I wanna help out with the Lambda Resistance, because I've been thinking about a custom Half Life 2 mod about a young autistic 20 year old man who's working with the resistance group to remove the combine from planet earth! But I still haven't figured out on how the story plot should start out but I'm still working on it so no worries.
Whoever is playing the match of Stellaris is probably seething with rage on some forum. _"This new species is too OP! Out of nowhere, within a week, apparently this one member of the species who spawned out of nowhere just led an uprising and ruined my total control over the planet! I was about to get reinforcements there to crush those cockroaches, until apparently I couldn't anymore? Plz nerf!"_
"...They're always departing but they never arrive... and the ones that do arrive... they never leave... you never see them go they're always full... no one ever gets on but they're always... they're always departing but they never arrive..."
Given enough time and advancements, humanity would prob become worse then the combine lmao, just imagine if u found another planet with the resources of earth on + humanity would most likely use it to itd fullest for ours
@@deathmaster38interesting theory, the combine could be a remnant of the human race that expanded so hard that it lost all touch with itself if that makes sense
@@deathmaster38 nah, the story has ended, valve no longer cares about single player games, half life alyx was a spin off made to sell more vr headsets valve just makes multiplayer free to play games that can be heavily monetized like their auto chess clone, the failed hearthstone clone, the new fps moba etc
"The first contact was bound to happen. The galaxy, let alone the universe was simply too big for just a singular species to develop intelligence in. Any delay in contact only meant a heightening of the eventual culture shock. In humanity's case, this "culture shock" meant the complete extinction of mankind as it had come to be known." -The Author, All Tomorrows
@@SkyrionnIm a bit surprised the author of All Tomorrows was initially not too receptive to the praise its been receiving in recent years. But I believe hes accepted it since then and is working on expanding the lore, its a fantastic piece of modern science fiction.
friend of mine asked me as we were watching WHY a Dyson Sphere is so significant that it made Gordon lose hope. i answered quite simply: "you know how a Star can last for millions of years, if not longer right? imagine turning the entirety of a sun into a power source that is essentially infinite in duration and strength. now apply that power into a Military setting and you have the exact reason why Gordon lost hope."
There's a certain Lovecraftian cosmic-horror aspect to the Combine that goes understated - we hear hints that the Combine have conquered worlds and dimensions so far beyond human understanding, that we are basically nothing to them. It's like if a single village of a couple hundred people in the Australian outback rebelled against the British Empire at its height of power in the early 20th century. Their power is so unfathomably vast they could eradicate us all within minutes if they wanted to. Yet, we still resist, we still choose to fight this control. I think that's the real "lesson" of _Half-Life_ - that the human spirit is utterly indomitable. But there's a layer of control above even the Combine - the Employers - guiding and nudging events unseen. It's like the Ghoul says in _Fallout_ - "there's always someone behind the wheel".
Also ties in well to the scientific meaning of Half-Life - no matter how often you measure it, there will always be some material left, just like the indomitable human spirit :)
They really do feel insurmountably large, once you take into account what exactly they are, and what we are in comparison to them. Everybody says Breen negotiated Earth's surrender and humanity being spared, but I don't even think that is truly the case. They're so big, so powerful, with such a 'diverse' array of species among them, they probably don't even really need humanity at all - after all, the Vortigaunts are humanoid, what are the chances other humaniod lifeforms had been encountered by the Combine as well? No, we survived because they literally do not care. It doesn't make a difference to THEM whether we live or die - why would it? They've got control of untold worlds out there. Just pop a suppression field around the Earth, let it do its work, and they don't have to waste time and resources, or the risk of destroying the resources they're here for already, wiping us out. Humanity is only something worth destroying once we managed to smash up something of theirs. And even then, it's not a victory. We're bedbugs to them. But still, we fight. Everybody *knows* for a fact there's a greater empire out there, comparable to Yog-Sothoth in size, and the resistance keeps chugging along. Why? *Because even bedbugs can kill.*
@@DoctorpooandtheTURDISThey want local teleportation that’s it. With Mossman acting as a spy they already got a less efficient version at nova prospekt. If not for Gordon showing up, humanity would give them local teleportation through Black Mesa East or Aperture Science research and then slowly age/be transformed into extinction.
The combine are so far beyond us your scenario is still way too small. It’d be more like if that tribe in Australia got invaded by tripods from war of the worlds, the disparity between us in tech and capability is so vast that the difference between them and the British empire starts to look pretty insignificant.
It very possible that there is no "Primary Species" anymore, and using the grubs have basically Borged themselves (not a hive mind but a super-culture).
I do support the theory that the Combine are essentially a multiversal cancer. They're simply expanding and conquering for the sake of expanding and conquering, if there was some sort of purpose at one point, like, expansionism, stealing resources, or something else, it doesn't exist anymore, there's no one at the helm. The Universal Union exists because it exists. It perpetuates itself because it perpetuates itself.
Do you know why the Combine went all out in the 7 hour war? They're not as good as we think they are, and we're more dangerous to them then we know. They only had a short window to take us over before we mastered teleportation. Having barely encountered Xen, Black Mesa was already designing energy weapons, adapting and experimenting on multiple alien creatures and producing effective ammunition and portals with ease. If Opposing Force is still canon then they even managed to turn an M2 Browning into a laser cannon using Xen crystals within hours of Race X invading. Aperture Science Innovators has been playing casually with wormholes, exotic matter and consciousness transfer since the 60s and had recently built the iphone of wormhole guns. If the Combine hadn't invaded on the heels of the portal storms Humanity might have been able to force the Combine away by simply closing their portals and throwing everything with an exotic matter warhead back through them. We could have been invading them like it seems we did Xen at the end of Half Life.
Yeah also the Combine are too big and spread out for their own good. The planets they have are most likely only in contact with the homeworld but even then that can be severed.
I would find it so interesting if someone reached the top of the Combine Empire only to find out that they were overthrown eons ago, but the empire is so vast nobody realised & thus the cogs in the machine kept turning even after the insurgency that took them out was annihilated by another subjugated species. As time continues those who knew the original species was dead lost this knowledge and the combine objective just continues onwards with no one at the helm to say we have conquered enough.
That almost makes the Combine scarier imo, that if the original species that created it is no longer around and in control then there’s literally no one behind the wheel driving the car, so to speak. It would be a self-sustaining system, a cosmic biotechnological machine that invades worlds, subjugating and integrating the dominant intelligent life. Forever growing and evolving but with no clear sense of purpose or direction, just gobbling up whole realities because that’s what it does. At that point it would be more like a force of nature than anything else.
I personally thing that, if the assimilation of Earth was completed, the Combine would have eventually shut off the suppression field to make Human "farms" so they could have an endless supply of Stalkers, Overwatch Soldiers and any other possible forms they could turn us into.
I really don't know what is worse to imagine. Being pushed out of essentially an industrialized baby factory and born a male, fed all sorts of hormones and drugs to make you even more of a better combine soldier, just to have your genitals and the like be cut off, your body gutted into and filled with machine, and not know anything else. Or being born a female, and reduced to nothing more than breeding stock, or used as the occasional stalker. Either way, both would suffer immensely. the soldiers being sent in as cannonfodder, and the 'breeding stock' simply being so malformed and disfigured that they cant even be recognized as human. The word human farms reminds of this scp 001 proposal called the factory.
I think that’s partially what Breen has resigned humanity to, he sees humanity either being somehow useful enough to the Combine to keep around, or we’ll go extinct. Breen wanted to basically convince the Combine we’d at least make good soldiers, sure augmented and hardly even human anymore, but the only alternative is extinction, as resisting such an unstoppable force is hopeless.
I doubt they would use breeding farms, I believe much like the other synths humans would be artificially made (test tube babies). As far as we know the combine soldiers and metro cops are not all male, all sexual organs are removed and all vocoder is used instead of speech so they all sound the same. I think the combine would use all people as soldiers just because with the amount of modifications made to them they are essentially the same. Also I assume the stalker thing is just a temporary way of instilling fear into the civilian population and would likely be stopped just because the combine would not have any civilians anymore of humanity was actually fully assimilated
@@Combinehuntsmanunit This is a good point, however I feel like if the combine solely wanted to have shock units, they would likely just start pumping out solely males, for obvious physical, psychological, and biological reasons. Perhaps we could to a degree see a return of a combine assassin, or a lighter shock infantry if both genders are involved. Mostly just basing this info on both the models in game, and how militarys have worked for the most part in the past few hundred years since the introduction of fire arms.
@@Combinehuntsmanunit Fair enough. Artificially born Humans also make sense. But I feel like it's half and half for the stalkers being kept around or not, I don't doubt a big point of them is to show there is a worse fate than death but they are seen commonly as maintenance workers in the Citadel, and probably other large and important combine sites. Though it is possible they only used Stalkers due to the convenience of Humans already being on the planet and may use some other species for maintenance on their other planets.
It must be such a pain in the ass to get all of this b-roll footage captured, and in such a cinematic quality too. Just know that your efforts are seen and appreciated a lot, even when algorithm doesn’t do you justice you’ve most definitely earned.
