Suffering from blogger’s paralysis, wanting to talk about five different things but having no preference as to which, I’ll just stick with the theme. This is a bit silly, of course, Episode Two being six months off, but Dabs mentioned something I’d forgotten, and I looked it up, and he’s right. Raising The Bar, the superb coffee-table book about Half-Life 2′s development, mentions that at one point a large section of the game was set in an arctic base, called Weather Control. Examining a scan of a map sketch, it even mentions a ‘Judith at Weather Control’ scene.

I don’t think we’re going there in Episode Two – it’s a whole new country and Episode Two is already introducing a very large and very different environment, but we’ve been shown it now, and I really buy the idea that they’d finish the trilogy in a very different kind of place. Also of note are two aspects of Valve’s design philosophy: a) that the player should see where he’s going to end up long before he gets there (mentioned in Raising The Bar), and b) that you don’t show the player something cool then deny him it (mentioned in Gamespot’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life 2, I think). Wherever the climax of Half-Life 2: Episodes, we’ll glimpse it well in advance, and whenever it happens, we will go to Weather Control.

My final, third piece of evidence is one of the most universal tenets of videogame cliché: all expansion packs, however they’re delivered, must take you to a snowy environment.

I’m not sure how far they got with the section when it was going to be a part of Half-Life 2 – the name makes it sound like it served a Combine function like the Air Exchange, which had a lot built around it before it was cut – but there’s a short story by Marc Laidlaw in there written as inspirational material for the section. Sort of like textual concept art. It describes an intense climactic battle between Combine reinforcements who’ve tracked down the main rebel force, a last stand by the latter. Snowstorms and ice explosions. Enticing.