Waiting

The full-sized picture is 2048 x 1536, and is available for download. It looks good just letting Windows resize it to your desktop.

Abandoned buildings fascinate me for some reason. The ones in Half-Life 2 (along the coast, in particular) stir my curiosity and interest in the same way. I love games where you don't feel as though the world centers on you...the ones that give you a sense of things playing out beyond your sight or influence.

Before you leave New Little Odessa, Colonel Odessa Cubbage tells you that he believes the 'Bridge' has likely fallen under Combine control...but it's about the only former rebel outpost that doesn't really show signs of battle. There are no dead bodies laying around. All the Combine you fight seem to arrive at the same time as you...one runs out of a small building near where you enter this area, the rest are in the buildings further down the road, next to the rail bridge. The dropship hasn't even left yet when you approach this place. There are a few Zombies and several Headcrabs hanging around, but it's hard to tell if they were involved in the conquering of this outpost. Zombies and Headcrabs seem to move around quite a bit, and there are no Headcrab canisters... So what happened to the former inhabitants? Did they become Zombies? Were they executed by the Combine, and their bodies thrown off the cliffs? Or were they captured and dragged off to some possibly worse fate?

Rather than killing everyone in battle, it's obvious that the Combine do (at least occasionally) go to the trouble of capturing some of the more "run-of-the-mill" humans. When Alyx Vance is searching the monitors in Nova Prospekt for her father, you see plenty of citizens and rebels being held in prisoner pods. There are a few places later in the game where you find rebels held behind force fields or locked inside chain link fences (usually with a bunch of prisoner pods nearby).

This bunch were probably taken off guard. They're all filthy...and almost certainly doomed. I'm sure they know about the horrible things that could (will) happen to them. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one made a run for it as they're lead to the dropship. Nothing those soldiers could do now would be worse than what will happen once they arrive at their destination...right?

I've probably put more work into this picture than any other I've done in Gmod. The dropship in the background is the same one that takes off as you arrive in the game. I tried and eventually gave up on posing a ragdoll instead. I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but that sucker just would NOT bend the way I wanted it. The use of the 'live' dropship led to some cussing, since almost every time I loaded up my save to resume work on this scene, I forgot to disable the AI first, and the dropship would fly away by the time I made it out of the tunnel. The Combine and humans are all ragdolls. The grime and blood/injuries on the characters was done in Photoshop. I also had to fix the nearest girl's arm when I edited the picture, since bending it that far made her upper arm appear jagged and warped. A huge part of my editing was making it look as though the sun is coming from a different direction than it is in the game. This picture should be happening at a different time than when Dr. Freeman passes through...perhaps earlier in the day. None of the shadows were in-game. I illuminated this side of the house with a light and Photoshopped all the shadows. I also figured out how to set my resolution at a much higher level than what my monitor supports. Only a quarter of the screen was visible and it lagged like hell, but it allowed me to get a very high-resolution screen capture. The Depth of Field blurring was also done in Photoshop.

Half-Life belongs to Valve.