It was a long one to put together but absolutely worth it. While it's nice to see content doing well in the algo sometimes, this does come mostly from a love of the series. I think this one is doing better than normal though
I've always been scared of the combine empire. They are not a mob guided by a Queen/King, they are not monsters with earthly magic powers, they are just... so alien, so ... human like philosophy... The simple act of "combining" every conquered world to their liking, learning, exploiting is something you could see in human like strayegy in fiction... scares me
They are humans. The combine are humans. Combine = Combined Efforts Galactic Empire. Lead by administrators lead by a puppeteer. Remember that. It'll be Canon one day.
@@Ipolitelyaskyoutodie But they don't give a shit about what you say. If you say something and not act out then you don't get tortured and turned into a gruesome disgusting dastardly synth
The ultimate irony of the Combine's subjugation of Earth is that humans would have become an entity much like the Combine given enough time to evolve and expand unchecked.
I hate that you are right, we think of combine enslavement of humans to be this big scary event. When in fact it is just a larger scale holocaust, we pretend like we didn’t already do exactly what the combine did to us, but we did it to each other. That’s why I love the combine, the scariness in them, is the same horrors we can find if you simply look within
@@jpassa9093Not just the Holocaust. Look at how we treat other species. It's disgusting and it's all because humans were brain washed by industries into thinking it was okay. Humans treat animals horribly in the agricultural and fishing industries
I always wondered if the Combine were actively invading/occupying other worlds while occupying Earth. Imagine some alien planet is resisting the Combine then suddenly new types of units, the Overwatch soldiers, show up en masse
@@TypeAPositiveThere was an Overwatch voice line that threatened an “off world assignment” so I assume SOME people were sent to other wolds as a punishment if nothing else, after all normal humans wont survive in different atmosphere, gravity and radiation. Combine “human” soldiers on the other hand are equipped with life support so i guess they can probably at least exist on other worlds.
@@TypeAPositive Most aliens in HL2 were synthetic cyborgs, so a fully synthetic and modified human could probably match up to some of the combines current military.
The Combine was aware of Earth for some time before their invasion, they just weren't quite able to reach Earth with their portal technology. The Black Mesa Incident, however changed that; enabling the Combine to either pass through Xen to reach Earth or the resonance cascade and/or portal storms as a result created the dimensional conditions necessary for Earth's dimension to accommodate a Combine port directly to their overworld.
My headcanon for decades was that the resonance cascade dispelled whatever was keeping us out of sight of the Combine (ex. maybe the ozone layer was acting as an invisibility cloak)
@vincenzomedicci6541 or perhaps our side of the galaxy or galaxy itself is in some kinda deadzone where, without the incident the combine wouldn't have been able to enter
@@Rainin.7 To gain control of Xen. Seeing as he brought back Gordon to destroy the citadel, the Combine invasion was an unforeseen consequence similar to Race X showing up in OpFor
I think some people would laugh at that, since the combined are bested by Gordon and his gang of skalleywags. But I'd believe it. We only ever see the workers left to drain earth. Never the army. It's like the Roman army taking an area and leaving a skeleton crew behind. The people best the skeleton crew sure, but they'd never even scratch the actual army. They'd probably fit in really nicely. Not to mention the combine have a vast portal network. Instant transportation across massive stretches of space. No warp needed.
@@benneeds_a_name7398 Yeah I was about to say, we mainly see the Combine's equivalent to the adeptus arbites for most of the game. We do not know the full extent of their military forces.
@@benneeds_a_name7398Except the Imperium has advanced tens of thousands of years into the future. They have an entire navy and control over 1 million worlds and have psykers that are probably more powerful than the advisors. (Plus Big E is still a powerful foe even though his physical form has rotted. Though they probably wouldn’t stomp the shit out of combine as much as DAOT (Dark age of technology) humanity would. They would definitely not make it easy for them.
@Man_Aslume They get smoked the second anyone with any relative power in the Imperium notices them. The combine are a non-factor on the scale of bullshit 40K lives in.
Ahhh, hell yes. I was waiting for something like this. The Combine are some of my favorite villains in any medium at this point. The idea of fusing biology and technology in the way that they have has really expanded and/or awakened something in my mind creatively, and I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of such an entity now. I'm relatively new to the series and I genuinely can't believe that I skipped over this for so long. Anyway, thanks for the content, and this vid in particular.
They're completely stupid. Biotech is cool, but you need to consider: Why would they bother enslaving anyone? It just doesn't make sense. It's a waste of resources and provides zero benefit. They could easily just take some DNA samples and extract the bits they like to create new organisms. They don't need to use the vortigaunts to generate their weird energy. They can simply use their DNA to create a vastly more efficient biomechanical generator. This is ignoring the simple fact that the energy they can harvest through a dyson sphere is incomparable to anything they could get from any organism. You have to think about what "energy" really is. Even if we suppose that the vorts have a connection to a source of infinite energy, the joules per second that can be transmitted through a single vort needs to be small enough that they don't explode or simply overheat. There's just no way that it could every be more cost-effective than a dyson sphere, fusion reactor, antimatter reactor, or a penrose generator. The same is true for all their enslaved servant species. Why would they do that? Why would you waste so much time and energy feeding a bunch of humans who may or may not agree to undergo a process to change them into something new? You could have simply created the thing you wanted right from the start, without needing to waste all those resources feeding and housing them until the grow up. Not to mention, converting normal humans is inherently more difficult simply because humans are all slightly different. It's just so much easier to create a standardized template and produce exactly the type of organism you want, and then rapidly improve your prototypes through extensive field tests in controlled environments. And all of this is ignoring another simple fact. Humans are more productive when we're happy. If they wanted us to be slaves so that they could use our technology, it would be way cheaper, easier, and more effective to just be nice to us. They have so much tech we might want, all they'd need to do is offer to exchange knowledge. After that, if they're worried we might be a threat, they would simply glass the planet, taking all of our tech and all of our DNA. The resources of earth are completely negligible. It would be so much more energy efficient to just go mine a few comets or ice moons rather than use a freaking intraplanar portal to drain the tiny volume of water we have in our oceans. They're a stupid villain with bad tech.
I liked to take what the Gman says to imply that The Combine are just one of MANY groups across dimensions. That the hints at the cyclopean scale of the Combine itself wasn't even close to the true scale of the reality humanity had just started being exposed to.
So... The combine desired localised teleportation? insane that all they had to do was keep fighting and invading the home of that Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System in order to get it. (Though I think we can all agree anyone sent into that facility would be absolutely massacred via turrets, goo, neurotoxin, and mashy spike plates.)
''I'm the only one standing between us and THEM" -GLaDOS I think aperture was hidden by her so the combine won't find it I dunno how she'd hide an entire facility but whatevs
@denifnaf5874 To be honest hiding a facility within what originated as a salt mine isn't too hard for her. Plus I don't think she even needed to hide it as the entire combine forces would most likely barely be able to break in at all due to the sheer amount of insane defences and weaponry within that facility.
@@critiquing_chad9520lasers, turrets, rocket turrets, neuro toxin, energy balls no different from AR2, spike plates, acidic water, fire, energy barriers that turn anything and everything to ASH, all being controlled by a hyper intelligent AI capable of baiting and tricking people into places. Yeah it makes sense as to why the combine couldn’t penetrate that facility
The Combine dyson sphere may be the only actual central power they have after collecting recourses from across the multiverse to build the dyson sphere. So destroying the sphere could potentially leave them with only their outposts scattered across the multiverse.
The nuance is that the Core of the Citadel is, in fact, a Singular reactor, (literally a Black hole as an energy source) which are MANY TIMES more powerful than Dyson Spheres. If Combine is able to allocate such an energy source to some small colony on the outskirts of space, then for it Dyson Spheres are like Wind farms for us, when we have had nuclear power plants for a long time.
You have to keep in mind that a Dyson sphere is many times the radius of the star. It's a size so great any attempt at describing it is futile. You can't really just destroy it. Even a giant ship striking it at light speed would just affect a miniscule portion. And we're not even discussing that a Dyson sphere is a deformed inefficient popular mutation of the original concept: a Dyson swarm, where you simply have an array of solar collectors around the star. These things aren't even physically connected and are built using self-replicating automation over a long time. In that scenario, you don't even have anything specific to destroy. All you could do at most is reversing the process, but to do that you'd need to be a kardashev 2 civilization yourself.
@mapleflag6518 oh if you're at the level where you're considering SUCH solutions there is a ton of ways to do it, including those you mentioned Random, but I'd suggest Isaac Arthur's channel for various topics, you'll see just how mindnumbingly absurd the amounts of energy Dyson swarms/spheres would produce
I don’t think the “Original” Combine race still exists. I’m willing to bet that they are long dead but their empire is so vast that most of their slave races have no idea.
Or the original race has turned themselves into something terrifying and horribly dangerous that would make human minds go insane so in other words the combine is a hive mind entity that is make of countless species and civilizations that been assimilated into this unholy collective of consciousness
With how mechanical yet organic the Combine are, I imagine the original species was either wiped out by an AI that controls all lesser Combine AI leadership, or has melded so far with technology and other species that they’re a cyborg hybrid that has no liminal features of what they used to be. Combine would be a fitting name in that case.
