G-man is one of the laziest pieces of writing I have ever seen in anything...

What are examples of properly mysterious characters then?

Plebs should leave.

Cigarette Smoking Man from The X Files
Even when his name was revealed it was only an acronym

Yet it's the only character I ever wanted so bad to know who and what he is

I meant from video games.
The only thing I remember from X-Files is how fucking hot agent girl was.

Not everything is jew jew/Lost level retarded "mystery"

Pic related?
shadow client from hitman '16

If you knew who he was, he would be a bad mib inspired character.

but yeah, its fucking dumb regardless. That sounds about right. Characters like that where popular for a while. I think everyone got tired of the bullshit.

When is HL3 coming out?

If you don't care about video games why are you on a video game board?

I just like the way he talks.

That's all.

I have no fucking clue about new Hitman.
If anything daodan system from Oni was pretty mysterious, since it was never properly explained and it manifested differently in different characters. I thought it was cool as fuck.

After episode 3

In Ep 1 epilogue you see him talking to your target shortly before you actually killed the guy
in Ep 2 epilogue he's in a parking lot in the backseat of a guy talking with his boss on the phone regarding your ep 2 targets and taking a "key" from the dude killing him afterwards
in Ep 3 epilogue you see important looking old men distressed over a break-in that they didn't know about as all the keys were ""accounted for"", vault is emptied and ransacked

People who go on a videogame discussion board might have an interest in videogames. Amazing, isn't it?

I think they did it pretty good with Gaunter in Witcher 3

You and people like you are why writing in modern sci-fi and fantasy has plummeted along with discourse about it. Kill yourself.

this game is pretty good

the question is, why wouldn't the g-man be interested in him. his natural ability to survive all situations isn't something to pass up. opposing force sequel when. no, prospekt doesn't count.

see

and

you opinion does not matter, mysterious characters have roles just like the mains and the supportive.

Have you ever been on /v before? The "I don't care about video games" shit has been on /v for a while. It's fucking retarded, but that's /v for you.

I doubt they ever planned to explain him in any way. That's why I like him.

This, for a more vidya related just think of Outsider from Dishonored…

GAS

No, really. Why have you not been run over yet?

It wasn't a bad take on the overarching plot but I mostly saw it as a retread of the twist at the end of Silent Assassin.

G Man is the Half Life version of Q

Not even close.

There both powerful assholes that like to mess with people and have favorites they like to keep tabs on and watch their growth.

Retards like OP is why we have nintendo lore threads. Millennials have to always make mountain out of mole hills. I just want video games to focus on fun again, not retarded NV tier "lore".

Gman isn't nearly as omnipotent as Q. Q can pretty much fuck over a planet or a full system in the blink of an eye while gman has no clear motive or established backstory. It's even implied that he works for people who have power. Gman could just be using said power on loan in order to accomplish tasks. The similarities you make aren't nearly enough to make them an equal comparisons. I'de equivocate the high ranked followers that serve the Dominion in DS9 more to Gman. Or one of the many secret societies every government seems to have. Comparing Gman to Q would be like comparing a school bus to cheese because they're both yellow.

Pls no

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Well if it doesn't have writing, and it doesn't have gameplay then what does it have?

Ok soundtrack.

dafuq? team fortress and portal dose not have gameplay? I'm shock!

hes a 4th dimensional being

I mean, if its suppose to be "beyond our comprehension" then sure, or some type of god creature find. They don't ever really say that. I was pretty set on the fact he was just a happy alien merchant with a kick ass teleporter in his briefcase, or high phyker powers and shit. Nothing god like, but basically would require a bit more fire power then small arms and different types of rocket launchers.

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Q works for the Q council and they have taken his powers away before. So far they have displayed the same powers time stop and teleport anywhere. Also Q isnt omnipotent he has been tricked before.

g-man's a nigger?!

/thread

By the end of HL2 you should have a pretty good idea of the G-Man's nature and motivations. The only real mysteries left are his endgame in regards to the Combine and Resistance, which probably would have become apparent by the end of Episode 3, and his employers, which would be left as a plot-hook for any future games.
Laidlaw's recent ramblings can be safely ignored.

