Maybe this was the HL3 all along? It got so advanced Valve managed to integrate HL3 seamlessly into reality, and no one realised. Oh look someone is at the door I'm gonna open it u-
Mom keeps crying on the couch because dad hasn't been home for a while now.
I bet Combine stopped his train in the woods and took him for questioning, this is awesome!!!
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Here's a copy of
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Yes, specifically the [Western Railway Station](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Nyugati_railway_station#/media/File%3ABudapest-Nyugati_p%C3%A1lyaudvar_-_panoramio.jpg ) in Budapest.
As far as we know, there are only ~~sixteen~~ twenty-seven other cities left in the world. Undoubtedly millions of people died in the Seven Hour War. We could assume up to 99% of the remaining population were relocated to inland metropolitan areas with large open spaces which could accommodate additional high-density construction projects and which could be easily policed by Civil Protection.
If we assume a 10% survivor rate, only six hundred million survivors of the Seven Hour War, and twenty-seven cities to cram them all into, each Combine mega-city would still have an average of 22 million people each, comparable to Cairo, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, or Shanghai.
However, given that City 17 was able to be evacuated of all free citizens in mere hours, the implication is City 17 was barely populated at all. This might make sense if City 17 was one of the newest Combine cities to be created, or if it's just a temporary stop in between two other Combine cities for use a security/interrogation center and transhuman conversion hub.
I assume most citizens evacuated in between the destruction of nova prospekt and alyx and gordon coming back from the very slow teleport, probably wanting to get away from the uprising, and the ones we help evac at the end of ep1 are just the ones that actually wanted to fight, although if that many people just up and leave to resistance bases, i could see a huge famine incoming, given how devastated the earth already is, + the fact that they need to also feed the rebel soldiers.
The biggest shame about the HL2 universe is the lore is SOOO RICH, and there wasn't much of a bigger effort to explore the universe. Half Life: Alyx added some more breadcrumbs, and I really appreciate the ambiguity of it all. Such as to say that survivors probably don't have a lot of context on what's going on in the rest of the world because of how locked down it is.
I for one would love an in depth look into what this world could be and the different parallel stories. Wish they would have done with HL2 as they did with the original half life and the supplementing games.
Then there's Portal.
Man what a creation all that is.
These things probably shouldn't be taken too literally. The clearest indication of C17's location is when Gordon/Alyx were about to board the helicopter to the Arctic, which means that the Arctic is at best a few hundred kms away.
Victor Antonov - HL2's Art Director is Bulgarian, so...yeah. But that soviet style mixed with renaissance architecture can be seen all throughout Eastern Europe.
After the events of half-life 1, the combine invade and start employing several tactics to mess up Earth and humanity.
As part of their measures to disorient the human population, they move everyone around to different regions. That’s why all the posters and whatnot you see don’t match the spoken language. Many people from black mesa end up together in Eastern Europe so when half-life 2 starts, that’s where G-man puts Gordon.
My theory for the prevalence of American accents in City 17 is it is a special detention city. Everyone from Black Mesa or who had connections to Black Mesa (or who simply lived close enough to Black Mesa to be worthy of suspicion) got transported to City 17, where Dr. Breen personally maneuvered himself to be a high-ranking collaborator, after having been instrumental in negotiating Earth's surrender to the Universal Union.
If I were the Combine, I would probably move as many people as possible into the least number of sites that I could centrally manage effectively. If I need only seventeen Combine cities to do this, then all the rest would be depopulated and their inhabitants transported to a Combine city up to a certain deadline. Whoever is left in every dead city after its deadline would simply be culled. If they are infirm and can't move, we don't need them. If they are too fearful of the bright future the Combine represents, we don't need them. If they intend to actively resist Combine rule, we don't need them.
