Reading through many HL2 mod overviews makes me angry.
Lines like, you are Jack Squarehead
You are Jason Bourneagain
A resistance fighter called Peter Sutcliffe
God it makes me angry... people building these mods don't seem to realise that when you boot any first person shooter mod you are only one person. The player.
Gordon Freeman is a plot device but he doesn't really matter. When Alyx says "good job Gordon" the Gordon part is irrelivant. It's the player she's congratulating.
Mod makers try so desperately to make their mod fit into the HL2 canon. I don't see why it has to.
They could probably come up with a much more compelling story if they simply walked away from the canon and did something else entirely.
I guess it's due to Opposing Force and Blue Shift that people follow the idea of a secondary adventure running along side the original. I often think these kinds of projects are too ambitious to be completed anyway, and be completely original anyway.
I think its important to develop a character you can relate to or at very least feel empathy for. If you played a faceless, nameless character, then it detracts from the experience.
For instance, a ship's cook thrust into the middle of a war can make the things he does pretty epic, being he is not a trained military commando. In my own Mod, the forst couple maps develop the character whose perspective you are playing from. It turns the game/mod into a sort of interactive story IMO.