An empire that has a goal of absorbing the multiverse into its war machine, the reasson is unknown and that makes it much more creepy, its truly lovecraftian because i doubt our human minds would ever understand just 1% of their empire, its structure, story and actual goals. Whats more interesting is the combine got to xen, i remember in half life alyx final hours that valve mentioned something along the fact that xen is a multiverse on itself, so does that mean the combine's power grew just because they got to xen? We may never know.....
Compared to the other Combine lore videos trying to explain them, this is probably the most well put together and informative without any over the top personal bias. Great job on putting this video together.
The OG idea was not directly to conquer all life, but to see everything as a resource, including other life forms They would use these life forms, twisting and reshaping them to fit into their production chain, completely assimilating them and molding them as needed If they no longer had any use, they would simply dispose of them The They would exploit everything available to expand and uncover new resources, consuming everything to fuel their growth in an ever-escalating spiral
I thought it was far more interesting listening to the voice of the Overwatch machine/thing, it gave you an insight into how the Combine thinks. It felt more to me like larger organism, viewing everything that had been taken under it's control as part of the body. Like their faction is totally playing Hive-Mind in their greater game of Stellaris, and they're winning. Everything else that counters or prevents its aims is viewed more like invading organism, with words like cauterize, malignant, coagulate, infection. And the sheer weight of control that seems to have been applied to the members of the Overwatch and humanity, with tons of stuff about their rations (based on performance), elected mind wipes for promotion, and removal of humans off world, and even control over their sex life. Seemingly the aim is to bring everyone and everything under it's complete control and ensure everyone does and behaves exactly as they should. Anything that doesn't, clamp, contain, sterilize, amputate.
Not a fαn of Laidlaw's initial ending. We never learn anything about the Gman, his employers and their agenda, and the whole thing about fighting the combine being futile is a very defeatist outcome. At the very least it should be like "yeah. the combine are big, but when one patient survives the virus, then a cure can commence".
In my head cannon the head of the combine is a rouge Ai built by the original combine race prior to their demise and so the AI kept following what it was programmed to do protect the race that built them so it did by taking over new species to better help protect a long dead race
I have a theory that the Advisors are the original species just not their original form. We know doctor Breen tries to get a host body which takes the form of an advisor, what if the original species turned themselves into the advisors? Why they would do this I'm not sure, maybe the advisors are more powerful their original form or it's just more efficient at traveling the universe.
Amazing video, I was waiting for years for someting like this to be created, as an "overview" of how the combine behaves, how they got to earth, and the background connections to their and humanity's existence and future plans. This video is peak content, filling up gaps the regular player might miss from the story. Please keep up making these truly amazing and interesting videos.
Your videos are always so underrated, you put so much effort into making these amazing lore videos and I love them. I can't wait so see what you're gonna do next :)
It would cool if we get a idea of what the original species of the combine is. like a vague description of a low raking average Joe combine but describe like a lovecraftian style that would make the advisors look like pathetic maggots.
The one captivating thing about the Combine, for me, is that they don't seem "evil". They don't seem to go out of their way to actually cause someone pain for the sake of causing pain. I think whoever runs the Combine, the species that started the entire empire in the first place, lack the concept of empathy and remorse, but have limitless ambition. I think that what they do to the species, while objectively cruel, vicious, vile and evil to us, is nothing that they would consider bad. They seek to expand and the only thing they care for besides that expansion, is its efficiency. And efficiency is worth anything when you don't hold emotions to the cost at which it comes. So while we think turning people into Stalkers for example is an unforgivable cruelty, to them it's probably just recycling a subject that was impacting efficiency in a negative way. Turning something "broken" into something that has its purpose. A cold and calculated methodology that is made by species that are incapable of holding a moral compass and therefore, use ANY methods that are fit to fullful their ends and they aren't exactly evil for it, because they seem to be incapable to empathize. They lack the same brain structure we do, they aren't like us. They might even think it's doing us a favor. If we rebel, we were inefficient and becoming a Stalker is them giving us an option which we wouldn't be able to have without them and in turn, be "efficient" and play our part.
Exactly, do you question if you’re a killer or not because you step on an Ant? Usually we don’t because we humans view the ants as smaller creatures who’s lives ultimately mean nothing, except this time humans are the ants.
so the founder is a cold blood psycopath that see think in logically reasoning to a point.... so basically put its an AI core if you think about how they use a whole sun to power there empire.
@@mrdarkshoe eh i like to agree up to a point, the thing is we are now acknowlaigng wild life now and other things around us more often. the thing is we can't help to step on a ant by mistake beasue we are that big and it just happen sadly. if anything i think the combine would just like us in some ways, like how us human build a city and wild life just adapted around us to live in said cities.
Oh man the ambience at 3:34 is just ingrained in my mind. It has such strong and vivid associations with the mystery of those half life aliens. Its still a special game
@@idfk-x4f Facts. The combine put our entire species into submission within 7 hours thats how massive their forces are and there is no way they used all they had to make it happen too. Whatever Combine forces we deal with in Half life 2 is mostly made out of our own species which means we only hinder our own numbers in the end.
Just finished James S.A. Corey's The Mercy of Gods and it totally played on the theme of a Combine-like empire... as I was reading I kept thinking about the Black Mesa mod Zen levels.
The Combine stationed *_on Earth_* were desperate, the rest of the empire probably couldn't care less if one of its many colonies is suddenly cut off. In a presumeably infinite multiverse, it's only a matter of time before some other poor civilisation has their own Resonance Cascade, allowing the Combine to try their luck again.
the aleph universe sounds like a cyberpunk book called neuromancer reference. in that story, a machine capable of hosting a miriad of people, along with the entire copy of the internet, and anything digital in that matter is designed and made. and this whole pocket universe, with everything that ever was, is called at first the AL3ph or Aleph. i think it is a clever reference. as the concept is kinda similair to the shu ulathoi
Imo there is very clearly a second great power in the universe that challenges the Combine the Gman seems to work for whoever that other power is. The Gman does what he can to undermine the Combine on Earth and apparently has clients he works for seems like this other power has hired Gman to be a problem for the Combine.
Or maybe The Combine is in a cold war with this is great power and so both do underhanded things to sabotage each other and the Gman is one such underhanded method. The other power cannot directly help Earth so they send the Gman.
Fun fact the combine over watch soldiers used to be humanoid aliens that were in those suits. That was the original idea that they were going to go for but then they just made him human augments. For my own sake I like to say that some of them are human augments and I like to say that the soldiers that we see in the game are not human they're kind of like humanoids from other planets and dimensions that are just humanoid soldiers being used as a battle platform. I don't know it just makes it sound cooler to me when you think of it like that. It truly makes them alien like they're some kind of political military enforcer on a planet.
I think the qz combine deserve more of an explanation like the "unseen lore" since there is no official explanation on specific things. Lemme explain So we know that the combine units deployed in the qz come in the 4 variations, but in the files of there voicelines, its shown that they would use tactics that would emotionally manipulate unfortunate victims, in a scene of HLA it can be heard that the combine grunts are calling out for Alyx pretending to be some sort of friendly, whats interesting for that is that ALL units have voicelines for that specific task as well, which are gone unused. Going further with the idea of unused voicelines there are the unusued charger voicelines, lines of switching weapons and charging towards the player hence the name, there was a cut feature that would include the charger running at the player while wielding a stunstick to strike the player. There is still more lore that can be speculated around the grunts from hla as well, from one single death voiceline that cant be heard in game but only seen in the captions, one line the grunt cant say when killed by the player is "im sorry", this fact alongside the other voicelines the grunt has showcases that he is the least augmented like the captain, suppressor, and charger, but enough to complete decent tasks within the quarantine zone. More hidden lore that can be found is about the workers, theres so much we can speculate from just the scenery and destruction when playing through, you can find dozens of dead grunts and works alongside each other showcasing that covering up the qz is not an easy task, and in some parts you can see them using some sort of device to spray against the xen fauna covering the walls, those tanks that are filled up are seen in the antlion section of the game where its showing antlions being extracted from there sacks right into those said tanks. Whats interesting about the antlions is that they are all slow and heavy, a lot more bulky than the hl2 variations, this can be supported by the nests that they build which are on the surface of the qz, which means whatever the combine extract from the antlions, they turn that mix into fluids used by the workers to wipe out the xen flora and fauna. Straying away from all that, the big question is why we dont see any of these soldiers outside the qz and in hl2, well I think tge answer to that is they were deployed somewhere else, by the time hl2 came around, city 17 was probably finished and the only thing they needed was less troops to worry about which is why they only use cps and standard transhuman soldiers, which by that time the city grunts were not needed and the qz units were probably deployed else where in other quarantine zones, I dont believe one bit that the suppressor and wallhammer would evolve into the hl2 soldiers, especially from how effective they are shown in hla. Now is all that I explained canon? It can be, valve themselves have conflicted with there own lore, but the way I explained things can definitely explain how city 17 and everything would be different the time hl2 comes around, best possibility to make everything in hla canon to exist in hl2 somewhere else in the world.
