I was playing through Half life 2 today out of boredom when I suddenly realized how easily it could be turned into a RTS like Halo is. Does anyone else besides me notice this or am I just crazy or a genius.

No, you're basically crazy.

See, the Combine stomped Earth's armies flat in a matter of hours, and that just screams imba to me.

GloatingSwine:
No, you're basically crazy.

See, the Combine stomped Earth's armies flat in a matter of hours, and that just screams imba to me.

It wouldn't be for the pre-Combine invasion, but maybe after Gordon knocks over the Citadel and an uprising begins.

That being said, I don't see it working out. Humans in post-Combine earth don't have any armored vehicles, no bases, no anything except some rebels with some ragtag bullets. And a good supply of medkits. To squeeze an RTS out of it, you'd need to deviate a long long way away from what was seen so far.

Also, headcrabs wouldn't make much of a third side, but they couldn't be ignored from the game either. They'd also lose all their scariness once you were put in the RTS "godmode" view.

I don't see it working.

No, no, NO!

My favourite thing about the Half Life series is the feeling of control. Or total lack of it, even though you take part in varous fights and cause/prevent several cataclysms, you never feel you can see the whole picture. As if you are somebody's pawn in their big game called Earth.

Putting you in the position of the somebody would completely ruin the sense of drama. You'd have to explain each side and it's leader's motives. A bit like the Star Wars prequels. Before Darth Vader was a scary character, now he's just the emo kid who couldn't defeat Ewan McGregor.

I could see it working pretty well, but the day Valve makes an RTS is the day a Korean puts down StarCraft to play Peggle. I think they could do it like Halo Wars where they made it before the main story line. The seven-hour war i mean. That would be cool.

That or it doesnt act like the standard RTS of our day. What if you had to control people, from only like a fifty foot height. You need to guide like thirty rebels against combine in a street, or field. You need to move them to cover, flank the enemy, and organize them based on what weapon they have against what enemy. This would be easy to factor in the zen forces because we dont need to mass headcrabs, thirty zombies we saw in Ravenholm.

Small battlefields and small forces. You cant build soldiers. You are given fifty guys and you need to use only those fifty guys the take out the enemy.

Wow im getting excited

Absolutely not, that would be a terrible game, and a horrible disgrace to the series. I understand Halo did it (I don't know how good Halo Wars is supposed to be), but to make an RTS you have to sacrifice a lot of character, storyline, and ingenuity. If you shifted the game to RTS, you can forget about the gravity gun, you can forget about "Do it yourself" physics puzzles, and you can forget about any decent character development.

I realize RTS fans may have a hard time getting into the jewel of a series that is Half Life, mainly because of the genre barrier, but making an RTS would cause riots. If the riots weren't naturally occurring, I would personally start them and add a few more counts of arson to my criminal record.

I selected "Who cares?" because, if you are honest with your game experience in HL1, HL1 expansions, HL2, and HL2 Episodes, I would hope you have come realize there was already a great deal of influence from Real Time Strategy games, but it was focused on what it is like from a personal experience, not a eye in the sky ... Surely I wasn't the only one to fight on the rebel side and recognize a world with supply depots and lines, with struggles for key locations, and the need to coordinate strategies against the Combine?

IMHO, its not at all necessary, I already played HL RTS in FPS form.

It would be balanced, one team is death distroyer worlds, and the other has 5 people who arn't useless.

Yeah, a RTS works with how it seems on paper, and on paper the rebles get crushed.

I'd say it'd make a good RPG before it'd make a good RTS, and even that doesn't sound appealing.

There already is one, Half-Life 2:Wars. It's a third-party thing, and not complete. BAse building should be out in the next release. I could see a real one being kind of cool, just for the storyline, not because "omg hl must buy!!11!!1!!!", but then again normally hate more plot intensive levels in Age of Mythology and Age of Empires: II where you just had troops and had to do stuff. I don't think it's the type of thing Valve would do.

If it's a good RTS it will be good, but a good RTS based of Barney will be a good RTS.

I say no because Valve won't even have released Half-Life 2: Episode 3 when the world is destroyed in 2012.

