Citizen

"I can't remember the last time I had, well, anything."

- Rebel

Citizens are humans living under Combine rule, after the Seven Hour War and subsequent Combine occupation. The term Citizen refers to a human living under Combine rule in a city, as opposed to a rebel or refugee.

Background
After a successful invasion, the Combine began to establish their dictatorship over the Earth, creating Overwatch Soldiers from human soldiers captured during the Seven Hour War. The remaining population was rounded up into the still-standing cities, which were re-designated with numbers instead of names (14, 17, etc.). These new "Citizens" of the Combine's empire are provided with accommodation, rations and protection from the Xen aliens that infest much of the world. The Combine also erected a Suppression Field, to prevent procreation.

The Combine also established the Civil Protection force. Staffed by unmodified humans, as opposed to the transhuman Overwatch, Civil Protection acts as the Combine's police force and handles the affairs of policing and monitoring the populace in the cities. Civil Protection officers are feared for their brutality, as they often bully Citizens and administer beatings at the slightest provocation. As seen in Half-Life 2's first chapter, Point Insertion, Civil Protection officers sometimes stage raids on residential buildings to arrest and imprison alleged rebels and sympathizers. Comments made by Citizen onlookers seem to suggest this is a regular occurrence. Citizens are encouraged to join Civil Protection by promises of better rations. Civil Protection officers themselves are encouraged to undergo transhuman surgery to join the ranks of the Overwatch.

In an attempt to prevent tightly knit communities and organizations of any kind from forming, the Civil Protection authorities transfer Citizens from one city to another as many as three times a year. Citizens are also apparently forced to wear identical blue denim boiler suits, and women have their hair cut short.

The penalty for Citizens who choose to disobey the Combine (or are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time) is summary execution, forced conscription into the Overwatch or Stalker transformation, conducted at Nova Prospekt.

Oppression
Citizens are granted the minimum of what they need to survive, such as a standardized diet and home. They are also transferred from city to city frequently.

Citizens constantly complain about the quality of their meals, which they get in packages dispensed by machines found in public places, such as the City 17 train station. For drinking, Citizens have access to free water, dispensed through vending machines, among other ways. Some Citizens believe, however, that the Combine put something in the water that wipes memories, suggesting that the Combine use the water itself as yet another method to brainwash Citizens. Civil Protection officers are given far better meals, which becomes yet another incentive for the Citizens to become one.

Citizens are assigned to simple flats in apartment buildings which are all categorized into blocks. They are kept under constant surveillance by Civil Protection officers through the medium of City Scanners and Security Cameras. Raids and arrests are frequent occurrences throughout the apartments.

Most Citizens live in rather poor living conditions. In the apartment block in Point Insertion it can be observed that most apartments lack doors (from the constant CP raids), are littered with old furniture and debris, and are just generally dirty and cramped living quarters. Most homes have a small TV, which is always shown displaying Wallace Breen's Breencasts.

Citizens are able to apply to be part of Civil Protection. Those who do have generally better lives, and work on shifts patrolling areas all around the city where they then take place in raids and crackdowns or just beat up and arrest other Citizens for many different reasons, or even without any reason at all. These Citizens are generally hated by non-civil officers, because these Citizens choose to be a part of the Combine, beating and arresting Citizens at their own discretion, rather than their Combine Overwatch counter-parts, who have had their memories wiped.

The Resistance
Among the oppressed inhabitants of City 17 there is a significant underground movement; even Citizens who are not actively involved in the resistance are usually sympathetic. As survivors' accounts of Gordon Freeman's heroic feats during the Black Mesa Incident reached a wider audience, Freeman came to be considered a legendary figure in the minds of many people, being one of the few that fought both the Xen aliens and the military and survived.

In the cities, the Resistance operates underground networks (such as the Underground Railroad in City 17) to escape the attention of the Civil Protection. Citizens seeking to escape the oppressive atmosphere in the cities use these networks to escape and join the Resistance forces.

After Gordon Freeman's return and subsequent feats against the Combine, which eventually culminated in his leading a swarm of Antlions into Nova Prospekt and destroying it, an all-out rebellion sparked in City 17 in which many Citizens joined the Resistance and formed armed militias, dramatically boosting the Resistance numbers.

Behind the scenes

 * Originally, Citizens were to be dressed in green with an apron and gas masks, since the Air Exchange was replacing the air with toxic gases at this point of the game development. An early "Consulcast" also refers to this by "The true Citizen conserves valuable oxygen." In the end, the gas mask concept was only kept for the Combine humanoid units.

"We designed the Citizens of Half-Life 2 to look oppressed and downtrodden. Their costumes reflected the location and environment they lived in using standard issued clothing to give it a prison-like atmosphere. Half-Life 2 spans three days, and we wanted the Citizens to correspond with the time and location of events throughout the game. Citizens appear in almost every map of the game, but couldn’t overpower the player visually. We wanted them to compliment the world and not stand out."

- Moby Francke


 * The Citizens were originally to include children, to be seen working in the Cremator Factory in the Combine Factories area and as corpses in Ravenholm. Indeed, children are not present in Half-Life 2 and its episodes, which was canonically explained with the Suppression Field.


 * Friendly fire was also originally to be authorized on Citizens and Vortigaunts, like the Black Mesa Personnel in Half-Life. The feature can be experienced in the playable Half-Life 2 Beta; upon being hit, Citizens will answer things like "Freeman! We're on your side!", "Watch what you're doing!", "We trusted you!". These sound files can still be found in the Half-Life 2 files.

Citizen list
Technically, the Citizens are a mix between the Half-Life scientists and security guards, to which they succeed. While the body models and textures are the same (one female and one male), only the heads change (although the model build can change from a model to another, making a Citizen slimmer or fatter). Also, most Citizen face textures bear the first names of the people who gave their likeness to them. Nine male models exist, while the females count only six. There were originally nine women, although a tenth man also existed. The face textures for these cut Citizens can be found in the playable Half-Life 2 Beta files. Most people used as models come from the Seattle area. While all Citizens all use the same brown eyes, several models actually have blue (such as Ted Backman or Erdin Grcic) or green (such as Joey Paresa) eyes.

The NPCs come in three types: "downtrodden", which is the normal blue outfit; "refugee", the same blue outfit, but in lesser condition and sometimes with a shirt beige instead of blue (the one featured in the Standard Zombie); and "rebel", classic or medic, appearing during the Uprising, although some still use the two previous types. Through these types, their face tend to change a bit: different hair color, shaving, beard, goatee and moustache variations (for the men), different skin details on the face, different mouths or eyebrows, etc. Of note is that Gordon Freeman arrived in City 17 dressed in Citizen attire, "downtrodden" or "refugee".

All reference model images featured in Raising the Bar are the actual pictures used for the face textures.

In the playable Half-Life 2 Beta files, the file "halflife2.fgd" contains several alternate nicknames, accompanied with the warning that they should not be included in the final version ("don't ship with these names"). The available ones are listed near their related Citizen.

Trivia

 * The blue boiler suits worn by all citizens may be a reference to the blue overalls worn by the Outer Party in the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

List of appearances

 * Half-Life 2
 * Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar
 * Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
 * Half-Life 2: Episode One
 * Half-Life 2: Episode Two