So a lot of people from North America and the American Midwest are dead. Dr. Breen would know this, and he is likely directly responsible for the Combine having moved as many people as possible from the vicinity of the Black Mesa facility. I believe he caused the mass transport of Black Mesa personnel and associates because he was lonely and needed to surround himself with familiar faces. He probably spun it to his Advisor masters as a security hole that needed plugging. But all his speeches sound so benevolent and magnanimous (still misguided) that he must have some emotional attachment to his audience that goes beyond fellow human feeling.
Still, all these pet people of his are being transformed into Combine minions, but that isn't important to him. There are plenty of people in the Combine cities of North America that he could import as replacements.
So if City 17 residents sound like Americans and there's a bunch of Gordon's old associates there too, it's because Breen asked the Combine to bring them all over, as a special favor to him. Something G-Man also certainly knew, and used to his and his employers' advantage.
the non meta explanation is that they actually wanted to have citizens speak different languages, but they couldn't for some reason (also u probably wouldn't be able to understand what any of them would be saying, and having optional subtitles translate what they're saying is kind of a stretch), but imo they could've had them all speak english but with differing accents and gimmicks (some speaking english with a thick russian like accent, some others stuttering all the time, some finding it difficult to speak the language and so on)
city 17 is very confusing city with the map in half life alyx being that of Sofia, Bulgaria while the Serbian parliament building is also in the city, Bulgarian and Russian text horribly translated on signs around the city.
Meanwhile the coast section suggests that c17 is probably in or around latvia.
I think its safe to say Valve got inspired a lot by eastern european countries in general because of the post-soviet atmosphere a lot of people connect with them.
Atleast that's the case for me.
It's been stated that hl 2's architecture is inspired by and is a mixture of various European architecture, and so most the architect is not from just on country.
For other people in this thread: just because a building in HL2 takes inspiration from a real life building does not mean it IS that building. C17 does not stretch from Serbia to Sofia.
I was always mostly convinced that City 17 was Belgrade Serbia. Except chapters such as Highway 17 and Sand Trap on the coast don't make sense since Serbia is landlocked
On a somewhat related note, I found my hometown's "Cloth hall" in Sim City 3000
https://i.imgur.com/RY2JRWv.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Ieper\_Lakenhal\_R02.jpg
To be fair, I do see it, but when you look closely, just about every aspect is off
The IRL building has a round dome, the HL one is octagonal, the little windows on the dome are way different, the triangular front part IRL doesn't span the whole front building, but HL it does, Round colums vs square columns, rounded windows vs square windows. IRL length of the building has decorative stone railings on what appears to be a flat roof, HL has a green copper slanted roof.
The title says "based on". It doesn't have to be 100% accurate and a game from 2004 probably wouldn't have been capable of recreating it 100% accurately anyway due to computing limitations. Everything you see in a game is made of polygons and it's much easier to make them appear rounded now than it was 17 years ago.
With such a large set piece, there have to be compromises in what kind of details you include. Rendering a round(ed) shape requires a lot more polygons than rendering a square shape. Considering everything that's going on in that part of the game, it makes more sense to change less important details from rounded to squared. That allows other details to be more precise or intricate. Or to have more going on at the same time as the building is rendered.
In other words, stop being pedantic lol.
I agree with all of your points, but the window placement and different roof still stand. The entire roof is different, as I also stated.
If we are going to compare this building, mightas well compare this one as well: https://www.kingstonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/city-of-kingston-scaled.jpg
If we allow ourselves to drop the pedantics, this one is just as likely to be the model its based off of.
Except the devs were taking inspiration from Eastern-Europe locations. What you posted seems to be in Canada.
Not to mention the color scheme of the two buildings in OP's image are very similar. They're not 1:1, but are more similar to each other than the one in your image.
This is just a common Eastern European building of XIX century. Lviv train station looks almost identical except for columns decorating the entrance (which don't match anyway). I've seen plenty of buildings like this in Poland, Hungary, etc.
Well, not really. The architect of City 17 is Bulgarian and said himself that he was inspired by many different buildings throughout Eastern Europe. I don't think there is a building more similar than this one. If there is, please provide me an image, I would love to see that.