Just kidding, I just don't think Valve will do it and they certainly won't license it. Also, as many have kindly (or not so kindly) pointed out a Half-Life RTS is basically either Combine pwns, or sneaking rebels and scientists somehow beat the Uberarmies of Doom.

So why does everyone assume an RTS has to have base building and resource gathering?

Like Mathias said, go a Myth route. You've a group of resistance fighters (anywhere from 5 - 50 or so), and you maneuver them throughout the city/wilderness fighting combine and zombies. There's no reason why it wouldn't work, especially with a guerilla/commando style setup.

Whether Valve's equipped to do it, of course, is another story.

CanadianWolverine:
I selected "Who cares?" because, if you are honest with your game experience in HL1, HL1 expansions, HL2, and HL2 Episodes, I would hope you have come realize there was already a great deal of influence from Real Time Strategy games, but it was focused on what it is like from a personal experience, not a eye in the sky ... Surely I wasn't the only one to fight on the rebel side and recognize a world with supply depots and lines, with struggles for key locations, and the need to coordinate strategies against the Combine?

IMHO, its not at all necessary, I already played HL RTS in FPS form.

That's a funny way of describing a simulation of military tactics and situations. It's got RTS elements.

That's almost like saying that an RTS has FPS elements because there are weapons in it.

Now, I don't know anything of the story. I've played half the first game, and thought it sucked. It does, come on, admit it. And I've played portal, oh, and I crashed a car a few times in the second one at a friends house. I did read that webcomic that I can't remember the name of, with the Gordon clone running around screwing things up, but I don't know how accurate that was. Despite that, I can honestly say an RTS in that world would never work.

As someone mentioned, a squad based game in the style of commandos, fallout tactics or UFO would probably work, and be quite nice. And just because a few FPS fans would whine and complain because things suddenly got complicated doesn't mean it wouldn't work. The gravity gun would still be useful, if used, but seriously, how many do they have? (Seriously, I don't know.) Gordon has one, but how many others? Does it really have to play a part in the game? And no, there wouldn't be any physics puzzles. That's quite good, they're getting boring. Zombies and headcrabs would still work, and so would story. Character development as well. Playing it out in a way similar to the UFO series (including UFO:AI which isn't a part) would make it nice as well, have a nice map of the place, a few outposts you build additions too (but change the style of such to fit the setting of course)...

Hell, even I might be convinced to play it. Of course, if it would be done, it wouldn't be done well, and it probably won't be done. Unless they hired me for it, and put me in charge, in which case I can promise that the story and characters would be sufficient at least. It would probably come out late though.

And of course the story shouldn't focus on mister Superhero Gordon either, but rather a group of other people. You could run into him in one mission or so (perhaps even tying it in with earlier games, I'm sure there's at least one place Gordon gets a timely rescue by rebel forces, or they have to go clean up some mess he's made). It would explore another situation, and give some explanation of the other forces in the world. It would be a nice way to find out how others view him, and what consequences his actions have, to show that Gordon and what happens around him isn't the only thing of importance in the world. Sort of like what Renegade did, but the other way around. And good.

No.

But secretly, yes: http://hl2wars.hlrse.net/

That's prolly the best you're gunna get.

An RTS? No, definitely not. An X-Com style turn based tac-combat game? Perhaps. That actually sounds like allot of fun to me. Of course, my most looked forward to games right now are the rumored 2K Boston X-COM game and the possible Jagged Alliance 3 so maybe I'm just in the mood for that.

Halo?

You mean that "Halo Wars" thingy, right?

I quite like the idea of a commando's style Half-Life game. I would love to control a bunch of rebels making hit and run attacks on combine outposts, stealing weapons and sabotaging their efforts. Honestly it's a great idea.

I don't think it would work, for many reasons and most of them have been mentioned. But also because people play Half-life to be Gordon Freeman, to be a little scientist that takes down the combine. Also lets face it most people who play the Half-life series are nerds, comon we all know it, I know I am, and we get to play as A SUPER NERD in a suit who gets to blow stuff up. That is the appeal of the Half-life series, if they made it into a RTS you would lose that group of people who like to be Gordon Freeman. Becuase they wouldn't be Gordon Freeman in the RTS they would be just another army leader.

one of the poll choices should have been, "Are you fucking high?".

