Talk:References:Marc Laidlaw emails/Unverified/Not emails

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On the Xen Crystal

“	That crystal sample in the opening, for instance, should have been clearly echoed in the Nihilanth's chamber—and even down inside its gaping cranium. That was the plan. But we ran out of time to make the clear visual association.	”
	– loonygames

On the repercussions of killing Eli

“	We wanted to make sure that whatever the repercussions were, they would be meaningful for the other characters. Eli is a central figure for so many of the characters in our world...he's basically the father of the resistance. Yes, Gordon is an important figure in the resistance, too, but he dies all the time. We knew we could kill anyone in the series and it would have been meaningless unless there was someone in the game who could mourn for them--someone whose grief the player could experience vicariously. The people who say they cried when Eli died--I'd be surprised if they actually cried at the moment of the animation of his death. I think the visceral reaction occurs when you hear Alyx pleading. That part still gets to me because it is a very raw emotion and it gets past my guard. After working with Merle Dandridge for so many years, we were sure she would do something amazing with the scene. That confidence was another reason for the choice we made.	”
	– halflife2.net

On Wallace Breen's last words

“	He could be talking to Gordon or the Combine...or maybe both. Anyway, he's bargaining.	”
	– halflife2.net

On the story-telling in the Episodes

“	HL2 was intended to stand alone without further explanation, and it still works that way. But when we decided that we were going to experiment with episodic content, it seemed like a good opportunity to finally "go deep" with story elements we had already introduced. We also felt obliged to give our fans some more concrete ideas to help interpret what had happened in the past, and what that might mean for the future. He don't wade into the forums and tell people they are right or wrong about parts of the story; we try to address things through the games themselves.	”
	– halflife2.net

On the nature of the Episodes

“	We conceived the Episodes as a complete three-part cycle stemming from HL2, which is why these are the Half-Life 2 Episodes. The idea was to do something self-contained within the larger series, not to use them to wrap up the series. I don't see how the conflict we've been slowly revealing could possibly be resolved any time soon. Humanity is just starting to glimpse the larger context.	”
	– halflife2.net

“	They forced our hand...instead of jumping forward another 10 years and letting players fill in the gaps for themselves, we've gotten the chance to develop some of the elements deliberately. But we've also had the chance to spend more time working on our characters and letting more of the plot emerge from them and their dynamics, rather than simply out of the demands of saving the world as quickly as possible.	”
	– halflife2.net

On cut characters from Half-Life

“	Well, we didn't always have the resources; early on we wanted a wider range of characters - we wanted women scientists and stuff there - but we just didn't have the texture read memory. The train says they're an equal-opportunities employer on the way in, but the fact is that there are no women there that day. They all stayed at home; they knew there was something going on. The whole relationship with Dr Mossman in HL2 was a scene that we tried to do in Half-Life. We'd done a whole bunch of stuff for this scene where there was a betrayal by a woman scientist; at that point in the story Freeman was being hunted and you think that the scientists are all your friends, so this scientist says she's going to get you help and tells you to stay in the room you're in - and then she calls the guards. We couldn't do that in Half-Life - we didn't really have characters on that level - so it was cool in HL2 when we had characters who were far enough along...	”
	– CVG

On old ideas

“	Well, every now and then something will come up and we'll be like, 'Oh, don't you remember how we tried to do this in Half- Life, but we just couldn't figure out how to make it work?' So yes, we do still pick stuff out of the mix and make it work. I mean, there's a scientist you hear a lot in the test chamber in the early part of Half-Life, and he's never reappeared. And we've finally worked out a place for him where he's been all this time! It's been pretty fun figuring out how to bring that guy back.	”
	– CVG

On Gordon Freeman

“	The character of Gordon Freeman? Well, ultimately he was just a name. There was this character that you played who was this eyepiece looking into this universe, a motive force that enables you to move through it. We just wanted to create somebody who didn't get in the way of the player exploring on their own yet feeling like they had a specific role - never quite sure that they were playing it right, but having it as part of the whole experience. Are you doing the right thing or the wrong thing? We really like messing around with the implications of telling you that you're doing one thing, when actually, everything else is forcing you to do something different from that. There's irony in the game - everybody tells you that you're a scientist, but all you're actually doing is running around shooting stuff. All these things fall into the bucket of Gordon Freeman...	”
	– CVG