Another note, cmdrrileysv4000 shows a lot of cut content from hla which could definitely add some more lore to what the combine could've added or already added by just arent seen
Spot on. The Combine forces we see in Half Life 2 and its episodes id believe is literally just a skeleton crew. No need to have the whole army on a already dying planet
I still feel like Alix pushing the story forward, serving as a retcon to the LAST thing that happened in the story.... They must be working on something, right? Why push it forward, why change Eli`s fate?
Excellent video! Great visuals, clear speaking, and a fun script to follow along with. I'm a huge Half Life junkie and even I was able to learn a few niche details here and there. Thanks Skyrionn!
With fictional settings like this I often find myself wondering what I would do if I was there. As much as I'd love to think I would resist, I don't think I would have the emotional fortitude for it. I'd probably end up in "an eternity's repose". It brings peaceful thoughts, does it not?
The Combine as a species are so terrifyingly overpowered its unreal…Idk how I forgot they didn’t just go from planet to planet but UNIVERSE TO UNIVERSE 😂 It’s hard to imagine anything beating them tbh…They’ve harnessed so much of the multiverse’s perfect manifestations of power… The Combine are living MY dream 😂 Except a more surreal, alien synth death metal version…
You never fail to put out good videos. You put in such effort and your love for Half Life doesn't seem to ever die. Hope Half Life 3 comes out soon, and when it does, I can't wait to see what you'll make from it. Keep up the amazing work, Skyrionn!
In my mind, all the events throughout the Half-Life games are carefully orchestrated by the G-man and his employers, who appear to consider the Combine their enemy. They probably came to the same conclusion that the Combine is unbeatable through conventional means, but since they are able to look through space and time, they're able to find a sequence of events that needs to play out to lead to their downfall (think Avengers: Endgame or BioShock: Infinite). G-man is directly responsible for the Resonance Cascade, as well as well as the uprising in City 17 20 years later. The famous words 'the right man in the wrong place' signify a big part of the strategy. Guerrilla warfare on a spacetime scale, targeting and destabilizing critical moments in history where divergent points can occur. It doesn't entirely explain his capture during Alyx, or what exactly his intended plan was during Episode 1 and 2 before the Vortigaunts stopped him. But everything hints at the fact that he's been manipulating the progress at Black Mesa to set in motion a set of events that could eventually lead to the Combine's downfall. But, as we're talking a war on a dimensional level we can't even comprehend, it probably wouldn't end very well for Earth. In the end we'd probably end up as a useful tool that outlives its usefulness as soon as the Combine are defeated, and left to die.
I love the Combine so much, I even adopted one of the code names a generic unit can get, Sweeper Zero. Combine is extremely interesting for me, what they do, how they operate. Tactics, lore, mechanics. I love these fellas. ❤
I keep needing to remind myself that this game came out in 2004. I remember neighbors buying computers just to play this and having everyone come over to see it in it's full glory. Those were the days!
Massive amounts of boron can mess with a star if you have enough of it, iron would also work but you would probably need more mass than you would boron. Good way to deal with a dyson sphere.
I have a theory that the combine conquest was initially peacefull for the first couple worlds or even the first few universes When other races where still almost as advenced as the combine Way before a civilazation would be an ant in comparison Those days where long gone by the time they discovered the Nihilanths species hovewer...
The Combine are a cosmic horror. Beating them is not a matter of destroying them them, but banish them. Human can never hope to truly "defeat" the Combine, as the Overwatch is not even the true Combine army, its just an local occupation force made of mostly human (well "human") troops.
Yeah. I think a lot of people don’t realize that the Combine forces we see on Earth during the events of HL2 aren’t even the true Combine military power. It’s merely an occupation force that’s mostly designed specifically for Earth and its environment. It was put in place after their invasion forces conquered humanity in the 7 Hour War and probably how they do it for all the worlds they occupy. We know very little about what these forces actually looked like and how powerful they really are.
Something I think about from time to time since I like listening to sci-fi e books and a fan of the half-life series is what if two hyperaggressive civilizations such as the Combine and the Qu of the novel All Tomorrows would interact or conquer one another.
It's actually kinda weird the Combine have such difficulty finding a way to Xen considering it seems to be just about any other species first stop in inter-universe traveling by default. Even seemingly unintelligent species like headcrabs managed to find a way to Xen somehow, yet the Combine just skipped by it and never figured out how to find it? Also, why do they even permit the existence of non-combined humans? Why not just move in and "upgrade" everyone as we appear to be entirely useless to them as-is? It's not like it's for breeding purposes 'cause they could easily manage that themselves and actively suppress that function in their captive yet unconverted population 🤔
We wish to help The Resistance. Where is your base located and how many of you are there?
I wanna help out with the Lambda Resistance, because I've been thinking about a custom Half Life 2 mod about a young autistic 20 year old man who's working with the resistance group to remove the combine from planet earth! But I still haven't figured out on how the story plot should start out but I'm still working on it so no worries.
In engineers voice yaaayy you can't fool me with those basic tricks combine
Well... it was Ravenholm, but-
classified
Your mom's house. 😏
I have heard Half Life 2/The Combine described as "A game where the player is playing a First-Person Shooter, and the enemy is playing Stellaris."
This is absolutely brilliant
Oh i saw that comment once, its indeed brilliant.
🤨
Brilliant.
Whoever is playing the match of Stellaris is probably seething with rage on some forum.
_"This new species is too OP! Out of nowhere, within a week, apparently this one member of the species who spawned out of nowhere just led an uprising and ruined my total control over the planet! I was about to get reinforcements there to crush those cockroaches, until apparently I couldn't anymore? Plz nerf!"_
Don't drink the water, they put something in it to make forget. I don't even remember how I got here.
You got here by train.
"...They're always departing but they never arrive... and the ones that do arrive... they never leave... you never see them go they're always full... no one ever gets on but they're always... they're always departing but they never arrive..."
Same guy but in the Half Mind mod:
“GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE!:
The water even made you forget to use the word you in that sentence
This is a joke btw
Sometimes i dream about cheese
It's disturbing how creative the Combine is in destroying all it touches during its conquest.
And worse, we, humans, (probably) help them get to Xen.
Given enough time and advancements, humanity would prob become worse then the combine lmao, just imagine if u found another planet with the resources of earth on + humanity would most likely use it to itd fullest for ours
@@deathmaster38interesting theory, the combine could be a remnant of the human race that expanded so hard that it lost all touch with itself if that makes sense
@@jackdaniels5071And somewhere out there, that ancient human civilization built giant rings in space…
@@Devdev009 Oh ! s*t
@@deathmaster38 nah, the story has ended, valve no longer cares about single player games, half life alyx was a spin off made to sell more vr headsets
valve just makes multiplayer free to play games that can be heavily monetized like their auto chess clone, the failed hearthstone clone, the new fps moba etc
"The first contact was bound to happen. The galaxy, let alone the universe was simply too big for just a singular species to develop intelligence in. Any delay in contact only meant a heightening of the eventual culture shock. In humanity's case, this "culture shock" meant the complete extinction of mankind as it had come to be known."
-The Author, All Tomorrows
All Tomorrows. One of the best pieces of fiction out there.
Fucking mortifying, though (which makes it better)
@@SkyrionnIm a bit surprised the author of All Tomorrows was initially not too receptive to the praise its been receiving in recent years. But I believe hes accepted it since then and is working on expanding the lore, its a fantastic piece of modern science fiction.
@@mrdarkshoe He still thinks its cringe and not good that's why he's writing a new updated version
friend of mine asked me as we were watching WHY a Dyson Sphere is so significant that it made Gordon lose hope.
i answered quite simply: "you know how a Star can last for millions of years, if not longer right? imagine turning the entirety of a sun into a power source that is essentially infinite in duration and strength. now apply that power into a Military setting and you have the exact reason why Gordon lost hope."
Kinda scary isn't it.
@@Skyrionn absolutely terrifying is what it is! Militarizing a friggin DYSON SPHERE! it's INSANE!
Fun fact: In the newspapers of both HL2 and HL:A shows that the Combine used large ships and orbital bombardment against humanity in the 7 hour war.
Wait really?
Can you quote the words?
@@AdrensphrdGaming
"Combine has a right to defend itself”, "Xenophobes refuse to condem Humans", "Pray for Combine 🙏"
@@AdrensphrdGaming did you receive my comments? Because it keeps getting auto-deleted when I am trying to show you.
@@6l1t3h_Official I can't see them
Isnt the same newspaper but more detailed and HD?
There's a certain Lovecraftian cosmic-horror aspect to the Combine that goes understated - we hear hints that the Combine have conquered worlds and dimensions so far beyond human understanding, that we are basically nothing to them. It's like if a single village of a couple hundred people in the Australian outback rebelled against the British Empire at its height of power in the early 20th century. Their power is so unfathomably vast they could eradicate us all within minutes if they wanted to. Yet, we still resist, we still choose to fight this control. I think that's the real "lesson" of _Half-Life_ - that the human spirit is utterly indomitable.
