In the
latest issue of the British magazine,
Retro Gamer, there was an article published called "The Making Of Half-Life 2". As you can tell from it's title, the article discusses in detail about the development history of our favorite video game. In the article, we can see two never seen before screenshots.
Here are some quick facts from the article:
- Initially Valve came up with the idea to include three alien races in the game.
- The locations Valve had planned for HL2 were also discussed in the article: Chicago, the Arctic base, Cairo and a Prague-like alien city.
- Gameplay in the Borealis section of the map was largely limited by the use of the fire extinguisher. The fire "would spread across surfaces and limit the player’s access to parts of the level or ignite flammable barrels" and the player had to extinguish fires in order to proceed.
- Initially the game's physics engine was Ipion Virtual Physics. The company that created the engine was bought by Havoc back in 2000).
- As Laura Dubuk mentioned previously a year ago, the Physgun was a prototype of the Gravity gun, but it wasn't meant to be used within the final game at all. Instead, it was a special weapon for testers to try out the game's Ipion physics engine.
- Initially, it was planned that the player would fight both soldiers and antlions in the Prison chapter, instead of having the antlions on your side.
- The first drivable vehicle to be added into the game was the digger. The digger would ram a "mother pod", which manifested as a Gonarch belly spawning headcrabs into the tunnels under Ravenholm.
- At one point, Valve experimented with only letting the player carry one primary and secondary weapon.
Update:ValveTime.net contacted Retro Gamer, and asked the authors of the article if they could give them the original files of the screenshots. They gave them both original files, as well as two screenshots that were also unreleased that didn’t make it into the article. You can see all four screenshots below.