On the story of the Episodes (Erik Johnson, not Marc Laidlaw)

“	Part of the strength of episodic production is being fluid and responding to how customers react to previous episodes. With the Episodes, we're working towards a specific event, and we have a plan for how we get there. Some of the details may change along the way, but the core is etched in stone.	”
	– IGN

On changes between Half-Life and Half-Life 2

“	This came naturally out of the design of the world, there was no point at which we didn't see the universe as being essentially dark. As long as we were trapped in the confines of Black Mesa, we didn't have to deal with the world beyond those walls, but that didn't mean we pictured a positive, nurturing environment, When the world of HL2 started coming into focus, we tried to be consistent in tone - but this wasn't a matter of being selectively darker or more sophisticated. It simply meant we had to be vigilant about introducing elements that might inadvertently break the spell that were were trying to cast.	”
	– Edge Magazine

On characters versus caricatures

“	We wanted to try our hand at adding real characters to the story, rather than caricatures. Advances in animation, and the people we were luring in from the film industry, spurred us to try for a broader emotional range.	”
	– Edge Magazine

On the development and goals of Alyx

“	We never argued about Alyx. In a lot of ways, the personality of the character in the game is just a refined version of our initial vision. Every discussion was about giving her more depth, more believability; we were all moving in the same direction from the start. Just as we wanted Gordon to be easily distinguishable from the typical videogame heroes of the way, we wanted Alyx to stand apart from the video-babe clichés.	”
	– Edge Magazine

On the design of Gordon Freeman

“	Gordon Freeman, whatever his strengths and weaknesses, is defined entirely by his design constraints. Silence is the keystone of his character. I know it doesn't work for everyone, but fortunately there are plenty of games with talking protagonists. We don't have to turn Half-Life into one of those. That said, the 'strong, silent type' jokes are way past their expiration date. Even the very first and freshest one was slightly curdled.	”
	– Edge Magazine

On White Forest

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

On the inspirations and character development for Gordon

“	At the time we created Half-Life, the typical videogame hero was Duke Nukem. Cigar-chewing, wise-cracking, crude although effective. Obviously he was incredibly popular and it would have been hard to compete on the same ground. But he was also the kind of character in whom I couldn't find anything to relate to myself. We thought making a character who was sort of a brainy scientist type would reflect a fair number of our audience, and then we could have fun with the contrast between this supposed know-it-all who actually had no clue what was going on at any time, and whose practice of physics was limited to turning power off and on by pushing buttons. As a viewpoint character, he was in place when I joined Valve, so I think he just naturally came out of the setting. It was a research lab, so the likeliest inhabitant of such a place would be a scientist. Once the game itself started to come together, then Gordon and his dilemmas came into focus. We wanted to mess with the player's concept of his own identity. Don't forget, in Half-Life, you could play as an absolute maniac, murdering your peers with crowbars and grenades, and having a great time while you did it. By the time we moved into a Half-Life 2, we thought the extra realism made the psychopathic behavior a lot less fun, and by then we were more interested in sculpting a deliberate narrative. Gordon couldn't be killing off his friends anymore. It meant a loss of some gameplay freedom…which was sort of like a loss of innocence. But anyone who wants to can still go back to the glory days of Half-Life and club extremely low-poly scientists to death with little remorse.	”
	– New Rising Media

On fan works

“	We don't feel our fans have any duty to do justice to the games—we're humbled that we inspire so many people to undertake these epic projects. When fans ask us about story details to work into a mod they're putting together, it's usually because they want to be true to the world and make something that feels like a part of it. We can't share our plans, so we always encourage them to do whatever makes the most sense as part of their movie or game or story. We have gotten years of enjoyment out of these creations. With the introduction of SFM as a more powerful movie-creation tool, we are seeing more astonishing little films all the time.	”
	– New Rising Media

