Information Half-Life: New America - Announcement



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AN ORIGINAL HALF-LIFE SETTING


It's been known for some time now that HL2 has been at the tips of our tongues, and this conversation only grows as the occasional peak on someone's steam game activity shows them on a private development server, or new content packs have been seen being uploaded. We've also played a hand in deliberate teasing from the abundance of writing that's popped up on the forums as well as a few memes and inconspicuous advisor avatars. Now it's time for us to pull back the curtains and show the fruits of our labor.

However, in this thread, I will not be announcing a new TnB HL2RP. In the same vein that what many call ZRP 1 was in fact Paroxysm, a setting that grew away from just simply the zombie genre, we too have made something uniquely different, yet still the Half-Life you know. We've hand-crafted a project we hope to see succeed where recent endeavors have not, and to embark on a new journey for TnB as a community to explore for the years ahead.



The Where: City 107: The American Midwest

TacoNBanana's new up and coming roleplay server, Half-Life: New America takes place somewhere within the former United States- knowledge of the city's exact location lost to years under occupation. This setting is not just a cosmetic and scenic change, but also a revamping of how the Combine might address the specific infrastructure left behind by Americans with its vehicle dependency, widespread populations and second amendment culture. America is a rebel nation, and thus its subjects could not be tamed with the same tactics that subdued City 17 and outlying environs.

The setting also ties heavily into the aftermath of the Black Mesa incident, and the lasting effect it had on the continent. Portal storms grew in strength and frequency over the years, and an ever-growing radius has seeped from the ruins of New Mexico and enveloped over sixty percent of the former United States. This area, referred to as the "North American Exclusion Zone" by the Combine, has forced numerous withdrawals from urban centers throughout the west and even on occasion outright abandonment of the citizens in those areas, left to be consumed by the raging portal tempests.

This influx of refugees being relocated east has both caused the Combine to move greater and greater numbers overseas to Europe and abroad and to reactivate previous urban centers that were disbanded for their own individual reasons. One such city is City 107, our setting's central location and a backwater, largely insignificant dot on the Combine's map. Few people know the city's old name, only that it is assumed to be near water. The city itself lacks a citadel, depending instead on a citadel nearby that has just as many other minor urban centers under its purview. While the city is by no means loosely controlled, it is, however, just another city logistically.

Within the city is a place greatly inspired by Man in The High Castle's familiar yet distinguishably discomforting atmosphere that contrasts from the America that was and paints a grim reality for the America that is. Beyond the city is a setting largely inspired by the overgrown, abandoned cities of The Last of Us and the treacherous and unpredictable wilds of the Zone of STALKER fame.



The When: Setting Timeline and Launch Roadmap

IC: The Black Mesa incident occurred in the year 2003, and was later proceeded a few months later by the Seven Hour War. As of the day the server launches, it will have been eighteen years since the war ended and the occupation of Earth began. The Civil Police Initiative became the Civil Protection Program as an arm of the Combine Civil Authority sometime in the late 2000s, and Overwatch having emerged sometime within the last five years. The present day is 2021.

OOC: The official launch date is still undecided, as we are waiting for a few uncertain variables to click into place before we decide when the gates will open, but we are looking to launch the city server sometime this month on a weekend. A few weeks after that we will follow up with the opening of a second server for the outskirts just at the limits of the city or beyond it, and a few weeks after that we will open up a third server to represent the American wilderness in its savage, Xen-touched form. We do this not with the expectation that TnB will fill three servers every day or even two, but rather with the understanding that the population will shift between these locations, and that the mere accessibility to travel between these locations ultimately enhances the overall roleplay experience of the setting no matter the server you're on.

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The What: Server Content, New & Upcoming Features

HLNA is receiving a massive overhaul in content, and is receiving a great deal of new features to enhance roleplay as well as give those who aren't quite the administrator type to still benefit from the use of tools often used by admins for events. The servers will be ran on the Eternity script made originally by TankNut for City 45 HL2RP and Halo RP, now modified by Drewerth for use in this setting.


