I wanted to make a giant post about Half-Life 2’s unreleased version for the game’s twentieth anniversary. However looking to what the happened over the years and after playing several mods and even the old content fixed, I grew to dislike the approach that fans have done with it. The obsession with getting the original unreleased/leaked version of Half-Life 2 working is getting silly.
Quick recap, Half-Life 2 released in November 2004 is considered one of the best PC games of all time. The game won a plethora of awards and is one of the biggest steps forward in video game history. However it had a troubled development and many ideas that didn’t pass the Cutting Room Floor.
In addition, in September 2003, the entire source code of the game was leaked to the Internet. This was the biggest leak at the time, and even to this day. Lotsof things were leaked, including archived content from the development stages of the game, circa 2000. Essentially the game was rebooted twice over, because it wasn’t working well.
In Valve’s Half-Life 2’s 20th Anniversary video, the company themselves told us many things, including how they went to make the Hyperborea/Borealis as close to the real deal as possible, only for the place be cramped that it wasn’t fun to fight in. So it was discarded.
This is what I mean. The Borealis is a now a mythical part of the Half-Life/Portal lore but playing the maps that contains it makes it a boring affair that you want it to end quickly. That’s not good for a game you want to be played.
The Content You (Don’t) Want to See
Cut content and concept art for many games can have a sense that the devs had better ideas compared to the final/retail version, and I often think that it’s false. Although cool ideas are cool, they can also be difficult to implement or cause unnecessary bloat to a project that eventually will make it feel too long for no other reason other than being long. I’m gonna continue using Half-Life 2 as an example.
There are three things in Half-Life 2 that didn’t make the cut to the final version that I feel that people really want to happen for some reason. The Borealis is one of them, making the game not being placed in the Arctic, thus killing Kraken Base and other related chapters. The second is the Air Exchange, an extremely cool concept that Valve did that fits nowhere to the storyline, only adding bloat to an already long game. The third is the Hydra, an enemy that is essentially living jelly that can kill anyone instantly.
As explained, the Borealis was based on a real ice-breaker ship that Valve visited and modelled into the game. However fighting inside of it was boring because Valve was going for a more realistic approach with the game and the Borealis was apparently too realistic. End result: Scrapped but its idea was revisited in HL2: Episode Two, at least its existence of it.
The Air Exchange is called the climax of Half-Life 2 by many for a big reason. It’s the largest set of maps that Valve made, serving as a big stopping point for the story, and also the biggest reason why the old citizens used gas masks and why the atmosphere looked so destroyed. End result: Scrapped because it was just too long. Like the map count on itself like 8 for one chapter. The first maps that you visit in retail with three chapters have a total count of 6 maps. Not a lot of exposition, just puzzles and fighting.
The Hydra is a “colonial organism made out of three neon blue tentacles that went up to the surface” according to the Combine Overwiki. Its designer, Ken Birdwell really want to add the Hydra to the game, as it was his ‘baby’ so to speak. It looked great for cinematics and fighting other NPCs. End result: Cut because it wasn’t fun to fight against.
“Dark and Gritty”
Unfortunately, I disagree entirely with the approach that some fans take with Half-Life 2 and other games in general. Sometimes cut content was left in the game files because devs forgot to remove it, Valve is insanely bad with this. But with Half-Life 2’s case, the entire game was leaked, meaning that we can have access to the files.
There’s a MegaLeak pack that you can download and check it yourself. This pack includes all the dev maps from different era of development of the game, so you can see how development was like. And I played it. Here’s my thoughts on it.
The leaked Half-Life 2 sucks. It doesn’t suck because it’s bad, it sucks because it’s too much all once, firing at every direction. I do admit that some parts of it look cool, like the atmosphere, but walking down through leak-City 17 will make you completely lost without nowhere to go. It’s quite telling when you go to the Consul/Train Station plaza and just feel completely lost. Then we have the Manhack Arcade, which is a nothingburger, because it’s only for show. Kids work on making Cremators just makes me laugh.
Alyx doesn’t meet you on the way to Kleiner’s lab, and apparently he gets injured after the teleport? Then it goes off the rails, with Ravenholm being before Eli’s lab, and then we have to go on a train to get to the Depot/Prison THEN to the Air Exchange, and THEN to the Borealis and later, Kraken Base. It’s just too much.
After that we also had the City Wars levels which were gonna be longer and we also had to fight the Hydra.
This original version was apparently gonna be 4 days long (in story), while the final version is 3. This extra day would mean that we would have a game that would be like the runtime of HL2 + Episode One + half of Episode Two at bare minimum.That’s just insane to me.
Oh and the ‘dark and gritty’ meme thing that people mention also makes no sense. You can make dark and gritty worlds without make them literally dark. Dark Souls 1 has Lordran, which can be beautiful sometimes, especially in Anor Londo, but the entire location feels desolate, dark, depressing and ‘gritty’.
We never got it fully and that’s OK
The WC Mappack (named after one chapter in the original storyline called Weather Control) has no Weather Control maps, because they were never made officially. No doubt that Valve would have delayed the game, even if the leak never happened.
I tend to find these things a nice history lesson to everyone to see that having everything is impossible. ‘Wanting is better than having’ is fully in effect whenever I see beta/leak discussions. The footage shown might have looked better but it wasn’t, because if it was, it would stay around the final game. We can argue that sometimes the devs don’t understand what they had was cool and they abandoned for a completely different idea but here’s my problem with that argument: You’re not a dev. Simply put, if internal playtesting reveals that something doesn’t work, then it should be cut. That’s what happened with most of Half-Life 2, it was never gonna be the experience that some people want it to be.
And I believe that is completely fine. I’m not angry at Valve for cutting ideas that could have worked. Because could have doesn’t mean it did. Despite this, the game is still fantastic. Did you know that Nova Prospekt aka Prison was one of the first things they did that wasn’t cut fully? And also it’s one of the best parts of the game (replacing the climatic Air Exchange), without a doubt. So much so that any leak footage of Prison just looks like the retail Nova Prospekt.
Even worse, Valve themselves didn’t finish all maps. The idea for the Weather Control was only a pipe dream, since they never fully started those maps, and many City War maps were left unfinished. But ultimately, even if Valve didn’t delay the game, and the leak never happened, we would never get that mythical version of the game. And that’s completely OK.
Just wish they didn’t cancel Episode 3. It could have revived many cool concepts.