On concepts for Half-Life 2

“	We never thought for a minute about the world outside the walls of Black Mesa. So we ran in circles for a few years, trying out all kinds of possibilities. We developed a world that had been invaded by numerous alien races that were in conflict with each other—there was a race of bugs, among other things. We stuck Gordon in a black leather HEV torture suit like something out of a Clive Barker film. Eventually we settled on a fairly straightforward story of one man against an invading force…our twist was that Gordon was no longer alone, no longer the one man saving the world, that everything he did was part of a cooperative effort. He did things for other people—most of the goals in the game are someone else's. Which is a good way to motivate a cipher. Once we had the world, we still had to make it feel like Half-Life 1; it still needed some kind of connection. And we found that in the Science Team—the survivors of Black Mesa, who knew how this had all begun, knew Gordon, and had (in some inexplicable way) been waiting for him.	”
	– New Rising Media

On iterating Ravenholm

“	Ravenholm was originally just a dark, dreary mining town—it was all about the claustrophobic streets, the teetering buildings, the oppressive sky. We planned it to be a haven that had been attacked by the Combine, we thought it would have one obsessive inhabitant who lobbed grenades and molotovs from a church tower, to help you get through town. But at some point, when we started integrating our physics engine with the game and designing environments to take advantage of that, we turned it into what we called Traptown. That's when it started filling up with saw blades and zombies. Father Grigori was just your average “preacher with a shotgun,” but of course that didn't really fit the environment directly, so I started to work out a more unorthodox religious approach to the character. A lot of people were working on all these different parts, and eventually the pieces clicked. We moved Ravenholm's appearance in the plot a few times…originally you were to have gone there before you met Eli, but we realized that the area was much more fun if you had the gravity gun already. And by putting Ravenholm later in the game, it gave us the chance to do all the typical foreshadowing that is so indispensable to horror settings, with characters pointing out the dark path to Ravenholm, and ominously warning, “We don't go there anymore.” The moment you hear that, you know you're going there…and it had damn well better be terrifying to live up to your dread!	”
	– New Rising Media

On Xen and beyond (initial statement by Doug Lombardi)

“	We had a glimpse of the larger threat when we were working on Half Life 1. In other words we knew that once you cleared out the nihilanth, you were going to discover something worse beyond it. We knew that some immense threat had chased the Nihilanth and its creatures out of their own world and into Xen, from which location they were all to glad to seize the opportunity to continue on to earth with suppression through the citadels. But the exact nature of the threat was left to be solved in Half Life 2.	”
	– CVG

On Xen and beyond (followup by Marc Laidlaw, actually an email)

“	I'm pretty sure the quote attributed to Doug is partly mine; I'm not sure where you found it, but quotes are often misattributed in interviews. Also, in a full interview we will often come up with more elaborate answers than we can supply to the many fans who write in with specific questions about plot points. And sometimes Doug will ask me to help him answer a question and I'll type something up and he'll forward it. We all pitch in on these kinds of things. Anyway, Doug's comment simply describes our state of mind about the general alien threat as we perceived it when we finished making HL1 and started thinking about what was to come. My comment is more about where we're at right now, and how we tend to proceed. Doug is certainly familiar and conversant with the story, as he must be considering he takes it upon himself to answer about five hundred questions a day about HL and HL2. But I don't tell him everything I have in mind, or everything we're working on from a story point of view. And like members of the fan community, different people on the team have different interpretations of various events in the games.	”
	– Source, now Source

On the expansion packs

“	We had a lot of conversations with Gearbox concerning the creation of Opposing Force and Blue Shift, and I supplied them with various documents that fleshed out background elements that hadn't been woven directly into the foreground of Half-Life. The place where you see this most clearly is in Barney's odyssey to Xen, where a bit more light is shed on the Xen-relay teleport experiments. Some of the reason for the overlapping narratives was that it made sense for Gearbox to reuse existing content, such as textures and design motifs, since they had limited schedules for producing these games. Most of the moment-to-moment gameplay and story decisions were left in Gearbox's hands, and we merely tried to make sure they dovetailed with our own designs and didn't create any huge conflicts. Gearbox, as fans of the original, had a good eye for places where their stories could overlap with Half-Life, but even so, they took plenty of liberties with the story for the sake of making a fun game. Fun in a game is ultimately more important than consistency.	”
	– Gamasutra