Could be many things but he seems to me to simply be the Orz from Starcontrol 2.

A "finger" of an extra dimensional being. Easy motive would be to come fully into our dimension and do whatever it is he wants, since with more than just a finger worth of power he would be a god.

Valve doesn`t exactly hides what he is, at the end of HL1 they outright imply what he is and what are his motives ffs.

No he isn`t, being capable of manipulate this dimension doesn`t qualify him as such, shit it doesn`t even qualify him as some esoteric element considering the established HL universe when fucking humans invented reality bending tech. G-MAN clearly is a species of alien working at some level for the COMBINE that has an agenda of his own, Vortigaunts those friendly aliens being able to mess with GMAN at the end of episode 2 proves he isn`t anything that special as a divine being.

On an unrelated note, god i hate nova prospekt.
I love hl2 but once you get to that first tower defense turret section the game just turns into a complete shitshow until you reach the citadel.

A mystery without an answer is fucking gay ass bullshit. Look at Lost, another Jew Jew show.

OP is right in that you need to have some clues and things to work with. A mystery with no answer or clues isn't a mystery, it's bullshit.

Yes. And they could probably destroy more than the universe if they wanted. That's not really a comparative power.
Gman is prohibited often actually. By a previously enslaved alien race no less.
And? On a comparative level Q is omnipotent.

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Thought he was confirmed human? Seems to me like they were were setting him up to be connected to the Borealis somehow. From Laidlaw's description of the ship - it exists spread out across time and space - spanning a spectrum of possible futures and probable pasts. He seemed like he'd be the agent of some potential future human or alien organization that has technology similar to the Borealis, but fully understood and functional, and he was either setting up events to make sure a certain series of past events took place - or preventing a series of future events from unfolding.

Not saying it's not lazy. It's the old Time Cop schtick, but that's the direction it seemed like he was aiming for. Maybe he was just a meta for the developers - setting up the events of the games for his organization (Valve), and his whole character is just a big in-joke.

You're right, smart people knew it always was.

No nigger, don't you understand what "omnipotent" means?

He's a direct homage to The Twilight Zone.

Moreover, just because you might not understand him (and your frustration from your lack of understanding is, well, understandable) doesn't make him a bad character. Unless you haven't been paying attention to the overall theme that's alluded to over and over and over again throughout both games.

We already have enough clues as to what Gman is: Basically an inter-dimensional CIA agent. He gets paid, in whichever way an inter-dimensional alien wants to be paid, to destabilize timelines, topple alien dictatorships, create and support insurgencies spanning entire planets, and collect people of interest to do what he can't. In Episode 2 he said something about "[agreeing] to abide to certain restrictions" when it came to using his powers.
In Half Life 1 he was tasked to orchestrate the Resonance Cascade, which would set Gordon on a path to kill the Nihilanth. This would leave Xen wide open to be captured by, say, a multi-dimensional empire like the Combine. It is extremely likely they were the clients of whoever Gman works for at this point in time.
In Half Life 2 the Combine came after Sol when it discovered traces of humans and their portals in Xen. By this time the Combine Empire is at a size its neighbors consider to be extremely threatening, so they call up the Space CIA to fix it. Gman gets contracted to liberate Earth, but can only do so through the planet's own means. There cannot be any evidence suggesting Space CIA had any direct influence over Humanity's reclamation of Earth. Man technically has to do it themselves, so Gman pulls Gordon out of stasis to do the more direct roles he isn't allowed to do himself. At the end of Half Life 2, Gman receives another contract which we never learn about because the Vortigaunts intervene to take Alyx and Gordon for themselves. The Vortigaunts aren't doing this because they are nice guys. They need the two to help kill off the rest of the Combine and assist Black Mesa East with other things, which wouldn't happen if Alyx died and Gordon was tossed back into stasis for his next job.
During Episode 2, Gman was kept away from Gordon by the Vortigaunts, since they needed him to help out the Rebellion. Gman could still observe Gordon, but couldn't contact him until after the Vorts tended to Alyx after she got injured. He tells Gordon he needs some small repayment from his initial investment in keeping Alyx safe her whole life (He rescues her when she was a kid I think), which would also help keep gordon alive as well. Gman tells Alyx to tell Eli "prepare for unforseen consequences". If I remember correctly Eli says something about being told those words by Gman right before the resonance cascade. Later on, White Forest gets attacked and two Combine Advisors kill Eli."Unforseen Consequences either mean the White Forest attack itself, or Eli's death. Either way, Unforseen Consequences refer to an event which starts another chapter in the Half Life story.
During the events of the canceled Episode 3, Alyx forces Gordon to help her board and arm the time-traveling Borealis. The plan is to make it teleport into the Combine homeworld and detonate it wherever their base of operations is, as revenge for her dead dad and I guess everyone else the combine killed too. As the two are soaring through time and space on course for collision, Gman appears and greets alyx saying "[they] have places to do, and things to be". Oddly, he just leaves Gordon on the Borealis to die in an inter-dimensional 9/11 suicide explosion. Maybe he assumed the Vortigaunts would just steal him off again, which they do, but it's weird seeing Gman just do away with an asset as provably valuable as Gordon. I guess he wasn't really that vital of an employee after all. When you get yourself captured in the last chapter of HL2, Breen does say that "[Gordon's] contract was open to the highest bidder".