Models: HLNA is receiving a facelift in clothing and faction models. Using predominantly Half-Life: Alyx assets as well as assets from ZRP and other things, Erkor has given us an entirely new selection of clothing to choose from, as well as new Civil Protection models and Half-Life Alyx COTA models. Scott/Puffin has also taken the time to rip various models from Half-Life Alyx to enhance atmosphere in the city, expand options for item models and also a plethora of resources for Xen-infested areas that will be making a frequent appearance in the setting.

Languages: HLNA comes with an expanded list of 32 different human language traits in addition to English that can be selected upon character creation, as well as semi-OOC Xenian/Race X languages for event communications between players. Players can also acquire bilingual dictionaries which, upon equipping into the Misc Item slot, will allow you to speak and understand a specific language in addition to your chosen trait for as long as that dictionary is equipped. Vortigaunts have also been bestowed with the ability to speak and understand all languages in addition to their own Vortigese.

GM Permissions: Rather than having a whole new GM usergroup, the server will enable administrators to permanently or temporarily assign permissions to a player to assist them in curating events independently of admins. These permissions include but may not be limited to observe permissions, /ev and lev permissions, custom item permissions, playurl permissions and vehicle permissions.

Xenians and other aliens: The script comes with a diverse selection of transform items that can be equipped on the Xenian slot to turn you into a variety of Xen creatures, each equipped with a full pallette of soundbytes that can be played during events.

Quirks: Quirks are a completely optional third field that can be filled out to discretely share secret information regarding your character's background or personality archetype to event managers and admins alike to be used in events to enhance the server experience to your specific character. You can write in your own quirk, or randomly generate one and receive a completely randomized quirk from a list of premade ones. You can also leave it empty and fill it out later after you've made the character.



The Who: Project Planners and Contributors

Before I wrap this up, I want to give a shoutout to everyone who directly or indirectly helped with the planning and creative process on this project. There weren't just lore writers and faction people, but also mappers, graphic designers, sound designers and modelers who all came out to give this their best. (Let me know if I forgot anything below, I tried to get everyone.)

Slug - writing this thread
Drewerth - Script development
Blooregardo - Lore writing, gmod posing & sound design
Wester - Lore writing & Vortigaunt faction design
Owain - Lore writing
Puffin - Lore writing & modeling
Erkor - Lore writing, Overwatch faction design & modeling
Pirate - Lore writing, CA faction design & j e e p
Emelianenko - Lore writing, graphic design
Ammo - Lore writing
Raspberry - Forcing Skyrim to do terrible things, general faction design
elf - Lore writing & Vortigaunt faction design
Nap - CCA faction design
7dast - Lore writing & Resistance faction design
Sinclair - Lore writing & gmod posing
Zippo Raid - Graphic design
BelowtheBelt - Lore writing
Feelsgoodman - Lore writing & CA faction design
SgtChico - Lore writing & CCA faction design
Wheatos - Lore writing, CA faction design & mapping
Zombiedude - Lore writing
Saetia - Sound design
Valerstein - Sound design
Jeezabelle - Graphic design
Mooondy - Graphic design & sound design
Scramble - Simphys vehicle creation
Vosk - Lore writing, mapping
Miguh - Lore writing

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More information regarding factions, pre-launch sign-ups, lore and more will come in the days and weeks ahead.​
 
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To begin with everyone is going to be a citizen. If you have a particularly good idea, post an auth. But nobody is going to be a pre-established rebel. Nobody starting in the outlands.
 
Characters not knowing what city they're in is kind of silly considering not everyone was just born and even those who were can hear about the past from others. Players not knowing what city we're in is just annoying. Let's just call it Chicago. Valuable city to the Combine, lake access if we want to do open water events (throwback to Bones), rural farmland a short trek away.
 
Or anywhere in Chicago. We can do the map city number = precinct number thing. i17 as the North end because beach for example.
 
eighteen years of defacing cities and mass-relocating populations and shuffling everyone around all over the place would be pretty effective at disorienting people into wondering where the hell they are

might be a bit easier if the city was nyc or chicago or cincinnati but whats to say that the city isnt one of those major, recognizable cities? you wouldnt know.

city 17’s location was hidden for the longest time until people aligned the HLA streetmap perfectly with sofia, bulgaria. its not something players are conceptually unfamiliar with
 
Maps aren't sorted but god help us if we end up back on i17 again. I'd like to keep it vague, you can take cultures from multiple cities and do what you want. It opens up more opportunities to be in more places, you're not restricted by 'ah but thats too far to go to on foot from chicago' or something similar. Also anyone who isn't American probably wouldn't be able to tell.
 
Even if not a single person knew the architecture and geography of a city I can't imagine no one saying "Lake? Chicago." Or "River? St. Louis."
 
think lakes and rivers would look pretty different considering the combine have been draining them
 
I get your gripe BMY and I would probably have the same one if it were set somewhere close to me in Canada, but nothing is stopping you from saying it is wherever you think it is IC, I just don't agree that pinning us down necessarily adds anything.
 
In HL2 the game the whole sea was drained like 15 feet and you could see pretty clearly where the water was due to the banks and docks. I imagine that would be the case again. And when you're talkint about Chicago it's massive shipping yards that wouldn't get missed.
 
I get your gripe BMY and I would probably have the same one if it were set somewhere close to me in Canada, but nothing is stopping you from saying it is wherever you think it is IC, I just don't agree that pinning us down necessarily adds anything.
Honestly on TRP the exact whereabouts at any time has been important to a character that I played and surely has been important to people involved in the various Western factions. Even if you insist that no characters can tell what city they're in, just picking one OOC gives us a foundation for coming up with backstories, bits of culture, etc.
 
I don't really get this premise that people would recognize the city they're in. It's pretty much a hl2 staple that the citizens have no fucking idea what they're even doing. You literally get your reasoning for this in the first level of hl2... it's a combination of constantly moving humans around in the few remaining (combine protected cities), drugging their water supply and over 20 years of suppression of culture, identity and anything remotely old world. Half life alyx goes further with this by showing a globe marked up from where the CCA has shifted people about. The best a bunch of Harvard and MIT graduates can do is say they're somewhere in Eastern Europe in hl2, as shown with alyx putting eastern Europe in a big circle.


The only citizens who show any semblance of awareness is the 'don't drink the water, they put something in it to make you forget. I don't even remember how I got here" guy and the "the trains are always arriving but they never have anyone on, but they're always leaving but no one ever gets on..." guy, both of whom would likely be seen as nutters. They clearly stopped taking their drug laced beverages, but it's still left them with no idea where they are because they've been subject to years and years of constant relocation.

There's actually historical precedence for this as well, the Chinese and Soviet governments under their more Stalinist Communist regimes were well known for constantly moving people around to keep them from being too 'comfortable' as to incite political concern. It's completely plausible.

Furthermore I think we see a pretty pacified outside in hl2, but America was the very heart of the Xenian catastrophe. Without a doubt, America would be absolutely unrecognizable. Cities wouldn't just be unrecognizable, nobody would care lol. It'd be like people giving a shit about a pile of rubble. I mean the best we could say is... identifying nearby water, but...why? Why would that matter when the old world is literally fucked?
 
It's fine that most people don't know which city we're in. Obviously there are a few original residents left who definitively know, but there's probably just as many people speculating and repeating wrong rumours so that very few people are sure.

More importantly, most citizens probably don't care to play detective with geography. For them, their only experience with the city is as City 107, and particularly for those immigrants from outside the former US it may as well be any Midwest City. It doesn't really matter what it was twenty years ago since it doesn't affect their lives today.
 
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I don't really get this premise that people would recognize the city they're in. It's pretty much a hl2 staple that the citizens have no fucking idea what they're even doing. You literally get your reasoning for this in the first level of hl2... it's a combination of constantly moving humans around in the few remaining (combine protected cities), drugging their water supply and over 20 years of suppression of culture, identity and anything remotely old world. Half life alyx goes further with this by showing a globe marked up from where the CCA has shifted people about. The best a bunch of Harvard and MIT graduates can do is say they're somewhere in Eastern Europe in hl2, as shown with alyx putting eastern Europe in a big circle.


The only citizens who show any semblance of awareness is the 'don't drink the water, they put something in it to make you forget. I don't even remember how I got here" guy and the "the trains are always arriving but they never have anyone on, but they're always leaving but no one ever gets on..." guy, both of whom would likely be seen as nutters. They clearly stopped taking their drug laced beverages, but it's still left them with no idea where they are because they've been subject to years and years of constant relocation.

There's actually historical precedence for this as well, the Chinese and Soviet governments under their more Stalinist Communist regimes were well known for constantly moving people around to keep them from being too 'comfortable' as to incite political concern. It's completely plausible.

Furthermore I think we see a pretty pacified outside in hl2, but America was the very heart of the Xenian catastrophe. Without a doubt, America would be absolutely unrecognizable. Cities wouldn't just be unrecognizable, nobody would care lol. It'd be like people giving a shit about a pile of rubble. I mean the best we could say is... identifying nearby water, but...why? Why would that matter when the old world is literally fucked?
The precedence in our HL2RP has been that it's not that hard to catch word of where you are. But the water's a good point, maybe more of us should have been roleplaying memory loss.
I still really think it would be beneficial for us as players to know where the city is though.
 
we discussed this in length while planning and determined there are a lot more benefits for leaving the location vague than there is specifying it

as raspberry said you’re free to assume its X or Y. but dont expect it to be named at least not until much, much later.
 
Honestly on TRP the exact whereabouts at any time has been important to a character that I played and surely has been important to people involved in the various Western factions. Even if you insist that no characters can tell what city they're in, just picking one OOC gives us a foundation for coming up with backstories, bits of culture, etc.

People didn't have the same problem when people were in City 17. What gives?

What stops you from simply just playing somebody originally from Chicago if you wish to pursue that character so much?

We had Bulgarian characters awhile back that never knew City 17 was canon wise in Sofia, Bulgaria. There was rumors of it before Alyx even confirmed it.

So why wanting it so much to be anchored down to one place when we haven't shown a single river or lake? I wouldn't know. Hey, we could be in Michigan. Or Canada?

And why would we want to put so much emphasis on people being fully ingrained in the geography of the area when the Combine specializes in moving people about to the point where even a place like Sofia is literally crowded with Americans. I say these questions to you as answers, because that's what made us reach to that conclusion of letting it be vague. America is a different beast as well. Don't get too comfy with the familiar. The whole continent can be very different. It can be theorized as ground zero of the whole Combine invasion, and who knows what happened to the country entirely?

If you want answers, find out in RP. We may just find out ourselves along with you.
 
I actually think that's been kinda a flaw BMY BMY in past iterations. It's way more Combine-y and terrifying to have this overbearing force break down your ability to even know where you are than to go "Haha yeah we're in Tokyo. Haha we're in Reykjavik" that other iterations have done. Don't get me wrong it's not like...critical, but it does help create a sense of unstoppable behavior from the CCA side of things. The CCA just becomes a visiting force imo when we do that.

Of course narratively I'm more than positive there'll be plenty to bite into in bread crumbs left behind to help nail down a general location of things.
 
I want to say that I'm glad BMY's asking things like these so that we can address them and you know, see how ya'll feel about things.

I ain't here to tell you, no, that's the wrong way to have fun. Or no, you're wrong. Here's the counterargument. Here's what we experienced personally. I'm listening to your feedback. We're gonna take it into account and keep it in mind. So, while this thread isn't a Q&A - especially since I don't want to even potentially throw about any spoilers - don't feel shy to say or ask anything, and when the server comes, I hope you enjoy being there. A lot of people are breaking their backs for this one, and they don't need pity commendations because you're gonna see the fruits of their labor. You've seen some of it already.

I've never seen a team so damn motivated.
 

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