On narrative structure, gameplay and emotional impact in games

“	As far as narrative structure, games are often rigidly structured; I don't think lack of structure is a problem at all. What's lacking is the emotional impact that usually accompanies structural highpoints or turning points in more traditional narratives. In most games, the feeling of finally achieving your goal is one of relief rather than elation or insight; the climax often merely marks a break from increasing frustration. I wish most games aimed higher than that. As an example of one game that got it brilliantly right, I'll point at Ico, where the narrative structure, the gameplay, and the emotional impact were all seamlessly fused into one. Near the end of the game there is a moment where the world comes apart and you nearly fall -- but you're caught. It was an incredibly poignant moment, conveyed through the game mechanics, the animations, a reversal in the storyline, everything all at once. This was a significant event not only for that game, but for the art of game design. And that was just one of several all-time-high moments in Ico.	”
	– Gamasutra

On characterization realism

“	We try to draw strong relationships between the characters; making each one part of a believable network of family and friends (and rivals) makes it easier for players to relate to them. Characters in weaker science-fiction stories often seem flimsy because they're solitary heroic figures without parents, siblings or ordinary relationships. Character-driven drama depends on social context, status transactions, how they relate to other people in their world. We also assume our characters have spent their whole life in this world - especially Alyx, who grew up surrounded by headcrabs and Vortigaunts. The crazy SF details are just ordinary obstacles to them - still full of potential threats and surprises, as in our own world, but with a grim internal logic."	”
	– CVG

On the development of narrative with Half-Life and Half-Life 2

“	In the first game, I arrived midway through the project, and my job was mainly to take an existing story with many loose ends and arrange the pieces in such a way that they created a convincing illusion of narrative. The second time around, we tried to have an end in sight from the beginning. But of course, everything changes along the way, and you're always surprised at where you end up.	”
	– Gaming Nexus

On his role in Valve

“	What I do here has changed over the years. Every game has different needs–including the amount of writing. Half-Life was the game I first worked on, and there was very little in the way of written dialog, but a great deal of working with the team to imbue the game with the feel of a narrative. With Half-Life 2 we had the ability to develop well-rounded characters, so the writing and storytelling got more complex as we tried to figure out how to merge strong characters into a first-person action game with a mute protagonist. Half-Life 2's script that was 10 times longer than HL1's. In the following episodes (HL2 Episode 1 and 2), the games were much shorter but also more dense–so the scripts for those rivaled the script for the full HL2. I wrote lots and lots of dialog, but only after we had figured out how to make the game itself support a strong story…so there were a lot of story design jobs that did not involve writing per se. I can't really say much about what I'm working on now, but the writing challenges continue to be varied.	”
	– Grinding to Valhalla