tl;dr: Gman, and other entities like Gman, are Space CIA for hire. Him and his employers have no loyalty to anyone and manipulate whatever they want whenever they want, but due to unknown restrictions must do so indirectly. They do what they do mostly for profit offered by their clients, but maybe just a little bit because it's funny.

It's acceptable to shit on valve since HL2 turned out to be a disappointing piece of shit, and is outright justified ever since they pulled that paid mod faggotry.

Apparently not.

You suck, fuck off.

How's your card game coming Gabe?

G-man was implied by Breengrub (the twitter and technically the character) to be an Advisor that chose a human form after its metamorphosis. Massively powerful psychic creature that imprinted upon its genes and hatched as the "riiiiise and shine, MISter freeman" we know today.

Lost resolved itself towards the end.

HL2 was always painfully mediocre.

I've spent a decade waiting, let's just put the whole goddam thing to rest finally and leave it be.

In this post: Fat rich faggot Gabe Newell gets exceedingly butthurt when people point out shitty aspects of his shitty video games.

ITP: user unironically thinks another user from 18 hours ago is going to see his post and be like "oh damn, he owned me."

Valve never made a half-decent game and Steam is fucking cancer. Not shitting on Valve is reddit tier faggotry.

I think he's an angel.

Funny you mention him since the G-Man was based off the Smoking Man from The X-Files.

Why do people say Gordon Freeman is not only a great character, but one of the greatest characters ever? He has no character, just a device the player plays the game as.

imagine being in his footsteps, that why.

yeah we will see a lot of these since hl3 cancellation got pretty much confirmed

I do. And I'm not saying Q is Omnipitant. But he's essentially a god with the amount of power he possesses. Gman is nowhere near that shit.

Oh FFS you don't need to explain a mystery. This idea that the spectator should know everything is why Star Trek is the cancer to the sci-fi genre. Just because there's "science" in "science-fiction" doesn't mean that you have to answer every question.

I don't think so. I think he represents an enemy of the Combine, or at least a rebellious faction within it. He collects humans like Gordon as assets to be used against them. The human race is just a potential weapon to him. He doesn't care whether they live or die as long as he can use them to strike against the Combine. He introduced the energy crystals to Black Mesa not with the intention of bringing Earth under Combine rule, but to drag Earth into his war, bringing him ever closer to winning it. Maybe he and his associates are doing the same thing on other planets. Maybe the Vortigaunt's world was a prior attempt.

The greatest thing about the G-Man is he exhibits powers over space and time, yet can be angered by the actions of other characters.

He refers to others that he works with, or works for, yet insinuates that they aren't necessarily involved in the plot in any direct way.

He could be future Dr. Freeman high on some Xen spice like dune

He could be the leader of the combine, using you a symbol for the resistance in the same sense that Emmanuel Goldstein is used in 1984. Since everyone trusts you, you can be the G-Man's double agent.

