Borealis (cut location)

"I knew this trip was gonna end in a bad way."

- Odell

The Borealis,  originally known as Hyperborea, is a location and chapter cut from Half-Life 2. It was to be set between two other cut locations, the Air Exchange and Kraken Base, and to be the last location of the third day, visited during the night.

Overview
Gordon was to encounter Odell, the ship's engineer, on the Coast, and reach the drifting ship on a tugboat. The ship, whose captain was named Johanssen, was an icebreaker supposed to bring supplies to the Kraken Base. Half of the ship's crew consisted of scientists. At some point the Combine found the ship and threw Sacktick shells on the ship, and the creatures attacked the crew. Odell noticed the creatures didn't really like the cold so he shut off the generator to let the whole ship ice over, and it killed the creatures, but most of the crew was already slain. In search of survivors, Gordon and Odell visit the ship filled with the corpses of the original crew members of the ship, Stalkers, Zombies, four tanks containing frozen Combine Assassins and Overwatch Soldiers. Odell and Gordon leave the ship with a small submarine and proceed to the nearby Kraken Base.

Versions


Several versions of the ship setting exist:


 * One version shows the ship stranded in the ice with a base nearby. It can be seen in a very early demo map called " " last modified in September 2001. It is unknown how Gordon was to reach the site at this point of the game's development; the question was probably not even answered yet.


 * An early Half-Life 2 journey shows Gordon traveling across the sea on the ship, directly from the coast to Kraken Base. It is unknown if at this point the ship's crew was already to be dead.


 * The most recent (and playable) version shows the ship drifting in the sea. This is this version Gordon reaches with Odell on a tugboat and leaves in a small submarine to Kraken Base. Sacktick are not present since they were cut early in the development process and never scripted, the "shelling" being recycled for the Headcrab, present on the ship. This is the version included in the mod Missing Information (but the maps are not completely finished and the ship workers' corpses are missing) and the E3 version where one of the first Half-Life 2 official screenshots is from.

Fate

 * The Borealis is part of the storyline set between Nova Prospekt and the City 17 street wars that was completely cut, the game timespan having been reduced to three days instead of the original four.


 * This chapter was scrapped around August 2002, as the last Borealis maps to be edited, " " and " " were edited on August 9th, 2002. However, a few of its props, prominently the blue barrels or the Vortigaunt Camp door, are used in the final version of Half-Life 2 and can be found in the model folder "props_borealis". While the original folder contains 238 models, only 6 have been kept in the retail files. Its skybox texture files are also still present in the retail files, under the name "sky_borealis", although they are not used.


 * The Borealis was brought back into the Half-Life canon in Episode Two and is likely to be seen or visited in Episode Three.


 * Odell's face was recycled for Odessa Cubbage.

Behind the scenes



 * The Borealis appears to be based on existing research icebreakers, the USCGC Polar Sea, the USCGC Polar Star (both sister ships) or the USCGC Healy (which is bigger and more recent than the former), all United States Coast Guard vessels, homeported in Seattle, Washington, USA. However the size of the Borealis seen in Episode Two seems to be closer to these existing vessels.


 * Inside the ship can be found signatures of the ship's aviation detachments (AvDet). The pictures seem to be from an actual ship, although it is unknown which one exactly. Most of the time those images consist in the names of the detachment personnel, detachment dates, flight hours, ports of call, and cruise comments, along with humorous images or squadron crests. Such images could be found in the USCGC Northwind, an icebreaker similar to the Polar Star and the Healy, and also belonging to the United States Coast Guard.


 * The name "Borealis" is likely associated with the term "aurora borealis", the northern polar lights only visible in the Northern Hemisphere. "Borealis" comes from "Boreas", a wind god in the Greek mythology. "Hyperborea", the early name for the ship, was the name of the land of the Hyperboreans, a mythical people who lived far to the north of Thrace. "Hyperborea" means "beyond the Boreas", thus beyond the land of the wind god Boreas.

Trivia

 * "Johanssen", the name of the ship's captain in the original story, is quite similar to "Johnson", the name of Aperture Science founder and CEO, Cave Johnson. Also, "Arbeit Laboratories" can be seen on some crates inside the ship. The retail Borealis belonging Aperture Science, it is possible those names were recycled.

List of appearances

 * Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar