This this completely agree. If another portal game comes out im more interested in the mechanics and setting than plot and characters

Yeah, I like Portal’s story but with Chell gone they’ll need to do something really clever and attention-grabbing with the third to make it as good as the other two. Even though GLaDOS is a great character that I love, the “murderous omniscient robot with a thing for killing humans” shtick has become a lot more prevalent in media lately (probably in large part because of Portal itself) and a new game with her in it just wouldn’t have the same punch. And not having Chell there - Chell and her off-the-charts tenacity and her talent for pissing off robots and her quick wits - would make for a very different experience with other characters. Plus if they tried to do a prequel it would just feel like a retread of the Old Aperture sections of the first…

I am awfully curious to see what sort of story Valve would come up with for a Portal 3, but I think that’s probably exactly why they’re avoiding it for the time being.

ehh, I dunno

Chell has no reason to go back to Aperture, she spent two whole games trying to get out of there. And it’s highly unlikely that Gordon will ever star in a Portal game - Portal and Half Life might take place in the same universe and they might have a lot of narrative connections, but gameplay-wise they’re extremely different. Valve’s smart enough to know that little good would come from combining the two and forcing Half Life fans to play a Portal game or vice versa if they wanted to see the story through to its end, or introducing the game mechanics of one into the other. Most people who’ve played one have played both games, sure, and you get a better understanding of the plot in each by playing the other, but it’s not necessary right now and it never will be; Valve’s not going to anger and alienate fans who only like one of the two. That’s why any Half Life/Portal canon crossovers will likely be limited to little things like finding the Borealis and attempting to destroy the Aperture tech on board there - we’ll never see Gordon Freeman pick up a portal gun because it would fuck with what the player wants from a Half Life game and a Half Life story, even if people find it an attractive idea now when it hasn’t happened.

If I was going to come up with an idea for a Portal 3… hmm. You know what, I’m gonna make a separate post for that and put it under a cut, because I have a thing but it’s getting kind of long.

Portal 2 concept art (for anon)

That’s an interesting question!

First off, if there’s ever another Portal game, I don’t think it’s coming for a long while - and certainly not until after the next Half Life game. Portal 2 came out only a little over two years ago, but it’s been six and a half years since Episode 2. Half Life is long overdue; heck, I’d argue that we won’t see anything from Valve’s major titles except Half Life until after HL3 is released.

Portal and Team Fortress 2 both came out on the same day as Ep2, and since then one has received a sequel and the other has had a couple of pretty big expansion packs that drastically changed gameplay. Both Left 4 Dead games have come out during the six-year waiting period for the next Half Life game. A new Counter-Strike game came out last year. It’s Half Life’s turn, god dammit

But given that, do I think a Portal 3 will ever be made once HL3 is out? Possibly. The big flaw in that plan is because of Portal 2’s story. During development of Portal 2, after it was decided the project was going to be a sequel and not a prequel using the mysterious F-STOP mechanic, Valve originally planned to have the game feature a new protagonist instead of Chell. There’s concept art out there of the possible new protagonist(s), which I think comes from the art ebook?

The thing is, playtesters expressed surprise and disappointment that GLaDOS didn’t “recognize” them when she was revived. Her dynamic with Chell in the first game was so memorable and interesting that people were expecting more of it from the second and were confused when she didn’t acknowledge them. So to preserve that character dynamic and remove the loss of the player’s suspension of disbelief when GLaDOS expressed no anger at them for killing her in the last game, they reworked their plan for Portal 2 so that Chell didn’t actually escape at the end of Portal. That’s why they patched the end of the first game so she gets dragged back down to Aperture by another robot instead of simply falling unconscious in the parking lot, as was originally implied.

But that’s not something they can pull off twice. Not only is the ending of Portal 2 a hell of a lot less ambiguous than its predecessor’s original one, it’s also a very satisfactory conclusion from a narrative standpoint and brings home the story and character arcs surrounding Chell and GLaDOS. If they just pulled the same thing all over again and retconned things so GLaDOS didn’t actually let the player go at the end of the game, people would get angry (and it would also really fuck with the canon co-op storyline, which hinges on the fact that GLaDOS doesn’t have humans to test with anymore and is getting frustrated and angry because of that).

So if Valve ever wants to sit down and make another Portal game, they’ll have a bit of a catch-22 to overcome - if the player character isn’t Chell, then people will be disappointed, but they’ll also be disappointed if she is the player character. It’s going to take a clever solution to work around that.

chocolate-covered-portals:

fuchsiamae:

chocolate-covered-portals:

There are Hard Light Bridges in Half-Life 2, except they’re called Combine Field Bridges. And we’re not actually sure they’re made of hard light. Other than that, the similarities are a little eerie.

#sometimes i wonder if the combine did manage to track down aperture #and take some of its technologies

DON’T SAY THAT OH GOD

What I mean is— well, it’s pretty much implied that Portal takes place during the Seven Hour War or shortly after that. And GLaDOS’s explosion very possibly could have attracted some attention….

The field bridges are technically just the same sort of force field as the ones that cover certain doorways and such in Combine-controlled areas of the Half Life games to prevent the player from progressing through them unless and until the game wants them to - obviously they’re tinkered with a little because the force fields allow recognized personnel to pass through them with no obstacle and passing through a bridge like this would mean death or injury and render it useless, but the visual similarities are distinct enough that they’re certainly connected. They also operate using two generators, which each create a single beam of blue light when turned on individually, meaning the most likely way field bridges are created is by a reaction between two beams of some sort of energy, like a magnetic attraction you can touch and walk on.

Hard light bridges, on the other hand, are generated by a single device called an emitter. It’s not possible to only turn on half a light bridge (or at least it’s not possible in-game), and the implication is that they’re made of light that’s been absorbed and somehow compressed into a beam with enough density to bear human weight and block other light from passing through, while still being semi-translucent enough that you can see things through them.

Does this mean they’re unrelated? Not necessarily; they function almost exactly the same in both Half Life and Portal, so they could still plausibly be connected. It does mean, however, that the Combine didn’t just hop into Aperture and borrow their tech - even if the concept of light bridges originated in Aperture, the Combine version has at least been heavily edited with their own technology.

What really complicates the question is that Portal also has puzzles using the Aperture high-energy pellet, which is almost functionally and visibly indistinguishable from the Combine energy balls used in puzzles and as the pulse rifle’s alternate fire in HL2. The only differences are that the pellets instantly kill you but the balls only do damage (which could be explained away by the fact that Gordon has an HEV suit but Chell simply has a regular jumpsuit) and that the balls are stored in or transported along beams of light while the pellets are generated by a launcher - the two entities have exactly the same skins and animations and are even used to solve puzzles in almost the exact same way by redirecting them into a socket generator, despite the differences between the gravity gun and the portal gun. And even though the pellets were replaced by lasers in Portal 2, their presence in Aperture is still canon, because you can find multiple broken pellet launchers when traversing the old test chambers at the start of the game.

Both Portal 2 and Ep2 (the most recent games in the Portal and Half Life canon, respectively) indicate that the storylines of the two are approaching some sort of small convergence - Ep2 of course features the revelation that the missing Aperture research vessel Borealis contains some kind of mysterious long-range portal tech that could doom the resistance effort if the Combine manage to find and use it, and Portal 2 offers an achievement for discovering the empty dry dock of said ship (and was originally, relatively late in development, supposed to feature Wheatley informing Chell that “a man with a briefcase” had come to see her earlier when he woke her up, indicating that the G-man was and perhaps still could be planned to relate to the Portal storyline in some way). It’s entirely possible, therefore, that the similarities in tech used by the Combine and Aperture will turn out to be plot-related somehow. But I think it’s also just as likely that said similarities are simply there because the games were made on the same engine and it made more sense to transfer some puzzle elements over, not for any in-universe reason.

gameranx:

It’s been a looong time by ~EthicallyChallenged

thecyberwolf:

Chell

by Anna Rettberg (Aerettberg)

Deviant Art ||| Tumblr ||| Twitter

nooby-banana:

rubitrightintomyeyes:

Wheatley has blonde hair and glasses.  He is very tall.

oh my god

melissasoup:

birdbrainblue:

melissasoup:

silverstreams:

The Portal timeline according to the Portal 2 Collector’s Edition Guide. 

Consider me confused. 

I know this is official, but the second to last should say 2000-200? though, I think, if we’re integrating it with the canon HL timeline.

I’m not confused; this all sounds about right to me. ¯\(°_o)/¯

I just want to know what “????” is lol. I’m guessing it’s 202?, not hundreds of years later, but that’s just me…

I think most people are confused because if BYDTWD was around 2000 and Chell was an attendee than it doesn’t make sense for her to be as old as she appears to be in the first game, which takes place about the same time as the Black Mesa Incident? She would have to have been a child or at most a teenager during the events of the first game, but she’s visibly older than that, so it doesn’t fit.

Other than that, though, I think this actually does a pretty good job at merging the backstory from the first game with the stuff from the second.

Is it ever stated officially that Chell was a small child during BYDTWD? I thought that was left vague? Like she could’ve been an older teenager or simply a volunteer?

I was taking the potato battery from the second game as proof that she was a small child, actually.

I mean, “Chell” isn’t exactly a common moniker, I don’t think there’s any chance it’s just a coincidence that one of the projects was signed with her name. And the project was almost certainly put together by a young child.

There’s also this other image that I got off of Google that appears to be a scan of the project’s texture? It’s different from the one in-game so it might be fanmade, but it mentions a “Mr. Johnson”, which would imply that BYDTWD took place when Cave Johnson was still around if it’s official.

melissasoup:

silverstreams:

The Portal timeline according to the Portal 2 Collector’s Edition Guide. 

Consider me confused. 

I know this is official, but the second to last should say 2000-200? though, I think, if we’re integrating it with the canon HL timeline.

I’m not confused; this all sounds about right to me. ¯\(°_o)/¯

I just want to know what “????” is lol. I’m guessing it’s 202?, not hundreds of years later, but that’s just me…

I think most people are confused because if BYDTWD was around 2000 and Chell was an attendee than it doesn’t make sense for her to be as old as she appears to be in the first game, which takes place about the same time as the Black Mesa Incident? She would have to have been a child or at most a teenager during the events of the first game, but she’s visibly older than that, so it doesn’t fit.

Other than that, though, I think this actually does a pretty good job at merging the backstory from the first game with the stuff from the second.