Or he could be an agent of Xen, working to correct the imbalance created by the resonance cascade in HL1

Perhaps he is his own master, and is just lying to everyone.

Cool character, great design, ex…cellent speech pattern…misterrrr freeman

Dr. Eli, I'm G-Man.

Half Life was good.

Mysterious Stranger from RDR. Very cryptic, but you get let on by his words and actions with no real resolution toward the end. I personally think he is God manifested as a human, or the humanization of Marston's conscience.

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nostalgia & a large marketing budget

The Observers are such a blatant rip off of G-Man. Which I'm not completely opposed to, but you are right that their full explanation really soured them in the show. Also, reminder that Valve put Lost references in Episode 2, and HL1 is shown in Lost, and J.J. and Gabe have been on stage together talking about collaboration on games and movies, and Bad Robot added a new game mode to TF2 (has that even been added on since then?)

His briefcase contains a gun, pencils, paperwork, and an electronic ID.

Gordon was very vital, but clearly his job was done. If your theory is on track, then at the end of Episode 2 the humans have successfully defeated the Combine on Earth, and Gordon is no longer needed, so he doesn't care if he dies or gets saved by Vortigaunts or whatever. And when I say "defeated the Combine" I mean that they have been cut off from any remaining portals that could be opened to receive supplies and backup to hold Earth. They aren't all gone from the planet, but the tide has turned against them and likely won't survive forever.

The implementation of the G-Man in HL was enjoyable for me, pretty overt but a window and personification of so much more.

Valve made tons of good games. It was only after Portal 2 or the TF2 Mann Co update Valve lost all legitimacy. Valve's only true bad game was Ricochet. The rest range from average (Day of Defeat/CS: Condition Zero) to good (Everything else)

archive.is/rtzNc

I generally don't care about HL one way or another but the answer for why there is no answer is because most of the Half-life plot was there because they thought it was cool. Mark himself admitted this when asked about Game Theory's video on the G-Man. So they probably just thought the concept of the G-Man was cool, that was good enough and went with it.

Q?

The Arm from Twin Peaks

You mean the one he caused?

So it's more of the game putting the player in those situations and mainly that the game was that good in doing so. You could have put a random guard in Freeman's shoes and boom, I guess he becomes one of the greatest characters ever.

Plot/lorefags truly are the most autistic, who don't understand the very thing they devote themselves to.

memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Q

That puzzles me too, he's literally just the player themselves.

Hell, why the fuck do you think they made Freeman a glasses-wearing, dopey bearded nerd in the first place? To best appeal to the average fag who plays video games. It's a lot easier to self-insert into some 9-5 office drone with a nerdy science degree suddenly picking up a gun and becoming a badass killing machine blowing away scary aliens and muscle-bound marines who sound like the most blatant tough guy stereotypes imaginable than an actual soldier or secret agent or some shit.

Hell, the first Half-Life is probably the only video game in existence that successfully pulled off the "average guy in an extraordinary situation" plot and made it fun, probably because they didn't give too much of a shit about justifying how Gordon can suddenly shoot like a pro. Maybe he just really, REALLY didn't wanna die.

That's kinda why I hate Half-Life 2 (aside from it being dull as shit). They just took away all the wonder and "one man against the world, adventuring through weird-ass places" theme.

Traded that for a regular hero saves the world story. The difference in setting from HL1 and HL2 is like they're from two different series. Still wonder how they went about that big change in the development of the game.

I agree that humanity defeating the Combine in any capacity is fucking retarded, but at least in HL2 Gordon is completely on the run from them. The only time he goes on the offensive is when he has MAJOR backup, a.k.a. the antlions in Nova Prospekt or the entire C17 population during the Uprising. Never once does he assault the Combine alone (with the exception of the Citadel), though they should have played down the messiah a lot more than they did in the game.

On top of that, Gordon is shown to be entirely useless in the first chapter of HL2 when he lacks both his suit and a weapon, making it more believable that he really did survive when you combine the fact that he has this powerful suit available to him on top of his intelligence/adaptability.