Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast is an additional level for Valve Software's 2004 first-person shooter computer game Half-Life 2. It was originally slated to take place between the levels "Highway 17" and "Sandtraps", but was dropped. Lost Coast was released on October 27 2005 as a free download to all owners of Half-Life 2. A flyby of this level is played during the HL2 video stress test. It can be found in the Source SDK Base.

Purposes
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast was developed as a playable technology demo, intended to showcase the newly-added HDR lighting features of the Source engine that were first implemented into Day of Defeat: Source. Lost Coast also demonstrates in general what the Source engine can achieve when system requirements and detail levels are significantly increased over games designed to run on a broad base of computers, with high-resolution textures and models. While generally not considered part of the Half-Life canon, Lost Coast features minor storyline details that were scrapped from Half-Life 2, such as a headcrab canister launcher. The level takes about 30 minutes in all for regular gamers to finish, although it can increase when commentary is enabled.

Plot
The level begins with Gordon Freeman waking up, after having apparently fallen (you hear a loud splash shortly before awakening) near to several decaying piers underneath the shadow of a large Byzantine-style church set up on a large outcrop of rock overlooking a small town that will soon be obliterated.

An unnamed man (referred to in the commentary as "The Fisherman") standing on the dock recognizes Gordon (although he cannot accurately remember his name) and tells him that the Combine are in control of St. Olga. He leads the player to a gate, which he opens, and tells Gordon to "take out that gun". He then sits on a bench beside the gate where he presumably remains for the remainder of the level.

The gate leads to a winding path along the side of the outcrop the church is located. The player doesn't walk very far before encountering resistance from Combine soldiers. A Combine Elite destroys the stairs directly leading to the church, forcing the player to continue up along the edge of the outcrop where he meets with more soldiers, some of whom rappel from above.

By this time the player notices that headcrab shells are being launched from within the church onto the nearby town, some of which seem to ignite fires within the city.

Upon entering the church courtyard the player is met with an unusual stillness, though the door behind him locks, effectively trapping him in the area.

The church itself is relatively undamaged save for the religious paintings on the walls, the faces of all but a few of the characters having been rubbed away. Whether this was an intentional act by the Combine (or Valve itself) or a coincidence is not known.

On one wall of the structure, the Combine have constructed the shell launcher. At steady intervals shells are loaded into the chamber and 'shot' upwards to come crashing into the town below. The breach of the device is easily obstructed by inserting any sizable object into the opening, thus jamming the mechanism - and releasing some poison headcrabs. This also triggers an alarm, prompting the Combine to launch a second attack into the church itself, including the appearance of a Combine Hunter Chopper.

After several soldiers are disposed of, an exit is opened which leads to a set of scaffolding set up outside the walls of the church and suspended above the beach below.

The player must then shoot down the chopper (which behaves like a gunship for the purposes of the gameplay) from that area, causing it to crash into the scaffolding and knock aside several boards. A lower level of scaffolding becomes accessible, which in turn leads to an elevator.

The elevator (which appears to be weight activated since there are no controls within it for the player to activate) lowers onto the beach near the original starting point, where the Fisherman congratulates Gordon and invites him to a "feast" in St. Olga. "I, uh, hope you like leeches."

The level then fades out.

Developer commentary
Aside from visual fidelity and HDR, Lost Coast also acted as a testbed for a commentary system where, when the option is enabled, additional items appear in the game world that can be interacted with to play an audio commentary, each piece ranging anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute of commentary. Players will hear the developers talk about what they are seeing, what is happening, why the team chose to do what they did, what kind of challenges they faced, and so on. Commentary tracks are represented by floating speech bubbles known as commentary nodes. To listen to a commentary track, the player places his crosshair over it, and presses the use key. Doing the same again will stop the commentary track. Commands can be run when a commentary track starts and stops; in Lost Coast, this is used to completely disable the AI while the track plays. However, in Half-Life 2: Episode One, running a commentary track renders the player invulnerable to in-game damage for the time being rather than disabling the AI, likely for the purpose of not drawing away from the game.

Valve plans to make commentary standard in all of their future titles, and, as stated above, has already added it to Half-Life 2: Episode One.

Lost Coast is not the first title to include developer commentaries: similar features have appeared in Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader (2001), Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando (2003) and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (2004).

Recommended system specifications

 * Processor: Pentium 4 2.4GHz or AMD 2800+
 * Memory: 1 GB RAM.
 * Graphics Card: DirectX 9 native
 * 335 MB disk space (with Half-Life 2 installed)

Lost Coast is a 98 MB compressed download from Steam.

Despite some claims to the contrary, Lost Coast runs on computers with specifications lower than that listed above, albeit without some of the key focal features such as HDR. It should be noted that a computer with the minimum specifications to run Half Life 2 will not be able to run Lost Coast.

Also computers closer to the bottom end of the Lost Coast minimum requirements are known to crash mid-game