But there's a layer of control above even the Combine - the Employers - guiding and nudging events unseen. It's like the Ghoul says in _Fallout_ - "there's always someone behind the wheel".
Also ties in well to the scientific meaning of Half-Life - no matter how often you measure it, there will always be some material left, just like the indomitable human spirit :)
They really do feel insurmountably large, once you take into account what exactly they are, and what we are in comparison to them. Everybody says Breen negotiated Earth's surrender and humanity being spared, but I don't even think that is truly the case. They're so big, so powerful, with such a 'diverse' array of species among them, they probably don't even really need humanity at all - after all, the Vortigaunts are humanoid, what are the chances other humaniod lifeforms had been encountered by the Combine as well? No, we survived because they literally do not care. It doesn't make a difference to THEM whether we live or die - why would it? They've got control of untold worlds out there. Just pop a suppression field around the Earth, let it do its work, and they don't have to waste time and resources, or the risk of destroying the resources they're here for already, wiping us out. Humanity is only something worth destroying once we managed to smash up something of theirs.
And even then, it's not a victory. We're bedbugs to them.
But still, we fight. Everybody *knows* for a fact there's a greater empire out there, comparable to Yog-Sothoth in size, and the resistance keeps chugging along. Why?
*Because even bedbugs can kill.*
@@DoctorpooandtheTURDISThey want local teleportation that’s it. With Mossman acting as a spy they already got a less efficient version at nova prospekt. If not for Gordon showing up, humanity would give them local teleportation through Black Mesa East or Aperture Science research and then slowly age/be transformed into extinction.
The combine are so far beyond us your scenario is still way too small. It’d be more like if that tribe in Australia got invaded by tripods from war of the worlds, the disparity between us in tech and capability is so vast that the difference between them and the British empire starts to look pretty insignificant.
Don't underestimate the power of an Australian village if there is enough beer.
It very possible that there is no "Primary Species" anymore, and using the grubs have basically Borged themselves (not a hive mind but a super-culture).
In other words the combine has become a hive mind entity of countless species and civilizations they conquered similar to the gravemind from halo
I do support the theory that the Combine are essentially a multiversal cancer. They're simply expanding and conquering for the sake of expanding and conquering, if there was some sort of purpose at one point, like, expansionism, stealing resources, or something else, it doesn't exist anymore, there's no one at the helm.
The Universal Union exists because it exists. It perpetuates itself because it perpetuates itself.
48 MINUTE HALF LIFE LORE VIDEO LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOO
edit : he even put in subtitles, what a chad
LETS GOOO
Always with the subtitles. They're so easy to do. Thanks for being here
@@Skyrionn not created by your haNd but tooIs?
@@sheeringobjectI mean all he'd have to do is copy-paste his script into the caption generator and add timestamps
@@misterhydra7285 thats handy
Do you know why the Combine went all out in the 7 hour war?
They're not as good as we think they are, and we're more dangerous to them then we know. They only had a short window to take us over before we mastered teleportation.
Having barely encountered Xen, Black Mesa was already designing energy weapons, adapting and experimenting on multiple alien creatures and producing effective ammunition and portals with ease. If Opposing Force is still canon then they even managed to turn an M2 Browning into a laser cannon using Xen crystals within hours of Race X invading.
Aperture Science Innovators has been playing casually with wormholes, exotic matter and consciousness transfer since the 60s and had recently built the iphone of wormhole guns.
If the Combine hadn't invaded on the heels of the portal storms Humanity might have been able to force the Combine away by simply closing their portals and throwing everything with an exotic matter warhead back through them. We could have been invading them like it seems we did Xen at the end of Half Life.
not to mention the unhinged fucking psychos at aperture casually invent a damn time traveling boat that can fly
Yeah also the Combine are too big and spread out for their own good. The planets they have are most likely only in contact with the homeworld but even then that can be severed.
10/10 insights
I would find it so interesting if someone reached the top of the Combine Empire only to find out that they were overthrown eons ago, but the empire is so vast nobody realised & thus the cogs in the machine kept turning even after the insurgency that took them out was annihilated by another subjugated species. As time continues those who knew the original species was dead lost this knowledge and the combine objective just continues onwards with no one at the helm to say we have conquered enough.
That almost makes the Combine scarier imo, that if the original species that created it is no longer around and in control then there’s literally no one behind the wheel driving the car, so to speak. It would be a self-sustaining system, a cosmic biotechnological machine that invades worlds, subjugating and integrating the dominant intelligent life. Forever growing and evolving but with no clear sense of purpose or direction, just gobbling up whole realities because that’s what it does. At that point it would be more like a force of nature than anything else.
That is uniquely terrifying. An infinitely propagating meat grinding civilisation
I personally thing that, if the assimilation of Earth was completed, the Combine would have eventually shut off the suppression field to make Human "farms" so they could have an endless supply of Stalkers, Overwatch Soldiers and any other possible forms they could turn us into.
I really don't know what is worse to imagine.
Being pushed out of essentially an industrialized baby factory and born a male, fed all sorts of hormones and drugs to make you even more of a better combine soldier, just to have your genitals and the like be cut off, your body gutted into and filled with machine, and not know anything else.
Or being born a female, and reduced to nothing more than breeding stock, or used as the occasional stalker.
Either way, both would suffer immensely. the soldiers being sent in as cannonfodder, and the 'breeding stock' simply being so malformed and disfigured that they cant even be recognized as human.
The word human farms reminds of this scp 001 proposal called the factory.
I think that’s partially what Breen has resigned humanity to, he sees humanity either being somehow useful enough to the Combine to keep around, or we’ll go extinct.
Breen wanted to basically convince the Combine we’d at least make good soldiers, sure augmented and hardly even human anymore, but the only alternative is extinction, as resisting such an unstoppable force is hopeless.
I doubt they would use breeding farms, I believe much like the other synths humans would be artificially made (test tube babies). As far as we know the combine soldiers and metro cops are not all male, all sexual organs are removed and all vocoder is used instead of speech so they all sound the same. I think the combine would use all people as soldiers just because with the amount of modifications made to them they are essentially the same. Also I assume the stalker thing is just a temporary way of instilling fear into the civilian population and would likely be stopped just because the combine would not have any civilians anymore of humanity was actually fully assimilated
@@Combinehuntsmanunit
This is a good point, however I feel like if the combine solely wanted to have shock units, they would likely just start pumping out solely males, for obvious physical, psychological, and biological reasons. Perhaps we could to a degree see a return of a combine assassin, or a lighter shock infantry if both genders are involved.
Mostly just basing this info on both the models in game, and how militarys have worked for the most part in the past few hundred years since the introduction of fire arms.
@@Combinehuntsmanunit Fair enough. Artificially born Humans also make sense. But I feel like it's half and half for the stalkers being kept around or not, I don't doubt a big point of them is to show there is a worse fate than death but they are seen commonly as maintenance workers in the Citadel, and probably other large and important combine sites. Though it is possible they only used Stalkers due to the convenience of Humans already being on the planet and may use some other species for maintenance on their other planets.
It must be such a pain in the ass to get all of this b-roll footage captured, and in such a cinematic quality too.
Just know that your efforts are seen and appreciated a lot, even when algorithm doesn’t do you justice you’ve most definitely earned.
It was a long one to put together but absolutely worth it. While it's nice to see content doing well in the algo sometimes, this does come mostly from a love of the series. I think this one is doing better than normal though
I've always been scared of the combine empire. They are not a mob guided by a Queen/King, they are not monsters with earthly magic powers, they are just... so alien, so ... human like philosophy...
The simple act of "combining" every conquered world to their liking, learning, exploiting is something you could see in human like strayegy in fiction... scares me
Which is exactly why the Borg are just as scary.
They are humans. The combine are humans.
Combine = Combined Efforts Galactic Empire. Lead by administrators lead by a puppeteer.
Remember that. It'll be Canon one day.
Nah I believe the combine is really led by a dystopian group, a party of sorts, like INGSOC in 1984.
@@Ipolitelyaskyoutodie But they don't give a shit about what you say. If you say something and not act out then you don't get tortured and turned into a gruesome disgusting dastardly synth
I think the combine are one big body guided by the mind virus mentioned by Breengrub that corrupted the Shuulathoi from the inside..
The ultimate irony of the Combine's subjugation of Earth is that humans would have become an entity much like the Combine given enough time to evolve and expand unchecked.
