@@krowta2062 no, nothing to do is far worse You have nothing, absolutely nothing to pass the time. You stand around all day, watching the Combine drain your home of everything, you can't do anything
@@antondavidovic3996 In the Beta you can see lots of workplaces. Children in the Cremator factory, people working in the Stenographer's Chasm, an APC repair garage, etc
@@mrplaygames2000 The joke went over your head. Also, Combine Soldiers weren't transhuman in beta, they were just guys in advanced armor who were slightly brainwashed.
@@leandroingrassia The retail is very consumer-friendly, but from an artistic point of view horrible. It is neither a cohesive experience, nor a faithful continuation of the first Half-Life game.
I don't get where your coming from because half life 2 is quite dark and Desolate as it is. You have a very drab and dreary world lacking in color and on chapters like the highway there's almost no music or npcs just the, wind ,burned corpses, enemies and you. the entire raven holm chapter is horror centered with headcrab zombies that are constantly screaming in agony. you have combine stalkers with their contorted forms and in episode 1 you have that stalker train sequence. you also have the gman sighting's for a healthy dose of parnoia. the music itself seems to be horror focused in a lot sections too.
@@leandroingrassia Nova prospekt is scary, until you realize that all of the prison guards have been wiped out by Antlions because of the bait in your inventory.
You can get them by searching "combine overwiki viktor antonov" clicking first result and going to the bottom of it. They are digital paintings that Antonov (art director of hl2) did in the early stages of the game's development. The majority of this locations did not appear in the final game or at least not in the way depicted.
@@olzhas1one755 Maybe they thought they'd lose some of their audience due to the game being much much scarier than the first; or they didn't want to release what was already leaked in 2003
@@sabianmateinnit First of all, the leak had nothing to do with the radical change. All of this stuff are leftovers from 1999-2002 still lingering in the files, by 2003 it was basically only a slightly darker version of retail in terms of what they were intending the design to be. Also, I think people forget how damn dark Half-Life 1 really was, this early HL2 stuff is only slightly darker than the game it's a sequel to.
@@olzhas1one755 Because it would've been too hard to put into a game, and the fact that it was so dark would affect the gameplay. The retail HL2 we got is much less cluttered and more geometric. At least, that's what I think made valve change the game so much.
Since half life is confirmed to be about multiple universes/transuniversal stuff, what if they rework the entire HL2 beta and release it as a spin-off and say it’s an alternate universe/parallel timeline (without being canon)
1:25 really gives me the feels of the original half life's nihalanth's sounds, then after that it sounds like the hecu grunts. I reckon hl2 beta would have captured the horror of the combine invasion alot more imo
I love the urban concept art here. It looks a lot more developed and industrial than the smaller bits and pieces they added onto the original buildings in the final.
Half life beta to me makes the combine a far greater threat than retail, because the air is polluted and every centimeter of the city is under control of the combine (instead of outskirts and forgotten places bieng for refugees) and the fact that you can not survive outside the city, and the child labor and so on... The combine we got were less of a threat, a great threat which you have chance to fight but nothing compared to the beta's, you wouldn't stand a chance against them. I feel like the beta version is as if Gordon freeman came 40 years after the takeover of earth instead of 20.
I think that was a big problem with Half-Life 2 as it was released, was that there's absolutely no hope of success. This version of the Combine seems more immediately worse, but more local, and thus a threat you have a chance of stopping. Release Half-Life 2's Combine are inter-dimensional and inter-universal, so unfathomably large already that not only are they a hopelessly unstoppable threat, but it makes sense that they would pay very little attention to Earth since it's basically a grain of sand in a planet-sized desert.
@@causticconsole They have a Dyson sphere and they are invincible, but all their troops on the ground were defeated by the homeless, who for the first time took guns in their hands, and all this happened in just a week. It looks as stupid as possible.