Hey OP - maybe you should have given an explanation as to how it could be "easily" turned into an RTS - that way we wouldn't get responses like "you are joking right?"

eggdog14:
No.

But secretly, yes: http://hl2wars.hlrse.net/

That's prolly the best you're gunna get.

*jawdrop*

I'm shocked.

I always thought some modders had built some RTS mod of Half Life. Sure, a major part of the appeal of the game is lost, but anything's possible.

While I agree a Half-Life RTS would be nuts, many of the posts in this thread are thinking a little too deeply inside the box. A RTS doesn't have to be yet another Starcraft clone. Perhaps, for a change, it could be more about single player, organising the resistance, perhaps a little like X-Com, stealing and reverse engineering combine tech, slowly sowing the seeds of rebellion.

Not that I want to see that, but it would work better than "zomg zombine rush."

Mr Wednesday:
While I agree a Half-Life RTS would be nuts, many of the posts in this thread are thinking a little too deeply inside the box. A RTS doesn't have to be yet another Starcraft clone. Perhaps, for a change, it could be more about single player, organising the resistance, perhaps a little like X-Com, stealing and reverse engineering combine tech, slowly sowing the seeds of rebellion.

Not that I want to see that, but it would work better than "zomg zombine rush."

so... not an RTS?

God, I love the series and everything, but the ante comments on this thread border on fanatical. Why not turn it into an RTS? Because it would lack traditional elements? Because the humans wouldn't be able to use tanks? For crying out loud, have you all been sat at home playing Command and Conquer for the past fifteen years? Times have changed, and many RTSes have adapted to include originality. People are reciting and singing the praises of X-Com sentiments and gameplay, when they really mean Company of Heroes!

Want an example of story in an RTS? Go look up Age of Mythology - a campaign which took days to finish, which told an epic story of love and loss. If Half Life's original expansions got away with telling the stories of washed-up security guards and Black Ops agents, then surely an RTS can take an equally different alternate route through the story, right? Or would that be 'uncanonical'?

Furthermore, there seems to be little problem when it comes to faction balancing. Sure, the Combine devastated Earth's forces within hours, but that was only the initial invasion force (personally I feel it would be quite interesting to have to retreat through such environments under attack by the Combine, but that's beside the point). What remains on Earth (with the portal now closed, too!) is little more than an expedition party in comparison with the other aspects of the empire. Thus, considering the humans are capable of building huge rockets and nifty anti-Combine gear (see: Magnusson's rocket/device) then the playing field is relatively level, given some artistic license. Furthermore, a great and artistic third faction could be made out of Xen's creatures.

I dont think an RTS would kill the game but enhance it. It is a great tool to tack on bits of story line that would else be used in conversation in a later game. Exactly like Halo did. I dont know if you read the halo books or the inside cover of the manual as you rode home from Best Buy mbut the human ships were piss poor when the Covenant showed up. The Humans got their ass kicked and they only way they didnt die altogether was because they didnt let the covenant find earth.

But dont get me wrong I know the Combine used massive forces and the Humans were taken by surprise. But at that time when the portal opened and the Combine flew in the world had weapons. We had tanks and helicopters and cruise missles and jets. We must of had some sort of edge? We could always add that edge. Dont think of the rebels in HL2 think of marines in our present day.

Hell maybe we had superior weapons but the combine had more soldiers and the ability to use a preamptive strike. Nothing specifies how the Combine won but thats the beauty of it. It can be whatever. Maybe when the Combine first attacked the world was in civil disorder. Maybe several countries fought over what to do when they came. Nobody knows what happened so it really is impossible to say whether it is a good idea to make an RTS out of that time.

Maybe in Ep3 the Humans have tanks. Maybe in another city the humans have tanks. This is a good way to explain what is happening in north america or in asia.

Freakout456:
I was playing through Half life 2 today out of boredom when I suddenly realized how easily it could be turned into a RTS like Halo is. Does anyone else besides me notice this or am I just crazy or a genius.

Funny, story, Halo was originally developed as an RTS, hence this Halo Wars thing. Makes sense. Half Life RTS? No. Silly. Foolish child. That would just destroy all the elements that made it great- the suspense, the drama, great enemy AI. I don't see how you could possibly make it work either.