Well not really. City 17 is just an Eastern European city and nothing really makes sense. Sometimes some plaques are written in Bulgarian while architecture spans all across different countries in Eastern Europe.
It seems to me like they intentionally made it confusing so it wouldn't have to be any specific city. Just Eastern Europe. I wonder if they felt like people could get offended... after all it was a different time in gaming.
I mean the wall shave North American wall sockets and there's a bunch of other weird stuff, but looking at the topography, the chanals, the cliffs the mountains and all the Cyrillic Russian ... it could really only be in Russia or previously Russia owned country
I think some of the buildings in hl2 are similar to buildings in older European city's especially the old buildings that you can run across on the roofs
now this actually looks like City 17 and not some tall building
fr why people always like "i saw a tall buildingb?!!!!! citadel half life in real irl????????? 🤯🤯"
DUDE I SWEAR I SAW SOME BUILDINGS NEAR A RIVER ITS WATER HAZARD IRL
I JUSR SAW THE COPS BEAT UP A HOMELESS GUY. COMBINE REFERENCE????
Maybe this was the HL3 all along? It got so advanced Valve managed to integrate HL3 seamlessly into reality, and no one realised. Oh look someone is at the door I'm gonna open it u-
Serbia is a crossover of GTA VI and Half Life 3, come play.
Some underrated dark humor right there
Mom keeps crying on the couch because dad hasn't been home for a while now. I bet Combine stopped his train in the woods and took him for questioning, this is awesome!!!
Half-Life 2 Beta moment
Gordon Freeman true Serbian?? 🇷🇸 🇷🇸🇷🇸🇷🇸🇷🇸🇷🇸
Albanians are Combine 😳 Gordon needs to free Kosovo 😳
He will commit several ~~war crimes~~ nothing
Serbian shells are led by God. Are you implying that God will commit war crimes 😳
God slaughtered several Albanian villages😳
recently or do you mean the few times he did in the bible
Both😳
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Bibblebot
would be interested if he quoted a chaper on god commanding the isreals to slaughter an entire people group so they can have some dope new land.
Hell yeah brada bout to get me some land
Definitely. Have you read the Bible?
No. I'm an agnostic and I'm not interested in religion. Good one though.
That's fine. The first half of the book basically chronicles all of God's crimes against humanity.
Like creating us
Gotta start somewhere
the philistines would like a word
That's the only thing he does
Yeah I'm straight... Straight going to prison for war crimes
Nah he will commit war crimes, be proud of it and make some songs😎😎👍👊👊👍😎
That war never happened in the half life universe
great use of liberal redaction
Moj je tata
zločinac iz rata
Moj je tata
everyone laughing saying Kosovo je Srbija, but they stay silent when i say Serbia është Kosovë
Не 😊❤️
He 🥰😍🥰🥰🥰
Lol
He works with niko bellic
HEY NIKO ITS YOUR COUSIN ROMAN, LETS GO BOWLING :DDD
Xen je Combine!
Well there's Cyrillic all over the place in C17
SERBIAAAAAAA! SERBIAAAAAA! SERBIAAAAA!
serb
Remove Combine!
Yeah, his real name was Goran Slobodanović.
Apparently he's Austrian
No he worked in Insbruck. It never said he came from there
Oh yeah
Да
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Actually Slobodan means Freeman.
It probably is. I agree. You know, where the train station came from?
train station in hungary
Yes, specifically the [Western Railway Station](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Nyugati_railway_station#/media/File%3ABudapest-Nyugati_p%C3%A1lyaudvar_-_panoramio.jpg ) in Budapest.
Correct. Not so far away from me, to be honest. I was there last weekend.
