TRAIN TO CITY 17

Brief: As in HL1, the trainride must showcase all the promises we’re making about our new games and technology. From a storytelling perspective, the trainride must unwind in such a way that it helps tell the story of event in Gordon’s absence. Starting with familiar elements, the landscape will get stranger and more ravaged as we approach City 17. Train announcements, posters on the train, overheard conversations among other passengers will also serve to clue the player to the new world.

TRAIN SCRIPT

You are in the Wild Train, speeding across the ominous landscape of the Wild.

TRAIN PA

[tbd]

Train announcements play continually, in ironic counterpoint to the vistas seen from the windows. They prepare the passengers (and by extension the player) for arrival in City 17, giving them some idea of the paperwork and processing they must submit when they arrive.

Nonliteral transition effects: Each time you pass through the darkness of a tunnel, the population of the car changes to give the impression that you are still in the G-Man’s influence, that the passage of time and distance is being blurred. Distinctive sound and visual artifacts will help to give these moments the G-Man’s stamp, and they will be used in later parts of the game, at moments of transition and fugue, when we again wish to bridge the passage of time and show the G-Man’s influence. The style of the G-Man "shock-out" should be prototyped based on the experimental Hazard Course map.

For the next several minutes, we pass through representative zones of the Wild, each sector telling a bit of the story of the last 10 years. We move from remove wild into successively more fortified and urban areas until we are in the heart of City 17. The changes are gradual, covering a spectrum. Meanwhile, we play out a scene with your fellow passenger, including the incidents described below; we run announcements from the Wildland Train’s PA system; we allow the player to move and look around freely, providing enough events that they can play this opening sequence several times and continue to notice and discover new details. The views are always of things the train is leaving behind, providing a novel and disorienting twist of previous train rides.

The train car itself is a decrepit passenger car, ugly, weird and functional rather than comfortable. The windows are protected by shutters that raise and lower at the engineer’s will, some are webbed with impact cracks. Peeling propaganda posters show the face of Dr. Breen as well as views of the CITADEL. The other passengers sit huddled in their seats. The one at the rear of the car is known as SAMUAL G-11789RF; he is the one character who will interact with you. The others will only grunt, shake their heads, and mutter "Leave me alone." if you try to interact with them (using +use).

As the ride begins (in motion), the train speeds through a nightmarish landscape, with wide panoramic views of a mutilated countryside. Distant ruined objects are silhouettes on the horizon. There are twisted shapes of what used to be trees, tangled forests of dead wood. An occasional crumbled chimney and marks of building foundations. Broken roads with overturned hulks of cars, trucks, buses, tractors. And in the midst of everything, glimpses of movement; Alien fauna. Grimy shapes that might be massive bullsquid; packs of houndeyes that hunger has turned into fierce, voracious predators; and new things, never seen before.

Off to one side, you see another train hurtling through the dusk. It gives you some sense of the train you are riding. The nose of the engine car is protected by a huge deadly variant on a cow-catcher, a sharpened steel plow designed to shear through herds of whatever creatures might stray across the tracks or try to take the train head-on. Something that resembles the old Gargantua looms up from a fissure, lunging at the parallel train, and the engine slices right through the thing, leaving it in gory pieces on the track.

The wild gradually gives way to a more suburban variety of ruins. Now we see broken buildings, choked streets, and fewer monsters. On the horizon, in the distance, we see huge tripodal shapes, enormous mortar-mechs, marching in silhouette against the marbled strip of reddish sky. Machines have replaced beasts as the biggest threat. We will encounter these creatures, and all these areas, later in the game, on foot.

Something hurls itself against the train, smashing part of a wind. Noxious gas trickles into the car. The thing, whatever it is, clings to the roof of the car. You can hear it scrabbling about up there, but all you see is one grasping, sucker lined appendage or tentacle which continues to flail at the broken window. The passengers take little notice of it. The passenger sitting at the broken window merely gets up and moves to the other side of the car. When the train is struck, the car shudders and several suitcases slide from the overhead racks and crash down onto the floor. They are all empty.

The train tracks, closer to City 17, begin to run through a protective barrier of electrified wire fences. Caught in the wires are the skeletal and charred remains of monsters that have killed themselves trying to get at the most reliable source of food in the wild. Beyond the wires, other creatures watch hungrily as you pass. Occasionally, something huge makes a rush at the fence and dies there in an explosion of sparks.

Closer to the city, the train passes through mountains of debris. It’s as if bulldozers have pushed all the remains of the old world out here forming a huge barrier that surrounds City 17. You look down into ravines full of poisonous liquid, monsters foraging and burrowing into the scraps. The broken carapace of one of the mortar-mechs lies near the train, if you happen to know what you’re looking at.

The train slows for no obvious reason. At the rear, you become aware of a pack of wild monsters that have someone gotten inside the track barrier. They are galloping up on the train from behind. As they come closer, the train pulls slowly through a huge set of gates. The monsters are gaining on the train – just about to leap through the gates when a pair of auto turrets mounted on either gate open fire on the pack, tearing the beasts to shreds as the gates slam shut.

The train moves at reduced speed through a security area. CREMATORS are at work in the train yard, hosing the yard with fire - catching headcrabs and perhaps a bullsquid that have managed to get into the perimeter, and incinerating them.

The next area is a former switching yard. You can see other trains coming into City 17 through other gates. Metropolice patrol the yard. Stalkers move about busily, in the dim light it’s difficult to see them clearly. One of the stalkers is crushed beneath the rails of a train, but no one seems to notice.

Beyond the switching yard, the train passes out into the Old City on an elevated track. The ground drops away, and we thread slowly between old brick buildings, lopped-off freeway ramps, deserted streets. Fires burn down in the crumbled buildings; there might be people in there but it’s hard to be sure. In a street below, a man runs out of an alley and rushes down the street, parallel with the train. Behind him, a squad of Metropolice step from the alley and open fire. The man falls. The scene passes from view as the train moves in, into a tunnel.

When the train emerges, it is winding through a section of the New City. Grey, fortress-like buildings, cold and inhospitable. The train slides slowly past an apartment building that looks like a prison gun-tower. You get a glimpse into one of the apartments; it is uninviting, sparsely furnished. A TV glares from the wall, and on the screen you have your first glimpse of the living Dr. Breen, making one of his interminable broadcast speeches. There is a family gathered around the TV. All of them are wearing their rubber suits and masks. Beyond the building, in an open square, a giant monitor looks down on the avenue below. The same Dr. Breen broadcast is projected here. You see pedestrians and buses moving below. Things are too orderly. Regimented.

Above the buildings, for the first time, you get a view of the Citadel, an ominous alien spire that looms at the center of City 17. It’s a brief glimpse, for now.

The train now screeches into Station 17, braking. The Station is elevated above street level, beyond the security checkpoints, stairs and ramps and escalators run down to the street, or arch off to some of the buildings. You pass into a tunnel, the station proper, and the train comes to a halt at the security gate.

TRAIN PA

Now arriving, City 17.