On inspirations for creating Gordon Freeman

“	Well, we knew generally that he was supposed to be a scientist, and this was immediately an interesting and appealing challenge as a writer. Really, the only other examples we had in the games at the time were like the Quake marine and Duke Nukem, so it was pretty easy to find something that wasn't one of those. It seemed like a pretty obvious thing to do since we were doing a science-fiction game. There's this scientist, he's not perfect, and there's a disaster, and it's all going to be the fault of the scientist. There was no shading about maybe you're doing these things because you're encouraged to or things have been set up to go against you. So, I think we didn't want to do a big backstory about the guy, we wanted to kind of leave it blank. Then we decided to take a look at sort of heroic scientific figures. The name Freeman Dyson came up, and Gabe had already come up with the name Gordon. We played around with silly names like Dyson Pont Carre and silly stuff like that, but we ended up with Gordon Freeman. The main thing was not to put too much detail into really specific things about this character because we always wanted the player to help create who he was. We had a resume of sorts to help explain what he was doing there, which was why we came up with M.I.T. and Seattle and the University of Innsbruck and these things that we kind of dispersed as little bits of information about Gordon. But the main thing was that we just tried to stay out of the way. It was even sort of a sad thing when we had to do a multiplayer model and show Gordon, or when we had to have his image on the box or the launcher. I remember that there was a review, and I totally sympathize with it, that talked about the level of disappointment that the reviewer felt when they actually saw Gordon Freeman on the game's launcher screen. You don't really want to take it this far, you just want to be this person and kind of imagine, like in a dream. What do you look like in a dream? Well, you want that to be what this character looks like. He's become a visually iconic figure, but the original intention was more idealized, that it would be cool if we didn't show Gordon at any time, we'd just let the player create their own. I mean, we tell you that you're a scientist, but we don't do a lot of work to convince you that you're actually doing science in the game. That's sort of a tease, that we have Gordon involved in another experiment after the last one he did didn't turn out too well.	”
	– GameSpy

On Half-Life Sequels

“	The first game was really totally self-contained. The idea that we were going to do a sequel to it... I'm really sequel averse in my own work. I think we thought that we'd do this, then we'd create a whole new world, we'd go and do something else. That didn't take into account the fact that Half-Life was going to be a success. We were prepared to let go of it and try something new. Initially Half-Life was supposed to be this quickie FPS that would give the company a resume and get us on our feet to do whatever the real thing was that we were going to do. We could learn some stuff doing this, then we'd do some other thing. So, one of the problems in embarking on Half-Life 2 was that Half-Life was this hermetic world, and it says nothing about the world outside of Black Mesa. Whatever we were going to come up with was going to be totally arbitrary. Fortunately, in that seed of Half-Life, there were some really recognizable things, like the science team. We were in this situation that we could make a world from scratch and basically do a totally new thing, but we had these transportable elements. As long as we had the core science team and this Kleiner guy and these characters from Black Mesa, you could put them anywhere and it's still going to feel like Half-Life. They're like a family for Gordon, they give him social context and they make you feel like you're continuing this adventure, even though it's in the middle of a bunch of aliens you've never heard of before. We worked hard to convince you that this is a struggle that we had hinted at in the first game. It's always like that. I think even if you set out to do a sequel, you get the most mileage out of the things that were planted in the first one and weren't really intended to go anywhere. After a while, you'll go "Oh, we put this in here and it wasn't meant for this, but it's the perfect thing to extend the story." There are little seeds that grow. As we went on, we looked at things from the first game that were just perfect for ripening and making something out of them episodes later. There's also sort of a fun satisfaction of making these pieces feel like they were inevitable from the start, to go back to these earlier elements and weave them all back into the larger picture. We've always tried to take that world into account. These things happened, and that's how they happened, and we're not going to try to say they didn't just so we can do something farther out with the story. So we kind of have to play by those rules that we established. Obivously, if you were still looking at the same aliens from the original game at the end of the episodes where we are now, it would be sort of tedious, so we tried to suggest that there's a larger universe of stuff out there. You're still in that universe, but there's a lot of stuff that you just didn't get to see before.	”
	– GameSpy