@@sasaider3711 Do you realize how many civilians joined the Civil Protection? Like the Conscripts in the beta, when the uprising started many of those who volunteered or/and worked undercover for the CP (like Barney) they turned on the Combine. You can see this by checking the rebels armors which are derivated from the metrocops suits. And because (as metrocops) the Combine provided them resources such as weapons, food and ammo so they were advantaged enough to turn against them.
I don't think people who say the combine seems worse in the beta than retail even understand the story of Half Life 2. In Half life 2, the world's resources are being drained, no more children are being born which means that overtime the human race will become extinct, and the combine still patrol the outskirts of cities and is under their control, in Highway 17 we can literally see houses that were raided by the combine. Sure, HL2 isn't as on the nose as the beta but that is a good thing. I will say that I am disappointed we never went to places like the borealis in the retail version but I MUCH prefer the subtle darkness of retail rather than beta's super on the nose approach to everything
I'm not exaggerating by saying that HL2 Beta would give Silent Hill a run for its money, actually I'd say most of these sounds are spookier. Damn, the atmosphere is dark and creepy as it gets, most of these sounds make me extremely uneasy, I would love to see the final game with this vibe.
Sounds reused or unused in the files in retail HL2: 0:04 city_siren_loop2 (used during the uprising i think but i'm not sure) 0:35 marching (sampled for metrocop gear rustling and i think used during the uprising) 1:07 skylift_move (used for the citadel pods moving) 1:42 and 1:51 thunder1 and 2 (not sure if its used in the normal game but its in the files and used in a lot of custom maps) 2:44 train_station_loop A.K.A. industrial_suspense2 (used as ambient music in the canals i think) 4:29 and 4:35 wind_moan2 and 4 (used in ravenholm)
thunder 1 and 2 also are heard in a lot of custom counter strike 1.6 and cs source maps that have heavy rain. also i remember hearing city siren loop2 at some point in one of the tunnel type roads in retail hl2, not sure which one tho.
It's a really metallic sound, you can hear it (in 2002 builds of Terminal plaza) if you stay near the train station entrance for a few seconds. Might be the distorted sound of a train arriving or departing.
You can listen it, with context, in the video "half-life 2 beta: e3_terminal" by user: HL2 Project Beta (min. 1:50). Recomend that channel a lot, specially their long videos. Almost everything i learned about the beta was from them.
As much as i wish that the beta had been released, i think the retail hl2 might be better. This feels more like a s.t.a.l.k.e.r. Game than a half life one. HL2 has a very nostalgic feeling to it, and keeps me coming back often, but I’m not sure if the same would have been said for this version. Plus, who knows what the actual quality of the game would have been. What makes the beta seem like such a better game is that we fill in the blanks with the stuff we want and think of.
i wish we had gotten this half life. dont get me wrong, half life 2 is good, but this kind of dark and gloomy atmosphere is what makes a game in my eyes.
0:35 There is a version of this in the game files but it sounds like it's coming from far away. It's in the streetwar directory in the ambient level sounds, which are ambient sounds for the City 17 battle. I'm not sure if it is used.
The number stationey audio is kinda interesting. My headcannon is its how the rebels communicated, as they seemed to be a bit more subdued in the beta, mainly hiding out in kraken base and having the double agent conscripts as its military. Alot of this beta stuff is great, i love the industrial dystopian vibe it has.
I would’ve loved all of this in the final game, visiting the air exchange, wandering through the wasteland, the story was so much more intriguing in the beta
I agree, would've been cool af to go to those places. I still prefer the retail though just because beta was so on the nose about how dark it is. In retail, you have to actually think and look to understand how dark the combine really are
I don't know if I'm the only one picking this vibe up but, the beta had a more fallout-ish vibe to it for me, perhaps more or so the beta had a more dilapidated, mossy, and drafty vibe to it. it also uses the colors metal tan, faded yellow, and dark green a lot.