I hate that you are right, we think of combine enslavement of humans to be this big scary event. When in fact it is just a larger scale holocaust, we pretend like we didn’t already do exactly what the combine did to us, but we did it to each other. That’s why I love the combine, the scariness in them, is the same horrors we can find if you simply look within
@@jpassa9093humans will cooporate when aliens invade mfs when ota soldier:😮
Literally, the combine could just be a "future of humanity" if we advance far enough
@@jpassa9093Not just the Holocaust. Look at how we treat other species. It's disgusting and it's all because humans were brain washed by industries into thinking it was okay. Humans treat animals horribly in the agricultural and fishing industries
They just had to hit us first before we reach the 41st millennium
I always wondered if the Combine were actively invading/occupying other worlds while occupying Earth. Imagine some alien planet is resisting the Combine then suddenly new types of units, the Overwatch soldiers, show up en masse
Humans aren’t really that good at fighting compared to other aliens, I’m assuming the combine would just keep them on earth
@@TypeAPositiveThere was an Overwatch voice line that threatened an “off world assignment” so I assume SOME people were sent to other wolds as a punishment if nothing else, after all normal humans wont survive in different atmosphere, gravity and radiation. Combine “human” soldiers on the other hand are equipped with life support so i guess they can probably at least exist on other worlds.
@@TypeAPositive
Most aliens in HL2 were synthetic cyborgs, so a fully synthetic and modified human could probably match up to some of the combines current military.
The Combine was aware of Earth for some time before their invasion, they just weren't quite able to reach Earth with their portal technology. The Black Mesa Incident, however changed that; enabling the Combine to either pass through Xen to reach Earth or the resonance cascade and/or portal storms as a result created the dimensional conditions necessary for Earth's dimension to accommodate a Combine port directly to their overworld.
My headcanon for decades was that the resonance cascade dispelled whatever was keeping us out of sight of the Combine (ex. maybe the ozone layer was acting as an invisibility cloak)
@vincenzomedicci6541 or perhaps our side of the galaxy or galaxy itself is in some kinda deadzone where, without the incident the combine wouldn't have been able to enter
Why g man purposefully cause the resonance cascade though?
@@Rainin.7Funny troll
@@Rainin.7 To gain control of Xen. Seeing as he brought back Gordon to destroy the citadel, the Combine invasion was an unforeseen consequence similar to Race X showing up in OpFor
The Combine is one of those factions that could fit in the 40k universe like a glove. Stalkers are just a more advanced form of Servitor.
I wonder what would happen if instead of the tyranids
The combine arrived instead
I think some people would laugh at that, since the combined are bested by Gordon and his gang of skalleywags.
But I'd believe it.
We only ever see the workers left to drain earth. Never the army.
It's like the Roman army taking an area and leaving a skeleton crew behind. The people best the skeleton crew sure, but they'd never even scratch the actual army.
They'd probably fit in really nicely.
Not to mention the combine have a vast portal network. Instant transportation across massive stretches of space. No warp needed.
@@benneeds_a_name7398 Yeah I was about to say, we mainly see the Combine's equivalent to the adeptus arbites for most of the game. We do not know the full extent of their military forces.
@@benneeds_a_name7398Except the Imperium has advanced tens of thousands of years into the future. They have an entire navy and control over 1 million worlds and have psykers that are probably more powerful than the advisors. (Plus Big E is still a powerful foe even though his physical form has rotted. Though they probably wouldn’t stomp the shit out of combine as much as DAOT (Dark age of technology) humanity would. They would definitely not make it easy for them.
@Man_Aslume They get smoked the second anyone with any relative power in the Imperium notices them. The combine are a non-factor on the scale of bullshit 40K lives in.
Ahhh, hell yes. I was waiting for something like this.
The Combine are some of my favorite villains in any medium at this point. The idea of fusing biology and technology in the way that they have has really expanded and/or awakened something in my mind creatively, and I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of such an entity now.
I'm relatively new to the series and I genuinely can't believe that I skipped over this for so long.
Anyway, thanks for the content, and this vid in particular.
They're brilliant. They're very high on my list of villains too. The Strogg are very close to them too.
Hell yeah the Combine and Tyranids from WH40K are my two faves. Oh and the Borg too lol.
They're completely stupid. Biotech is cool, but you need to consider: Why would they bother enslaving anyone? It just doesn't make sense. It's a waste of resources and provides zero benefit. They could easily just take some DNA samples and extract the bits they like to create new organisms. They don't need to use the vortigaunts to generate their weird energy. They can simply use their DNA to create a vastly more efficient biomechanical generator.
This is ignoring the simple fact that the energy they can harvest through a dyson sphere is incomparable to anything they could get from any organism. You have to think about what "energy" really is. Even if we suppose that the vorts have a connection to a source of infinite energy, the joules per second that can be transmitted through a single vort needs to be small enough that they don't explode or simply overheat. There's just no way that it could every be more cost-effective than a dyson sphere, fusion reactor, antimatter reactor, or a penrose generator.
The same is true for all their enslaved servant species. Why would they do that? Why would you waste so much time and energy feeding a bunch of humans who may or may not agree to undergo a process to change them into something new? You could have simply created the thing you wanted right from the start, without needing to waste all those resources feeding and housing them until the grow up. Not to mention, converting normal humans is inherently more difficult simply because humans are all slightly different. It's just so much easier to create a standardized template and produce exactly the type of organism you want, and then rapidly improve your prototypes through extensive field tests in controlled environments.
And all of this is ignoring another simple fact. Humans are more productive when we're happy. If they wanted us to be slaves so that they could use our technology, it would be way cheaper, easier, and more effective to just be nice to us. They have so much tech we might want, all they'd need to do is offer to exchange knowledge. After that, if they're worried we might be a threat, they would simply glass the planet, taking all of our tech and all of our DNA.
The resources of earth are completely negligible. It would be so much more energy efficient to just go mine a few comets or ice moons rather than use a freaking intraplanar portal to drain the tiny volume of water we have in our oceans.
They're a stupid villain with bad tech.
so the G-man is an escaped Shu’ulathoi that had chosen his own form and is twisting fate to see the downfall of the Combine in the future?
This has always been a popular theory and if U go back and listen to the nihilinths voice lines from the first game it kind of reinforces it
Not been stated to be canon in any way just a interesting theory so far.
I liked to take what the Gman says to imply that The Combine are just one of MANY groups across dimensions. That the hints at the cyclopean scale of the Combine itself wasn't even close to the true scale of the reality humanity had just started being exposed to.
“Gordon doesn’t need to hear all this, he is a highly trained professional.”
So... The combine desired localised teleportation?
insane that all they had to do was keep fighting and invading the home of that Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System in order to get it.
(Though I think we can all agree anyone sent into that facility would be absolutely massacred via turrets, goo, neurotoxin, and mashy spike plates.)
Oh I would have loved to see them go up against GLaDOS
''I'm the only one standing between us and THEM"
-GLaDOS
I think aperture was hidden by her so the combine won't find it
I dunno how she'd hide an entire facility but whatevs
@denifnaf5874 To be honest hiding a facility within what originated as a salt mine isn't too hard for her. Plus I don't think she even needed to hide it as the entire combine forces would most likely barely be able to break in at all due to the sheer amount of insane defences and weaponry within that facility.
@@critiquing_chad9520lasers, turrets, rocket turrets, neuro toxin, energy balls no different from AR2, spike plates, acidic water, fire, energy barriers that turn anything and everything to ASH, all being controlled by a hyper intelligent AI capable of baiting and tricking people into places.
Yeah it makes sense as to why the combine couldn’t penetrate that facility
damn that was good, you've become the top source of Hale Life lore bar none.
The Combine dyson sphere may be the only actual central power they have after collecting recourses from across the multiverse to build the dyson sphere. So destroying the sphere could potentially leave them with only their outposts scattered across the multiverse.
The nuance is that the Core of the Citadel is, in fact, a Singular reactor, (literally a Black hole as an energy source) which are MANY TIMES more powerful than Dyson Spheres. If Combine is able to allocate such an energy source to some small colony on the outskirts of space, then for it Dyson Spheres are like Wind farms for us, when we have had nuclear power plants for a long time.
You have to keep in mind that a Dyson sphere is many times the radius of the star. It's a size so great any attempt at describing it is futile.
You can't really just destroy it. Even a giant ship striking it at light speed would just affect a miniscule portion.
And we're not even discussing that a Dyson sphere is a deformed inefficient popular mutation of the original concept: a Dyson swarm, where you simply have an array of solar collectors around the star.
These things aren't even physically connected and are built using self-replicating automation over a long time.
In that scenario, you don't even have anything specific to destroy. All you could do at most is reversing the process, but to do that you'd need to be a kardashev 2 civilization yourself.
@@rairaur2234 So basically you would need either get the star inside to go supernova somehow or somehow yeet another star at it.
@mapleflag6518 oh if you're at the level where you're considering SUCH solutions there is a ton of ways to do it, including those you mentioned
Random, but I'd suggest Isaac Arthur's channel for various topics, you'll see just how mindnumbingly absurd the amounts of energy Dyson swarms/spheres would produce
I don’t think the “Original” Combine race still exists. I’m willing to bet that they are long dead but their empire is so vast that most of their slave races have no idea.
Or the original race has turned themselves into something terrifying and horribly dangerous that would make human minds go insane so in other words the combine is a hive mind entity that is make of countless species and civilizations that been assimilated into this unholy collective of consciousness
With how mechanical yet organic the Combine are, I imagine the original species was either wiped out by an AI that controls all lesser Combine AI leadership, or has melded so far with technology and other species that they’re a cyborg hybrid that has no liminal features of what they used to be. Combine would be a fitting name in that case.