On supporting characters

“	Well, there's always a lot more we could do with the characters. We haven't announced any plans for that, but the lives of all of those characters, especially for those of us who have been living with them for a long time, are much more complicated than what we could fit in a game. There's always going to be stuff we wish we could do with them, and if the opportunity came up, I'm sure we'd like to do that provided we could do it in a game. The really clever thing about it is that, and this was Gabe's idea originally, was that when we were looking at doing a sequel to Half-Life, and how to do expanision packs, the typical thing would be to have just done a sequel. He hit on this sort of Alexandria quartet type of idea where we give these characters the "Rashomon" treatment and tell the same story from the perspectives of the different characters. What was great about that is that Gearbox was able to reuse the exact same textures and models and everything from Half-Life, but just concentrate on the gameplay and narrative elements, so they wouldn't go into an area that we weren't ready to go into yet. The whole timeline beyond Half-Life was pretty scary for us, as we were trying to figure just where we wanted to go with it. It was a really clever reuse of resources, and it kept it consistent with the universe. We're kind of in a different zone right now, trying to make sure it all fits. That's one reason we've taken on the episodes by ourselves, rather than turn them into an expansion pack for a third-party company. We wanted to make these episodes indispensible and really advance the story with major parts of the plot and put the characters through changes. Half-Life 2 set the groundwork for these changes, but one game itself in the time it takes is just not enough to show change in a character. We're very careful about how we advance these pieces. It's harder to say that we're going to just peel off these characters and go do separate games with them. We like the element of careful control and attention to detail on how we develop them. From my point of view, a lot of it has to do with what we do with these characters. Obviously we could take game elements and other people could say "Okay, I want Alyx fighting robots on the moon." I don't really see Alyx in that kind of struggle, but maybe there's a game there!	”
	– GameSpy

On beyond Episode Three

“	It's an open universe. I don't think the universe necessarily comes to an end at any point. I mean, the jump from Half-Life to Half-Life 2 was still "Half-Life," but we got to perform this act of world creation, which was really exciting. We've been in that world for a long time now, and building worlds is something I really love to do. I think a lot of people here are like that. Hopefully there will be a transition similar to that, sort of like a rejuvenation or a reinvention, even if we're continuing with more "Half-Life" it's going to have some kind of new world creation involved in it. Whether the world we build is called Half-Life 3 or some completely new thing, where we take what we've learned about storytelling and do it in a new IP, I don't know. Right now, we're just trying to do the right thing by Half-Life and we hope people are happy with that.	”
	– GameSpy

On other media

“	There's been talk about it and there's certainly been fan requests and inquiries from publishers. What we always come back to is the fact that we want control over where the universe goes and where the characters go. Part of that is sort of the professional and personal challenge of wanting to do things in these games that you can't do in a book or movie. That just boils down to the medium: What can we do in games that we can't in other mediums? We're doing some things that can't be done in other forms. If these games are done right, books are irrelevant. You'd just be reading a transcript of the game you just played, minus the cool stuff, which is the stuff you did to influence it. If you were to watch somebody play through Half-Life 2, transcribe their experiences, then turn it into a descriptive narrative, as well-written as possible, that might be interesting to read. My initial feeling was that we would never do these as books, because this is something that's different and complete in itself. Then, at one point, we realized we had so much material from the universe that we could do books, we could do books, we could fill in the gaps for things that the games don't really give us the breathing room to do or develop. But now I've returned to the feeling that the games are so much better at doing what they do than books would be. Books are fine without having to have a bunch of "Half-Life" tie-in novels to go along with them. I think with the Halo universe, they can pick a point in the larger universe that they've built and say, "You can set a book here, it won't affect the game that we're building." We're trying to say the experience you're having playing Half-Life is the crucial experience to have in the Half-Life universe. We're putting you in the middle of it. Gordon Freeman is this catalyzing guy who is at the center of history right now. The things that are happening to him are affecting the whole universe right now, so why would you want to be the guy who's working in the office building a few blocks over? It's partly that, and seeing how far we can go with our storytelling technique. It makes sense for some worlds. I've done a tie-in novel, so I'm not against them. The one that I did was developing a universe, that there was already a visual element, and they wanted a video element and they wanted a novel element as well, they wanted to fuse though things. It's possible that it could happen, as they do pretty well, especially for those big franchises, so there's certainly interest in it, but I'm not sure it would make sense from a storytelling point of view. The other side of that is that if it wasn't me writing it, we'd want the person writing it to be here working on the games anyway, in which case we'd want to take the benefit of that and put it into the games, which I think is what our fans want.	”
	– GameSpy

On the benefits of the Episodes

“	I felt like Half-Life 2 had about a short story's worth of content. Taking six years to advance the story such an insignificant amount felt like a poor trade-off. The episodes let us increase the density of story-like elements a bit and ship somewhat more frequently, which feels about right.	”
	– halflife2.net