their emotions, ect. hell if the info we learn on combines from half life alex is anything to connect to this, then their eyes, ears, possibly nose/mouth, & larynx (voice box) have all been replaced with Combine Implants making them less human & even more dependent on the Combine & their Tech.
"We even hear the ghostly echoes of children's laughter if we get close to this playground"
That gave me absolute chills
At that point, I would have most likely just gone on an absolute rampage without any intent of survival.
So they killed all the children? because children are not affected by the embryotic suppressor since they are already born
slaughterhouses....we have a much worse situation with the rest of earth's species...this is only scary because it is happening to humanity
@engineer with the drip we all played half life 2 here but only one has played it on android
I thought bots couldn't feel?
I'm a stickler for dystopian antagonists, and good God I just adore the entire concept of the Combine
They have done this to billions of words turning everything into mechanical puppets. The only thing with true individuality are seemingly the advisers, with their addiction and worshipping of technology have turned themselves into fat husks who need artificial arms and telekinesis to move while everything else are basically a hivemind all in but name. The Universal Union is one of the most terrifying sci fi empires to ever exist and make the borg look like pussies. They conquered universes. UNIVERSES!!!! They have uncountable trillions upon their beck and call. They will stop at nothing until all existence has been combined into one cohesive union. They are even elderich in aspects. The 7 hour war was the most important war in its existence. But for the combine, it was Tuesday.
Well, we are living in a dystopian nightmare irl
compared to hl its less then nothing
the combine are a bunch of alien nerds with a god complex
I think it would be interesting if whatever is the top of the chain of command of the combine was an advanced AI. Like, advisors, administrators like breen and maybe some beings who are part of the original species(there could have even been multiple og combine species in my view) that started the UU are more spread out parts of leadership, but the mastermind or whatever is an AI, or something alike. Kind of like The Supreme Intelligence for the Kree species in Marvel comics/movies, but not necessarily the same.
This video is outstandingly well done and it made appreciate even more HL2, the explanation about how Gordon is seen as the only individual gives a whole new meaning to his name too, the Freeman.
ive always figured they called him freeman on purpose. it makes sense why the vorts call him THE freeman.
That combine fight scene with the maneuvers and stuff is actually crazy.
It's really fun how you mention that the Combine architecture is like a tumor to the planet it invades. I am an industrial electrician, and one of the things i simply cannot get over is HOW LITTLE SHITS the Combine give. Look at what they do. They slam a hole in a wall and put a bridge there. They bolt a terminal to a wall and call it a control center. In HL:A we see a construction Strider simply drop cables over rooftops.
When do you do these things? When you don't care about the system. The most orderly construction we see in HL2 is the citadel, and even that one feels kind of uncoordinated and random at times. None of this empire is built to last. Can't even imagine that the overworld of this collective of species looks like.
Imagine how they got there? Augmenting themselves, others, invading and aquiring, discarding all morale for cold practicality. How strong must their overarching goal be?
Funny thing in is your right. Humanity is only alive because the combine need their teleportation technology.
There is just 1 goal in their mind. And nothing else matters. The planet can be harvested for materials later as well. So why bother keeping it tidy
@@cherrydragon3120 More like keeping it tidy is completely foreign to them. Combine is all about functionality - functionality pushed to absolute. They do not do more, than is necessary. Even when it comes to local forces, they simply adapted existing human concepts everywhere, where it would be sufficient.
In Sandtraps there is a house with two burnt corpses outside after you exit the tunnel which could imply that Combine forces executed resistance members in barbaric ways like they did in Ravenholm with headcrab shells.
Or hey: The seemingly fried body at that one checkpoint in Water Hazard (15:33)
Perhaps he was being interrogated/tortured and they finished by melting his face ala Indy 1
There are examples of this ALL over. Use of biotics, fire, and other "scare tactics" and inhumane actions taken against resistance.
I think that the combine executed them with their guns and then burned the bodies for some reason, perhaps they wanted to put an outpost there and needed to clean it, otherwise it could atract xen creatures searching for food
@@larrydaboi1841 they most likely just wanted to clean everywhere so its not infested with rotting corpses or skeletons that the land is completely rendered unusable for new structures to be constructed, and because of potential mass xen infestation. for existing defensive structures, they would definitely clean up corpses to prevent further xen infestation and to add more needed supplies and other things
Its actually a cremator that burned the body
I absolutely LOVED this video! It completely shown me the dire situation the combine presents. I just bought Half Life Alyx but have never played 1 or 2, so I am doing research before i start the game to get brought up to speed. I have played maybe 30 minutes into HLA, (up to the button puzzle with the eye, if you know what part that is) but really didn't know how bad my situation was.. I am going to restart it with this new knowledge...and no I will not be picking up that can.
1:23 humanity's ability to pack bond with strangers in a crisis situation is our main defense against this tactic. we need intentional cultural structures to reinforce it
You know you made a good game, when people still talk about it 17 years after release
Somehow Mat hasn't tried to theorize anything about the Half-Life universe...
City 17
@@humanman2358 He has actually, he has a video about the G-Man.
In true Lovecraftian style, the Combine are more insidious the more you know about them -- despite how little you ever actually learn.
The fact that we have no idea of how an actual combine looks like is just staggering
@@thesha7447 I mean, unless you want to go with Hunt Down the Freeman’s interpretation, but uh... no thanks.
@@thesha7447 theres prob no such thing as an actual combine, whatever was the original species may have been completely consumed by the combine they created and no longer exist in any recognizable form. The combine could just be the sum of its parts.. yknow.. we live in a society.