"THEY come from anywhere and everywhere"
-BreenGrub
THEY rule all
i need you to know how much i appreciate these videos still, don’t stop putting in effort
An empire that has a goal of absorbing the multiverse into its war machine, the reasson is unknown and that makes it much more creepy, its truly lovecraftian because i doubt our human minds would ever understand just 1% of their empire, its structure, story and actual goals. Whats more interesting is the combine got to xen, i remember in half life alyx final hours that valve mentioned something along the fact that xen is a multiverse on itself, so does that mean the combine's power grew just because they got to xen? We may never know.....
Compared to the other Combine lore videos trying to explain them, this is probably the most well put together and informative without any over the top personal bias. Great job on putting this video together.
The OG idea was not directly to conquer all life, but to see everything as a resource, including other life forms
They would use these life forms, twisting and reshaping them to fit into their production chain, completely assimilating them and molding them as needed
If they no longer had any use, they would simply dispose of them
The They would exploit everything available to expand and uncover new resources, consuming everything to fuel their growth in an ever-escalating spiral
I thought it was far more interesting listening to the voice of the Overwatch machine/thing, it gave you an insight into how the Combine thinks. It felt more to me like larger organism, viewing everything that had been taken under it's control as part of the body. Like their faction is totally playing Hive-Mind in their greater game of Stellaris, and they're winning. Everything else that counters or prevents its aims is viewed more like invading organism, with words like cauterize, malignant, coagulate, infection. And the sheer weight of control that seems to have been applied to the members of the Overwatch and humanity, with tons of stuff about their rations (based on performance), elected mind wipes for promotion, and removal of humans off world, and even control over their sex life. Seemingly the aim is to bring everyone and everything under it's complete control and ensure everyone does and behaves exactly as they should. Anything that doesn't, clamp, contain, sterilize, amputate.
Not a fαn of Laidlaw's initial ending. We never learn anything about the Gman, his employers and their agenda, and the whole thing about fighting the combine being futile is a very defeatist outcome. At the very least it should be like "yeah. the combine are big, but when one patient survives the virus, then a cure can commence".
In my head cannon the head of the combine is a rouge Ai built by the original combine race prior to their demise and so the AI kept following what it was programmed to do protect the race that built them so it did by taking over new species to better help protect a long dead race
The recently taken Nova Prospekt prison. About 42 fighters, 23 civilians, 8 scientists, and 1 badass dog. This is the last of us.
I really like this new editing style! Nice work as always Skyrionn
I have a theory that the Advisors are the original species just not their original form. We know doctor Breen tries to get a host body which takes the form of an advisor, what if the original species turned themselves into the advisors? Why they would do this I'm not sure, maybe the advisors are more powerful their original form or it's just more efficient at traveling the universe.
Amazing video, I was waiting for years for someting like this to be created, as an "overview" of how the combine behaves, how they got to earth, and the background connections to their and humanity's existence and future plans. This video is peak content, filling up gaps the regular player might miss from the story. Please keep up making these truly amazing and interesting videos.
One more month left for the 20th anniversary of HL2 release.
20 years to go till HL3.
Your videos are always so underrated, you put so much effort into making these amazing lore videos and I love them. I can't wait so see what you're gonna do next :)
The combine can be use as a antagonist for other video game franchises that involve the multiverse
Like maybe as the main antagonists of video games that involves the multiverse
Havent even watched it and I know I am going to love it already. Love your content.
It would cool if we get a idea of what the original species of the combine is. like a vague description of a low raking average Joe combine but describe like a lovecraftian style that would make the advisors look like pathetic maggots.
The one captivating thing about the Combine, for me, is that they don't seem "evil".
They don't seem to go out of their way to actually cause someone pain for the sake of causing pain.
I think whoever runs the Combine, the species that started the entire empire in the first place, lack the concept of empathy and remorse, but have limitless ambition.
I think that what they do to the species, while objectively cruel, vicious, vile and evil to us, is nothing that they would consider bad. They seek to expand and the only thing they care for besides that expansion, is its efficiency. And efficiency is worth anything when you don't hold emotions to the cost at which it comes. So while we think turning people into Stalkers for example is an unforgivable cruelty, to them it's probably just recycling a subject that was impacting efficiency in a negative way. Turning something "broken" into something that has its purpose.
A cold and calculated methodology that is made by species that are incapable of holding a moral compass and therefore, use ANY methods that are fit to fullful their ends and they aren't exactly evil for it, because they seem to be incapable to empathize. They lack the same brain structure we do, they aren't like us. They might even think it's doing us a favor. If we rebel, we were inefficient and becoming a Stalker is them giving us an option which we wouldn't be able to have without them and in turn, be "efficient" and play our part.
Exactly, do you question if you’re a killer or not because you step on an Ant? Usually we don’t because we humans view the ants as smaller creatures who’s lives ultimately mean nothing, except this time humans are the ants.
so the founder is a cold blood psycopath that see think in logically reasoning to a point.... so basically put its an AI core if you think about how they use a whole sun to power there empire.
@@mrdarkshoe eh i like to agree up to a point, the thing is we are now acknowlaigng wild life now and other things around us more often. the thing is we can't help to step on a ant by mistake beasue we are that big and it just happen sadly.
if anything i think the combine would just like us in some ways, like how us human build a city and wild life just adapted around us to live in said cities.
47:26 Your end phrase was a masterpiece, I smiled
Oh man the ambience at 3:34 is just ingrained in my mind. It has such strong and vivid associations with the mystery of those half life aliens. Its still a special game
Loving this, saw the length of the video and the topic and was like - yep, I’ll be watching this.
Indeed!, Skyrionn is the best lore talker
@@mortara79 Certainly in top tier, esp when it comes to Half-Life. I absolutely love Half-Life lore, esp Combine/7 Hour War all that sort of thing.
given enought time aperture could have fought the combine to a stalemate
100%
combine forces on earth maybe, but the full combine empire would stomp aperture like it was nothing
@@idfk-x4f Facts. The combine put our entire species into submission within 7 hours thats how massive their forces are and there is no way they used all they had to make it happen too. Whatever Combine forces we deal with in Half life 2 is mostly made out of our own species which means we only hinder our own numbers in the end.
Just finished James S.A. Corey's The Mercy of Gods and it totally played on the theme of a Combine-like empire... as I was reading I kept thinking about the Black Mesa mod Zen levels.
Why am i obsessed with the combine. Theyve got my mind like eli.
The Combine stationed *_on Earth_* were desperate, the rest of the empire probably couldn't care less if one of its many colonies is suddenly cut off. In a presumeably infinite multiverse, it's only a matter of time before some other poor civilisation has their own Resonance Cascade, allowing the Combine to try their luck again.
the aleph universe sounds like a cyberpunk book called neuromancer reference. in that story, a machine capable of hosting a miriad of people, along with the entire copy of the internet, and anything digital in that matter is designed and made. and this whole pocket universe, with everything that ever was, is called at first the AL3ph or Aleph. i think it is a clever reference.
as the concept is kinda similair to the shu ulathoi
Imo there is very clearly a second great power in the universe that challenges the Combine the Gman seems to work for whoever that other power is. The Gman does what he can to undermine the Combine on Earth and apparently has clients he works for seems like this other power has hired Gman to be a problem for the Combine.
Perhaps there is huge war going on that we never see that Earth is just one tiny part of the war and we do not even know it.
Or maybe The Combine is in a cold war with this is great power and so both do underhanded things to sabotage each other and the Gman is one such underhanded method.
The other power cannot directly help Earth so they send the Gman.
ahh, yes, a Skyrionn Half-Life lore video on a Saturday. Good stuff.
Fun fact the combine over watch soldiers used to be humanoid aliens that were in those suits. That was the original idea that they were going to go for but then they just made him human augments. For my own sake I like to say that some of them are human augments and I like to say that the soldiers that we see in the game are not human they're kind of like humanoids from other planets and dimensions that are just humanoid soldiers being used as a battle platform. I don't know it just makes it sound cooler to me when you think of it like that. It truly makes them alien like they're some kind of political military enforcer on a planet.
I think the qz combine deserve more of an explanation like the "unseen lore" since there is no official explanation on specific things.
Lemme explain
So we know that the combine units deployed in the qz come in the 4 variations, but in the files of there voicelines, its shown that they would use tactics that would emotionally manipulate unfortunate victims, in a scene of HLA it can be heard that the combine grunts are calling out for Alyx pretending to be some sort of friendly, whats interesting for that is that ALL units have voicelines for that specific task as well, which are gone unused.
Going further with the idea of unused voicelines there are the unusued charger voicelines, lines of switching weapons and charging towards the player hence the name, there was a cut feature that would include the charger running at the player while wielding a stunstick to strike the player.
There is still more lore that can be speculated around the grunts from hla as well, from one single death voiceline that cant be heard in game but only seen in the captions, one line the grunt cant say when killed by the player is "im sorry", this fact alongside the other voicelines the grunt has showcases that he is the least augmented like the captain, suppressor, and charger, but enough to complete decent tasks within the quarantine zone.