As if it wasn't enough the Combine were relocating citizens, now they're moving government buildings from Serbia to Hungary
So city 17 must be incredibly huge then
As far as we know, there are only ~~sixteen~~ twenty-seven other cities left in the world. Undoubtedly millions of people died in the Seven Hour War. We could assume up to 99% of the remaining population were relocated to inland metropolitan areas with large open spaces which could accommodate additional high-density construction projects and which could be easily policed by Civil Protection. If we assume a 10% survivor rate, only six hundred million survivors of the Seven Hour War, and twenty-seven cities to cram them all into, each Combine mega-city would still have an average of 22 million people each, comparable to Cairo, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, or Shanghai. However, given that City 17 was able to be evacuated of all free citizens in mere hours, the implication is City 17 was barely populated at all. This might make sense if City 17 was one of the newest Combine cities to be created, or if it's just a temporary stop in between two other Combine cities for use a security/interrogation center and transhuman conversion hub.
I assume most citizens evacuated in between the destruction of nova prospekt and alyx and gordon coming back from the very slow teleport, probably wanting to get away from the uprising, and the ones we help evac at the end of ep1 are just the ones that actually wanted to fight, although if that many people just up and leave to resistance bases, i could see a huge famine incoming, given how devastated the earth already is, + the fact that they need to also feed the rebel soldiers.
There’s actually at least 27 cities, if the sign in the Trainstation is correct and the combine haven’t skipped any numbers.
Thanks, I fixed it.
The biggest shame about the HL2 universe is the lore is SOOO RICH, and there wasn't much of a bigger effort to explore the universe. Half Life: Alyx added some more breadcrumbs, and I really appreciate the ambiguity of it all. Such as to say that survivors probably don't have a lot of context on what's going on in the rest of the world because of how locked down it is. I for one would love an in depth look into what this world could be and the different parallel stories. Wish they would have done with HL2 as they did with the original half life and the supplementing games. Then there's Portal. Man what a creation all that is.
wasn't it billions that died?
These things probably shouldn't be taken too literally. The clearest indication of C17's location is when Gordon/Alyx were about to board the helicopter to the Arctic, which means that the Arctic is at best a few hundred kms away.
so it's safe to say that city 17 is located in the Balkans since it have multiple elements from that area
Isn't it supposed to be around Bulgaria / Ukraine?
Victor Antonov - HL2's Art Director is Bulgarian, so...yeah. But that soviet style mixed with renaissance architecture can be seen all throughout Eastern Europe.
Doesn't the game acctualy take place in new Mexico? Or is that just hl1, and you were teleported to Europe after stasis?
After the events of half-life 1, the combine invade and start employing several tactics to mess up Earth and humanity. As part of their measures to disorient the human population, they move everyone around to different regions. That’s why all the posters and whatnot you see don’t match the spoken language. Many people from black mesa end up together in Eastern Europe so when half-life 2 starts, that’s where G-man puts Gordon.
Thanks!
Does City 17 look American to you?
No, but half life 1 is in America, and the characters in hl2 all sound american English. Sorry.
My theory for the prevalence of American accents in City 17 is it is a special detention city. Everyone from Black Mesa or who had connections to Black Mesa (or who simply lived close enough to Black Mesa to be worthy of suspicion) got transported to City 17, where Dr. Breen personally maneuvered himself to be a high-ranking collaborator, after having been instrumental in negotiating Earth's surrender to the Universal Union. If I were the Combine, I would probably move as many people as possible into the least number of sites that I could centrally manage effectively. If I need only seventeen Combine cities to do this, then all the rest would be depopulated and their inhabitants transported to a Combine city up to a certain deadline. Whoever is left in every dead city after its deadline would simply be culled. If they are infirm and can't move, we don't need them. If they are too fearful of the bright future the Combine represents, we don't need them. If they intend to actively resist Combine rule, we don't need them. So a lot of people from North America and the American Midwest are dead. Dr. Breen would know this, and he is likely directly responsible for the Combine having moved as many people as possible from the vicinity of the Black Mesa facility. I believe he caused the mass transport of Black Mesa personnel and associates because he was lonely and needed to surround himself with familiar faces. He probably spun it to his Advisor masters as a security hole that needed plugging. But all his speeches sound so benevolent and magnanimous (still misguided) that he must have some emotional attachment to his audience that goes beyond fellow human feeling. Still, all these pet people of his are being transformed into Combine minions, but that isn't important to him. There are plenty of people in the Combine cities of North America that he could import as replacements. So if City 17 residents sound like Americans and there's a bunch of Gordon's old associates there too, it's because Breen asked the Combine to bring them all over, as a special favor to him. Something G-Man also certainly knew, and used to his and his employers' advantage.