@@fruitylerlups530 Nah, there must be a capital solar system of the Combine. They must have a centralized government of sorts. The original species, the powerful invaders that took over other species.
@@carcotasu081 "Must be", 'Must have"... Why?
13:45 Gordon Freeman, the only free man on earth
11:50 The AI in HL have always been really damn good for it's time. That's where the whole NextBot name comes from. Sucks that it was turned into placing a brainrot image that's supposed to follow you. Especially when people like to use the NextBot name on other games that aren't even Soruce engine related (ROBLOX...)
This takes place in the same universe where a guy records himself talking about lemons
Not just lemons, EXPLODING lemons
@@Ultra04channel Exploding lemons that burn your house down, at that
While dying to the moon
if cave johnson had been around the 7 hour war would have ended with cave johnson executing the combine leadership in the combine capital with a sawed off shotgun and some lemon grenades
@@sovietunion7643 lemonades, if you will
"Contact confirmed... uuhh... target is flying on a barrel.... target has reached the speed of light..." - Combine Soldier, in an HL2 speedrun
Also combine soldier, a few minutes later: Uhhh....target has entered the Citadel.
@@omegawilliam95s36 in half life 2 you leave the city to enter in the city again, lol
@@Mask_Guy lol
"Now that we have the pallet, we basically beat the game."
"Just how bad is The Combine?" They took our oceans so.....
Darn overwatch took my oceans
Can't have anything in City 17
This video is super well made!
From the short yet complete backstory of HL1 and how the combine got to earth to events pertaining HL2 and the individuals within City 17, all the way to how The Combine drained moral, deemed those together as threats and forcefully kept them apart, as well as how they drained “Earths Moral”, too, as waters were low, polluted, such as the minds of the people.
Thank you for this great and informative video!
I don't think I've ever heard someone describe Gordon's presence as "a cancerous cell" and that was the most accurate description ever.
Yeah, but instead the cancer is fighting a much bigger cancer the Combine
@@wilsonno9675 From the perspective of the Combine, Gordon is the Cancer.
Hes a virus, turning everything he comes into contact with against the Combine.
Where others become martyrs or are brought to heel, this one measly, insignificant biped has managed to go toe-to-toe with an entire occupation force.
@@wilsonno9675 You could easily describe humanity as a cancer too. Our rogue cells are just fighting a bigger, more destructive cancer.
@@JamesJJSMilton Also probably because the Combine is so massive that thinking and framing it in terms of biology is most appropriate. We have a currently estimated 30 trillion cells that makes us up, and each of those cells function like a city on a microscopic level.
Wow, combine soldiers have better AI than most games nowadays lol
And the game was back in 2004, (At least from its release), and it's better than current day AI. Other games don't have AI communicating to eachother.
It's not that the AI is smart, it's that in the encounters the Combine are in are scripted and made in a way that makes them look smart. Put Half Life enemies in a open field and they'll most likely act like the usual dumb video game AI. What makes the Combine feel smart is that the encounters there in are handcrafted and beautifully designed, and they also do what FEAR does where they make them feel dynamic with the huge amounts of voice lines.
@@t.m.m.8137 yeah half life AI sucks, just play gmod and you’ll understand lol
Funny thing is because most negative criticism of this game was the AI. A game called Vietcong made by a small Czech company in 2003 had better AI and of course Stalker that came out a couple of years later. HL2 is really just a visual and atmospheric experience but you hardly feel it because it requires you to move always that it was exhausting and arcady.
@@jerry12314 pretty big paragraphs to just say you’re bad at computer games.
6:18 I disagree with this. Remember, some people (like Eli) were helped by the Gman. Also the combine don't have total control over everything on Earth, all it takes is one person finding a place hide in like the Canals, Ravenholm, The Quarantine Zone, an abandoned facility like White Forest or Black Mesa East, or a mineshaft. The Combine are shown to have very limited control outside of the cities, hence why you're able to go virtually undetected by the Combine throughout Episode 2 when you aren't in an area used by the Combine.
5:59 yeah some of the citizens say Something along the lines of I don’t want to be caught talking to you like I don’t know I don’t remember but I think I remember that
They do all these smart moves but “I have a shotgun”
playing against soldier AI in HL1 in a nutshell
Combines: *killing all the humans on earth and drugging them*
Man in orange suit bhopping: " *Did you say somethin?* "
take doom guy for an example,
Demon: yo, i killed someone's pet rabit
satan: You what?
Doomguy starts sprinting as fast as a car.
Wait. Gordon can't speak
@@pixel22444 Yeah more like
Man in orange suit bhopping: "..." *Brandishes crowbar*
This is a shit meme, should have used the “And I took that personally” one
I read an article on something like this- it was about artificial intelligence, and why it needs to be well-monitored. It wasn’t because of rogue AI, but talked about what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands. Spoke about a dystopia where every action is monitored and reported to the people in power.
I forget the exact term used, but it was something like an S-class end of the world. In contrast to the standard X-class scenario where life is just wiped out, S-class scenarios are where suffering is so immense that being dead would be better.
A net neutral of everything being wiped away by catastrophic events, is worse than a net negative of a worldwide oppressive regime, where there’s not even a place to escape to.
Half-life 2 is a perfect representation of this.
Humanity is doomed to death- or, even if Gordon succeeds, a few decades of societal collapse. But in the meantime, every person waits for a death that may come minutes or years from now. Suffering on a catastrophic level.
The end of the world.