 You must be here to take on the combine did it lad Hey, where you going? You're getting fuzzy around the Good evening Lost Coast is a short free add-on for Half-Life 2 that was released in October of 2005 It's a single-level campaign that revolves around a Byzantine monastery on a cliffside Lost Coast is said to have been based on a scrap segment in Half-Life 2 that would have appeared sometime during the highway 17 Chapter this area however was never developed beyond conceptualization and was canned before any assets were created for it after Half-Life 2 is released in 2004 Val began finally putting wraps on the source engine's high dynamic range rendering system, which had been in development since at least 2003 looking to show off the new technology Half-Life 2's art director Victor Antonov made the choice to revisit the scrapped location believing that a monastery's warm natural colors extreme contrast and lighting and vibrant stained glass had great potential to create an Impressive display this led to the development of Lost Coast one of the only official Half-Life 2 expansions Which introduces a new interesting setting and a rather lovable one-off character? Additionally Lost Coast is notable for pushing a lot of graphical boundaries for the source engine and for being the first valve game to Include developer commentary notes. Hi, this is Gabe Newell and welcome to the Lost Coast To this day I consider valves dev commentary to be a genius way of getting young people interested in game design if you haven't done a Playthrough of Half-Life 2 the episodes are even left for dead with this feature on I highly recommend you go back and do so Anyway, today I want to take a look at this game which is often relegated to nothing more than a footnote in many other videos and try to give greater insight Into it and its development. We'll start with a simple question. What was Lost Coast all about anyway? Following the seven-hour war in earth since suing surrendered to the combine many resistance bases formed along the coastal wasteland of Eastern Europe In Half-Life 2 Gordon passes through a number of these settlements such as shore point base new little Odessa and lighthouse point Lost Coast introduces a new location in the form of a small fishing village called Saint Olga though never stated outright Saint Olga is heavily implied to be yet another of these coastal resistance strongholds holding city 17 escapees Inspiration for the village's name likely comes from Olga of Kiev the patron saint of widows Who was also the first recorded female ruler in Russian history getting back to the story after learning about the town of Saint Olga And its rebel inhabitants the combine devise a plot to eradicate its population and claim the area back as their own Soldiers are deployed to overtake the church of Saint Olga which sits on a cliffside adjacent to the town We're in a headcrab launcher is installed the next morning The combine begins shelling the village in an attempt to wipe out everyone in it if this attack isn't halted Saint Olga citizens will be overtaken by headcrabs and the town will become just like Ravenholm a coastal refuge turned horror show Luckily, however as Gordon Freeman awakens on the shore beneath the monastery He's greeted by a local fisherman who briefs him on the situation and urgently tasks him with destroying the canister launcher Unlocking a gate and letting Freeman through the fisherman witnesses Gordon climb the rocky cliffside dispatch combine forces with ease Jam the shelling mechanism in the monastery and destroy a combine hunter chopper all in the span of about 15 minutes Having finished the job Freeman rides back down to the shore in a makeshift elevator and reunites with the fisherman who gives him great Thanks and invites him back to Saint Olga for a feast of leeches Unfortunately before Gordon gets the chance to eat his first-ever meal in the entire half-life series He mysteriously fades from existence leaving the fisherman standing in bewilderment The sending leaves the player with several questions that likely won't ever be answered the most immediate being whether Gordon's Disappearance has something to do with the g-man. It's interesting to note that Lost Coast is the only half-life product released by Valve that lacks any sighting of him another question is whether Saint Olga actually recovers from the headcrab shelling or still needs to be Evacuated the fisherman seems to be under the impression that everything's gonna be fine But even if the headcrabs are taken care of wouldn't the combine eventually come back to finish the job It's hard to imagine them giving up so easily But the question that stuck with me in the near decades since I beat Lost Coast for the first time Just what is the significance of this mysterious fisherman? It might sound silly given his menial role But the fisherman is in my opinion one of the most underrated characters in the half-life series His performance is owed to the late Jim French who was also known for playing bill over beck and love for dead and Father Grigori in base half-life 2 the fisherman is said to have been the first character developed on the source engine without the use of a real photo for reference and since it's all but impossible to kill him in regular gameplay his model is also one of the Few with no ragdoll physics as for his physical attributes the fisherman is an older gentleman whose gray hair is far receded He leans on his harpoon while he walks indicating a bad back It might not surprise you the leaked files show he was at one point supposed to puff from a pipe Two early concepts from the fisherman show him donned in a yellow coat or just a casual button-up shirt Personally, I like the button-up look because I imagine it's what he would wear on the house And by the way if this piece reminds you of Team Fortress 2 that's because it was drawn by TF2's art director Moby Franky Given his age It's obvious that the fisherman remembers life on earth prior to the combines rule that probably plays into his passion for fishing and his Care for preserving Earth's original life forces Time like this. Hey now we lost enough species already It's actually pretty remarkable how similar of a role fathered Grigori in the fisherman play They're both older enigmatic figures who keep watch of a coastal town They seem to have a deep connection to the only differences that Ravenholm didn't last as long as St Olga has By the way if this ending is to imply that Gordon is being pulled back by the G man That would make the fisherman the only human character was seen Gordon be put into stasis And he seems to be weirdly unfazed watching a man fade from reality. Well, I guess you got other places to be Nice no one Yeah, is it possible that the fisherman knows about the G man and his powers probably not but it's still food for thought Going back to Lost Coast itself. Let's talk a little about the gameplay The Lost Coast level prominently features the players scaling a cliff and thus places great emphasis on vertical combat You'll find yourself fighting off enemies from both above and below Robin Walker states in the developer commentary that the cliffside combat was meant to call back to