Raising the Bar is a mod based off of the idea of amalgamating the earliest concepts of Half-Life 2 into a coherent story. This mod is not a leak-fix, nor is it a concept art recreation gallery; it will be a full story with inspiration from the old material as well as our own ideas of how to make it all fit together.
Wasteland Concept
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Description
While Cvox showed off his own version of the Wastes, ZitaX has a concept of another version of the landscape that will be present later on. As you can see, the Depot is located out in the wastes far away from the coastline, where the terrain is much more hilly and shows the deep ruts left from the ocean that once was.
I wish I could make concept that nice
This is really, really gorgeous concept art! Really nails the atmosphere of the beta too. Great work!
Um.....WOW
Hot, 11/10 ign.
Damn that looks good.
That looks really Beta-like! Makes me think of Orvell and Lem too :)
BTW, nice to see an update :3
*Orwell
Stunning *.*
Beautiful
Amazing!
This gave me quite the insecure boner while in school
I really like the concept. But if it's supposed to be the ocean floor it needs to be more down sloped from the rest of the land to show that it was once under the ocean. And it needs some stuff like old coral coves and maybe even some old dried up remains of more profound reefs. And what I mean by that is that you can see that the sea level is now so low, so if that's the case make the reefs for steep, not only will this help the player more associate the landscape with the ocean floor, but it will also be work as walls to prevent the player from leaving the confines of the map without using invisible walls.
We definitely have plans for using dried-up reefs in the works, but we kind of forgot to mention those before the art got done. Oh well :P
As for the ocean floor being sloped, it isn't always like that in real life. It is sloped near the coastline quite noticeably, but there are many places further out that are more like underwater plateaus, and that is what the area around the middle of Gordon's wasteland journey is like, minus a few features we have planned to keep things interesting.
It isn't. You're right. But we could have some steeper areas to not only limit invisible walls breaking immersion, but also give those areas a small story, like- 'Once the combine drained the sea levels they started chipping away at the sea floor and draining it of certain ores and minerals.' We could also have a Hydra appear there, as if when the combine were mining under the sea floor, they awoke the Xenian creature that made it self comfortable under the water a decade ago during the black mesa incident.
How would the Hydra, a creature that presumably consist mostly of water, survive in a dead seafloor? The Hydra was to be encountered in the Canals where there's plenty of moisture. Seafloor would have featured hardy creatures such as antlions and sand barnacles.
There is plenty of hydration for it. Do you not see the small pools in the piece of art?
Huh. I guess so. It's just, for me, the outlands and the Hydra were on kinda different sides of the spectrum. Never would image facing Hydras out there, that far from the city. Thanks for the suggestion!
It's fine. I was just coming up with ideas. But I don't think the Hydra should appear if it does break the flow of the story of course. But now that I think about it. You guys could place the tentacle pod from Half-Life 1 there! Yeah! It'd fit right in since it is a more hardy creature.
Plus more tentacles did appear right there in the desert later on, in HL.
But the question is if you guys are willing to make a new NPC for that section.
Really stunning. Pumped to see this in-game!
Holy ****, this is awesome 1000000000/10
Amazing !!!
Dang. That looks awesome. I know what my new desktop background is.
Will you release some kind of beta of this mod? It will be really nice when we can try some parts of gameplay :)
Dang, that's pretty amazing looking. Practically better than the concept art in Raising the Bar itself!
Thanks man! Thats cool to hear! More concept art soon(ish)