More hidden lore that can be found is about the workers, theres so much we can speculate from just the scenery and destruction when playing through, you can find dozens of dead grunts and works alongside each other showcasing that covering up the qz is not an easy task, and in some parts you can see them using some sort of device to spray against the xen fauna covering the walls, those tanks that are filled up are seen in the antlion section of the game where its showing antlions being extracted from there sacks right into those said tanks.
Whats interesting about the antlions is that they are all slow and heavy, a lot more bulky than the hl2 variations, this can be supported by the nests that they build which are on the surface of the qz, which means whatever the combine extract from the antlions, they turn that mix into fluids used by the workers to wipe out the xen flora and fauna.
Straying away from all that, the big question is why we dont see any of these soldiers outside the qz and in hl2, well I think tge answer to that is they were deployed somewhere else, by the time hl2 came around, city 17 was probably finished and the only thing they needed was less troops to worry about which is why they only use cps and standard transhuman soldiers, which by that time the city grunts were not needed and the qz units were probably deployed else where in other quarantine zones, I dont believe one bit that the suppressor and wallhammer would evolve into the hl2 soldiers, especially from how effective they are shown in hla.
Now is all that I explained canon? It can be, valve themselves have conflicted with there own lore, but the way I explained things can definitely explain how city 17 and everything would be different the time hl2 comes around, best possibility to make everything in hla canon to exist in hl2 somewhere else in the world.
Another note, cmdrrileysv4000 shows a lot of cut content from hla which could definitely add some more lore to what the combine could've added or already added by just arent seen
Spot on. The Combine forces we see in Half Life 2 and its episodes id believe is literally just a skeleton crew. No need to have the whole army on a already dying planet
You’re a really good story teller
Thank you!
I wonder if the combine sent any "TRANSHUMANS" (soldiers, and Elites) back to their overworld?
Likely given how Half Like Alyx Mention off world Assignment.
The designs are still so cool. It all holds up well 20 years later.
He sure knows how to yapp for hours to make content in a good way.
That's crazy.. It's reminds me of one leader of Earth who keeps yapping on the screen all day 🤯
Breen was spreading the values of our benefactors. We needed to here those valuable insights
Scariest part is that the possibility of a similar event is also probable in real life, Hawking was literally warning us for such threats.
I still feel like Alix pushing the story forward, serving as a retcon to the LAST thing that happened in the story.... They must be working on something, right? Why push it forward, why change Eli`s fate?
Excellent video! Great visuals, clear speaking, and a fun script to follow along with. I'm a huge Half Life junkie and even I was able to learn a few niche details here and there. Thanks Skyrionn!
With fictional settings like this I often find myself wondering what I would do if I was there. As much as I'd love to think I would resist, I don't think I would have the emotional fortitude for it. I'd probably end up in "an eternity's repose". It brings peaceful thoughts, does it not?
The Combine as a species are so terrifyingly overpowered its unreal…Idk how I forgot they didn’t just go from planet to planet but UNIVERSE TO UNIVERSE 😂 It’s hard to imagine anything beating them tbh…They’ve harnessed so much of the multiverse’s perfect manifestations of power…
The Combine are living MY dream 😂 Except a more surreal, alien synth death metal version…
I love this channel
Thanks for being here
You never fail to put out good videos. You put in such effort and your love for Half Life doesn't seem to ever die. Hope Half Life 3 comes out soon, and when it does, I can't wait to see what you'll make from it. Keep up the amazing work, Skyrionn!
Half-Life 3 could be in the works. We hope anyway. Thanks for being here every week
One video I would love to see you cover is a video going over the lore of the Combine synths
Noted!
Yessss another Half Life video!! What a great thing to wake up to.
Headcanon: The Combine becomes the Jarts in Greg Bear's Eon series.
I was always amazed they never made a movie or series based on this lore. Pretty rich material.
In my mind, all the events throughout the Half-Life games are carefully orchestrated by the G-man and his employers, who appear to consider the Combine their enemy. They probably came to the same conclusion that the Combine is unbeatable through conventional means, but since they are able to look through space and time, they're able to find a sequence of events that needs to play out to lead to their downfall (think Avengers: Endgame or BioShock: Infinite). G-man is directly responsible for the Resonance Cascade, as well as well as the uprising in City 17 20 years later. The famous words 'the right man in the wrong place' signify a big part of the strategy. Guerrilla warfare on a spacetime scale, targeting and destabilizing critical moments in history where divergent points can occur. It doesn't entirely explain his capture during Alyx, or what exactly his intended plan was during Episode 1 and 2 before the Vortigaunts stopped him. But everything hints at the fact that he's been manipulating the progress at Black Mesa to set in motion a set of events that could eventually lead to the Combine's downfall. But, as we're talking a war on a dimensional level we can't even comprehend, it probably wouldn't end very well for Earth. In the end we'd probably end up as a useful tool that outlives its usefulness as soon as the Combine are defeated, and left to die.
Finally someone noticed that the gunship looks like a dolphin's genus.
I love the Combine so much, I even adopted one of the code names a generic unit can get, Sweeper Zero.
Combine is extremely interesting for me, what they do, how they operate. Tactics, lore, mechanics. I love these fellas. ❤
Ok, this is my favorite one so far. The videos about The Combine Lore are the best of this channel IMO.
Glad you like them! Could be more to come
You've become one of my favorite content creators
1:08 ow man this view is so beautiful
Ngl falling asleep to this - rewatching / relistening to sleep to again
😂
the scariest part about them is that we only saw in Half Life 2, Episode 2 and Alyx, thats all in one country, they have a Multiverse worth os units.
God i love this long half life lore videos, subbed.
I keep needing to remind myself that this game came out in 2004. I remember neighbors buying computers just to play this and having everyone come over to see it in it's full glory. Those were the days!
I love your vids
Hope viewer appreciation still means something to you
Hey thanks. Absolutely!
I appreciate you watching ☺️
The entire video no annoying "where" but in the end 2 times :D Still a good vid, nice job dude :)
Massive amounts of boron can mess with a star if you have enough of it, iron would also work but you would probably need more mass than you would boron. Good way to deal with a dyson sphere.
how you gonna get the boron into the star if it's surrounded by a dyson sphere
@@bluegum6438 As you could see, its not completely enclosed.
@@morlanius more of a Dyson net then really
I have a theory that the combine conquest was initially peacefull for the first couple worlds or even the first few universes
When other races where still almost as advenced as the combine
Way before a civilazation would be an ant in comparison
Those days where long gone by the time they discovered the Nihilanths species hovewer...
Also i think the advisors aren't even at the top
That's how op the universal union is
Interesting theory - anything could have happened in those early years
Bro was like: you know what. No more single video ima make a movie of LOOOOOOOORRRRRRRREEEEEE and the combine
25:40 Awesome, thanks for this lore, didn't know that. We do have a place in the union :)
3:42 more headcanon. In another universe by Iain M Banks The Combine ruler race is called The Culmina.
Also super classified: Black Mesa invented Catboys and Catgirls but never released the research.
If Judith helped the Combine of Nova Prospekt make a teleporter, how did the Combine NOT have the technology?
Nice video! Liked it!
Thanks!
Love your content man, you are amazing as hell, thanks for you and your job man. Wish you all the best.✨
Thanks for watching the videos. I appreciate you! I love putting this stuff together because I love the series
The shaluathoi essentially invented their own little matrix
Criminally underrated channel
The moment the Combine try and go against aperture/GLaD0s will be something nuts.
Combine soldiers just trying to get through the front door only to be squished by crushers and panels..
My question would be... what the civilians even worked (at/for) because factories aren't really used...
The Combine are a cosmic horror. Beating them is not a matter of destroying them them, but banish them. Human can never hope to truly "defeat" the Combine, as the Overwatch is not even the true Combine army, its just an local occupation force made of mostly human (well "human") troops.
Yeah. I think a lot of people don’t realize that the Combine forces we see on Earth during the events of HL2 aren’t even the true Combine military power. It’s merely an occupation force that’s mostly designed specifically for Earth and its environment. It was put in place after their invasion forces conquered humanity in the 7 Hour War and probably how they do it for all the worlds they occupy.
We know very little about what these forces actually looked like and how powerful they really are.
That is true, they are just the human arm of a greater body..
Something I think about from time to time since I like listening to sci-fi e books and a fan of the half-life series is what if two hyperaggressive civilizations such as the Combine and the Qu of the novel All Tomorrows would interact or conquer one another.
It's actually kinda weird the Combine have such difficulty finding a way to Xen considering it seems to be just about any other species first stop in inter-universe traveling by default. Even seemingly unintelligent species like headcrabs managed to find a way to Xen somehow, yet the Combine just skipped by it and never figured out how to find it?
Also, why do they even permit the existence of non-combined humans? Why not just move in and "upgrade" everyone as we appear to be entirely useless to them as-is? It's not like it's for breeding purposes 'cause they could easily manage that themselves and actively suppress that function in their captive yet unconverted population 🤔
The combine may have the same flesh but not the same mind