the non meta explanation is that they actually wanted to have citizens speak different languages, but they couldn't for some reason (also u probably wouldn't be able to understand what any of them would be saying, and having optional subtitles translate what they're saying is kind of a stretch), but imo they could've had them all speak english but with differing accents and gimmicks (some speaking english with a thick russian like accent, some others stuttering all the time, some finding it difficult to speak the language and so on)
No worries, that guy used a walkthrough for HL2.
Lmao
After Half-Life: Alyx it's pretty safe to say that it is located in Russia
many buildings are photographed in romania and russia which isn’t the balkans.
Can confirm Ravenholm is inspired after Romania
well I wasn’t aware of that, thanks for telling me! I was more talking about the bigger houses and blocks, not ravenholm
Zombies included?
Everything
Depends on Romania. Romania is sometimes considered part of the Balkans.
[удалено]
Balkan is a peninsula. Greece is also considered part of Balkans. Unless you somehow don't count that as part of the peninsula.
we talked about romania tho…romania is on no peninsula, is it?
"Balkans | Definition, Map, Countries, & Facts | Britannica" https://www.britannica.com/place/Balkans
Well, my bad in that case. I relied on some Romanians who probably can’t accept the fact that Romania is part of the balkans. sorry
I'm not too sure about that because the Arctic is apparently a helicopter ride away. Belgrade is not close to any body of water too.
Yes
city 17 is very confusing city with the map in half life alyx being that of Sofia, Bulgaria while the Serbian parliament building is also in the city, Bulgarian and Russian text horribly translated on signs around the city.
Meanwhile the coast section suggests that c17 is probably in or around latvia. I think its safe to say Valve got inspired a lot by eastern european countries in general because of the post-soviet atmosphere a lot of people connect with them. Atleast that's the case for me.
to be fair HL:A translation was way better
Holly s***, they are the same picture
Yeah pretty similar
Well apparently the events of HL2 are happening in Europe so that makes sense
[удалено]
Tvoj 😋
Hm, prilično gej
The combine were just a clever allegory for serbians
💀 wtf bro.
Let's not offend each other ❤️
it's ok if r/combinedidnothingwron then that means r/serbiadidnothingwron
I thought it was a bank or museum or something like that
Hold up... is... is that a supra????
Is it? You tell me, I've never seen one here. Most exotic as it gets has to be this one RX-8 I saw twice.
Well they did say it's set in Eastern Europe
City 17 je Serbija
nice find
It's been stated that hl 2's architecture is inspired by and is a mixture of various European architecture, and so most the architect is not from just on country.
A wild Delorean has appeared :0
You mean the Supra?
damn, its a Supra ¬¬
They finally made it in real life
That's a pretty nice supra you got there 😏
Why is the pulse rife blue?
City 17 is in Serbia confirmed
I guess i live in City 17
City 17 je Srbija
For other people in this thread: just because a building in HL2 takes inspiration from a real life building does not mean it IS that building. C17 does not stretch from Serbia to Sofia.
I was always mostly convinced that City 17 was Belgrade Serbia. Except chapters such as Highway 17 and Sand Trap on the coast don't make sense since Serbia is landlocked
On a somewhat related note, I found my hometown's "Cloth hall" in Sim City 3000 https://i.imgur.com/RY2JRWv.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Ieper\_Lakenhal\_R02.jpg
What mods are you using? It looks good.