the segment and surface tension from half Life one where Gordon finds the rocket launcher and takes on an Apache helicopter and speaking of helicopters The one you fight at the end of Lost Coast isn't actually one at all at least not technically It's rather a reskinned gunship with the combine hunter chopper model applied. It even makes gunship noises The water in Lost Coast is filled with leeches that are meant to stop you from going out of bounds without the use of Cheats still it's very easy to break the game. The world record speedrun is 20.7 seconds long glitchless and a mere 3.7 seconds with glitches I'll never understand how people do this kind of stuff Unfortunately, however, there's not a lot more to say about the maps design since it's so short There's really just this cliffside battle to shoot out in the monastery and courtyard and then the helicopter fight However, Lost Coast was originally going to be a little bit longer and it wouldn't be a half-life video if I didn't talk about some cut content In March 2017 some files from the Valve developer repository leaked online This is not supposed to happen by the way This included map source files for Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Episode 2 as well as some early versions of the Lost Coast level These files give a lot of insight into how Lost Coast changed throughout its development For starters, the intro was originally a lot longer and actually went through a couple of iterations One of the earliest builds featured the player waking up stranded on a tiny island with the fisherman picking them up in his boat Unfortunately, this version wasn't included with the leak So what you're looking at is instead a recreation based on information provided in an email from Robin Walker Notice these metrocop heads on sticks you can spot on the boat path by the way weird stuff a Second variation that we do have featured the player having to hit a switch and ride on this shitty raft That looks like a Gmod dupe until they reach the shore. Both of these variations were then to feature a longer exposition from the fisherman First he balances on this wooden beam in a cut sequence Then leads the player toward a set piece taking place inside this washed-up shipwreck Once inside the fisherman and the player have to work together to pull two roped hooks and affix them to another large hook Which then raises a makeshift gate Interestingly, this part was originally meant to feature a remark from the fisherman about how this mechanism was once used to catch Bull squids after the hooks are attached the gate would lift and there was a full sequence of nothing But the fishermen struggling to climb up and down some rocks before dropping his harpoon and continuing his walk up to unlock The gate as usual. I'm kind of glad they cut this. I don't like watching this poor old man hurt his back Oh Here goes my back By the way, if you boot up the final version of lost coast and make your way back to the shipwreck that had the hook sequence in it You'll notice the developers hit a 357 enamel for it there a nice little secret Some of these early builds of the level also feature more advanced geometry around the St. Olga area and a strange catapult like mechanism made from brushwork This has led to some speculation that the player was at one point meant to actually enter and explore the town Though no actual sources corroborated this probably the last unique thing about these beta versions of the map is that they featured Combined soldiers in the windows of the courtyard area This was probably cut because they're hard to spot and shoot and they also tend to clip out of the walls Which looks pretty weird. That's about all I've got for cut content though To my understanding lost coast had a pretty short development cycle now, let's talk about the real contentious stuff What is lost coast role in the greater half-life universe? Though lost coast has been dismissed as totally unrelated to the mainline half-life games by almost every developer who worked on it a Travel poster in the latest series installment half-life Alex shows what is unmistakably the church of St. Olga with the caption to visit The coast while it's more than possible that this poster was included as nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek Easter egg to catch the attention of loyal half-life fans It does seem to insinuate that St. Olga is a real location in the half-life universe This calls into question what other elements of the lost coast may be canon as well Is the fisherman a canonical character in the half-life universe? Does any element of lost coast story actually happen such as the combine unsuccessfully targeting St. Olga with headcrabs? A couple weeks before I started work on this video. I contacted series writer Mark Laidlaw asking about lost coast in this poster He dodged a question about the poster But he did go out of his way to tell me that the popular fan theory of lost coast taking place during the Nova Prospect Teleport was baloney So that leaves lost coast in canon limbo I suppose sitting on the bench with Adrian Shepherd to close this video Here's some fun facts about lost coast the only music you featured in the game appears when the player enters the monastery The track is called dark interval and it later appeared in episode two the fisherman has a lot of unused dialogue like a lot These infernal leeches will clean your bones in a trice, and I don't care what kind of fancy swimsuit you're wearing Just one of those things here live too long is what I done and now they're gonna take it all away from me Lost Coast was actually the last published half-life game that Victor Antonov worked on after leaving Valve He went to work for Arcane Studios upon learning this I became curious as to whether he worked on the scrapped Arcane lit half-life expansion return to Ravenholm Though I couldn't find anything to suggest that the lost coast level is prefixed with D2 Which insinuates that it was part of the second day of Gorin's adventure in Half-Life 2 This lines up with the timing of the coastal levels and finally lost coast was a test bed for interrupted and resumed dialogue If the fisherman is prompted to stop talking like you hit him with a prop or something He'll play a brief preset voice line meant to make the cut back to his script more believable and smooth Hey now we lost enough species already Well as I was saying I'll take it or where they made their base Valve have been prototyping the system since 2001, but they just didn't feel like including it in Half-Life 2 I guess that's all for now though leave a comment below to let me know how you feel about lost coast What you think of it how you square it in Half-Life's cannon what you think happened to the fisherman in St. Olga I want to hear all of it. Thanks for watching. Have a good day I'm feeling like an epic gamer. I like to game Play video games every day. I love to game. I love to game. I love to game I forgot to mention this in the main script But there's this sequence right here where if you try to go up these stairs a Combine elite will blow them up But if you use the gravity gun you can actually catch it and you can just you know gravel up it is normal