I wonder why they made the final game less dark, maybe the dark theme felt like it was overkill/cliche? I don't know how to describe it. I feel like the final version was a more "realistic" dystopia in that it wasn't overly gloomy, etc.
They made the final game less dark as it differentiated too much from Half Life 1, they had to add simularities to Half Life 1 to keep it from basically being an entirely different game.
@@kabeam5643 Retail is radically different to HL1 anyway. Headcrabs/zombies, Vorts, Kleiner (in beta), Gman (in beta), Eli and Barney are all that connect it. Virtually everything else is gone.
The way hl2 was back in beta felt perfect to get you on edge to the point where you want to quit even though nothing happend, the 8 o clock xen like multicolored lighting, the ginormous combine machinery, the generators and large beams, the deep dark halls underground, the random alien like ambience, this game had it all
I personally think that its setting was going for a bit of a retro-futuristic 40s/50s style. Art deco architecture, brick and iron chicago style architecture, retro hand painted american posters and ads, skybridges linking buildings at high altitudes (i think inspired by Metropolis 1927 or the mega-cities of artist Hugh Ferriss), etc. They were going for a retro look, in my opinion, maybe a bit inspired by the movie Brazil 1985, with that vintage but ambiguous opressive dark world.
The original aesthetics were clearly very Orwellian with a bit of Randian thrown in. Later on, they began to diverge into their own style (more like Philip K. Dick or Arthur C. Clarke but still largely unique), which I think was for the better.
Many mods have tried to make HL2 Beta to become a thing. I don't disregard what the community has made with the content that exist but what if Valve actually managed to get this out as an actual game? Imagine how great of a masterpiece could have turned out.
I like to think that the beta cites actually exists, and the reason why city 17 doesn’t not look like the other cities is because it’s where dr breen lives in.
2:11 This is ment to be a Half-Life game, ladies and gentlemen. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if this sound (plus the others in the video) came from the 2001 Beta, as it's COMPLETELY different (and much more sinister and eerie) from the other Betas.
i don't know why... but Half life 2 beta kind of feels nostalgic to me,it looks like... i was there,the skyboxes also looks like the normal day in Gorno-Altaisk (Russian city)
Hello. I don’t have much to say but I wanted to leave a comment, as I’ve always found the beta version of HL2 incredibly interesting. I know they scrapped it due to negative play-testing reviews, but dystopias like this have kinda been my niche. The most simple way I can put into words as to why I like the beta so much would probably be, ‘Being able to play 1984 is pretty cool.’ If the concept art and sound files can unnerve me, I would love to know what a whole game like that would do. You really feel the oppressive atmosphere of the Combine through them. In a beta version of ‘Point Insertion’, I like to imagine Gordon on one of those Combine bullet-trains at 1:11.
Damn ! Some of the soundtracks remind me of Sad Satan : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jeJlgkzBfY4.html Specially the "Swedish number station". Someone is reviving the Beta right ?
What this game could've been fascinates me so much it is unbelievable. To me; this is by far one of the most interesting unused concepts for media as a whole, at least in my opinion. I can't explain it, but maybe if I get into the game development field I can put my vision (or valve's) as it's own rendition somehow
Gordon was imprisoned for 10 years in the beta and it gives me an impression that after 10 years of the Black-mesa incent The world was like the beta, but half-life: alyx is 15 years later and break my theory
Well, the early stages of the beta took place in an american style city resembling Washington DC and New York. Maybe USA situation is different to the one in the eastearn european city of retail... we dont know much about the world outside City 17.
When Valve finishes HL3 they should give us Half-Life 2 Beta (call it a fancy new name) and just rewrite the story from that point giving us a new storyline and this half life 2 beta atmosphere.
2:44 For fucks sake I had nightmares because of this damn sound because someone decided to add it into the LEGO Marvel Super Heroes setup. I was so happy I instantly booted the CD and what do I hear? Some fucked up shit. Also it included some HL2 sounds for buttons.