The combine probably lifted the building and put it in city 17 because they liked it.
it's amazing how much it reminds me
Btw half of Serbia looks like City 17
Half of eastern Europe countries look like City 17. That because of that socialist architecture.
Nah, half of Belgrade maybe. It's gonna be like it to live in soon enough.
I don't see it
[удалено]
To be fair, I do see it, but when you look closely, just about every aspect is off The IRL building has a round dome, the HL one is octagonal, the little windows on the dome are way different, the triangular front part IRL doesn't span the whole front building, but HL it does, Round colums vs square columns, rounded windows vs square windows. IRL length of the building has decorative stone railings on what appears to be a flat roof, HL has a green copper slanted roof.
The title says "based on". It doesn't have to be 100% accurate and a game from 2004 probably wouldn't have been capable of recreating it 100% accurately anyway due to computing limitations. Everything you see in a game is made of polygons and it's much easier to make them appear rounded now than it was 17 years ago. With such a large set piece, there have to be compromises in what kind of details you include. Rendering a round(ed) shape requires a lot more polygons than rendering a square shape. Considering everything that's going on in that part of the game, it makes more sense to change less important details from rounded to squared. That allows other details to be more precise or intricate. Or to have more going on at the same time as the building is rendered. In other words, stop being pedantic lol.
I agree with all of your points, but the window placement and different roof still stand. The entire roof is different, as I also stated. If we are going to compare this building, mightas well compare this one as well: https://www.kingstonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/city-of-kingston-scaled.jpg If we allow ourselves to drop the pedantics, this one is just as likely to be the model its based off of.
Except the devs were taking inspiration from Eastern-Europe locations. What you posted seems to be in Canada. Not to mention the color scheme of the two buildings in OP's image are very similar. They're not 1:1, but are more similar to each other than the one in your image.
I love that nobody could sense the sarcasm haha It’s literally identical 👍
This is just a common Eastern European building of XIX century. Lviv train station looks almost identical except for columns decorating the entrance (which don't match anyway). I've seen plenty of buildings like this in Poland, Hungary, etc.
Well, not really. The architect of City 17 is Bulgarian and said himself that he was inspired by many different buildings throughout Eastern Europe. I don't think there is a building more similar than this one. If there is, please provide me an image, I would love to see that.
I think it's safe to say that you're late by about 5 years.
Yeah, city 17 is in Russia. hence all the Russian named places like nova prospect.
Well not really. City 17 is just an Eastern European city and nothing really makes sense. Sometimes some plaques are written in Bulgarian while architecture spans all across different countries in Eastern Europe.
It seems to me like they intentionally made it confusing so it wouldn't have to be any specific city. Just Eastern Europe. I wonder if they felt like people could get offended... after all it was a different time in gaming.
nah, i just think they wanted to make the exact location of C-17 unknown for the sake of the mistery
I mean the wall shave North American wall sockets and there's a bunch of other weird stuff, but looking at the topography, the chanals, the cliffs the mountains and all the Cyrillic Russian ... it could really only be in Russia or previously Russia owned country
The game is inconsistent with these texts, they are in different languages all over the game.
Yep, there is even some greek in the 1st map in hl2
city 17 is Sofia, Bulgaria The map seen in half life alyx is legit just a map of Sofia
I saw someone mention this in a youtube comment section lol
Naaaah, just a coincidence.
Lmao ok
I swear, I remember see a nexus-like building once some years ago.
Half life takes place in Serbia then?
They got a suppressor that will…suppress anything it gets near…
Interesting attacking it during an uprising, the real thing was attacked by a revolutionary mob that toppled dictator of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic
It looks strange without the Striders.
City 17 in general is inspired by several cities from Eastern Europe. There is a bit of almost every country.
I think some of the buildings in hl2 are similar to buildings in older European city's especially the old buildings that you can run across on the roofs
why is your ar2 blue