Half-Life 3 may never be released by Valve but former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw has posted some fan fiction that he is calling Epistle 3 that wraps things up. It's a short and very touching story of Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance after the events of Half-Life Episode 2. Does it wrap up the story? Yep. Does it feel like a genuinely epic and proper ending to Half-Life 3? Absolutely. Does it answer every question and tie up every loose end? Nope.
Marc's site is getting crushed right now so check out a GitHub version below. Marc's version changed names and gender swapped the characters and this version fixes that:
https://github.com/Jackathan/MarcLaidlaw-Epistle3/blob/master/Epistle3_Corrected.md
Original story will be available when the Internet stops killing his website:
http://marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/
Marc is talking on Twitter about why he wrote this and answering some questions about the G-Man specifically:
https://mobile.twitter.com/marc_laidlaw/status/900980779802439680
Reading Marc's story now a couple times through really gave me closure and the way he writes is so immersive it made me feel like I was back playing the game. Even if Valve never gets around to releasing Episode 3 this was the closure I needed.
Marc's site is getting crushed right now so check out a GitHub version below. Marc's version changed names and gender swapped the characters and this version fixes that:
https://github.com/Jackathan/MarcLaidlaw-Epistle3/blob/master/Epistle3_Corrected.md
Original story will be available when the Internet stops killing his website:
http://marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/
Marc is talking on Twitter about why he wrote this and answering some questions about the G-Man specifically:
https://mobile.twitter.com/marc_laidlaw/status/900980779802439680
Reading Marc's story now a couple times through really gave me closure and the way he writes is so immersive it made me feel like I was back playing the game. Even if Valve never gets around to releasing Episode 3 this was the closure I needed.
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Wow that's very well written. I am happy to have some closure on the story but that just makes me want more.
I'd read a novel or a comic series that explains things more in-depth.
And if there's another game and this text is taken as backstory, perhaps because of that one event in the text (don't want to spoil it for people who read comments before reading the article), we could have a different protagonist.
It's also worth noting, dear readers, that the pastebin is way easier to read than the official one on his site. To get around infringing on Valve's IP, he changed the names of everyone. Someone was kind enough to fix those in the pastebin
I don't know. That was pretty weak sauce. A few paragraphs of roughly written non-canonical events. I didn't understand the pronoun juggling of the Breen-grub. The whole "story" feels like listening to a friend spoil the latest episode of *insert fav show*, only giving certain highlights. Any dramatic effect falls flat. I don't really understand why this was written.
The grub was probably biologically female but had Breen's consciousness, that's what I assumed anyway.
But it's certainly not a fleshed out story.
I had only read the pastebin version. Apparently, whoever did the translation to pastebin did a sloppy job. Regarding the Breen-grub, they were all supposed to transfer over as the same pronoun. Also, another thing that threw me was the reference to Episode 2 as a "game." This is another change from the original that was entirely unnecessary, and I thought was a weird attempt to break the 4th wall. Recommend reading both versions, as hard as the original is to follow, what with the naming conventions.
Wow yeah you're right. Those are some odd choices.
Updated my post so h this version, which corrects the names MUCH better than the pastebin version:
https://github.com/Jackathan/MarcLaidlaw-Epistle3/blob/master/Epistle3_Corrected.md