Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

Half-Life 2 Lost Coast is a technology demo showing off the Source engine's HDR capabilities. The game setting 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. In the Source SDK Base, a flyby of this level can be launched for a video stress test.

Plot
The level begins with Gordon Freeman waking up, after having apparently fallen (a loud splash is heard shortly before Gordon awakes) close to several decaying piers underneath the shadow of a large Byzantine-style church set up on a large outcrop of rock overlooking the coastal town of St. Olga.

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 have made a base in the area. He lets Gordon through a gate and tells him to "take out that gun".

The gate leads to a winding path along the side of the outcrop the church is located. Gordon soon encounters resistance in the form of Overwatch Soldiers, some of whom rappel from the cliffs above. As he proceeds up the cliff, a launcher based in the church at the top begins bombarding the nearby town with headcrab shells. Upon reaching the top of the cliff Gordon finds the church and its courtyard unguarded. 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 the developers themselves, to avoid controversy) is unknown.

On one wall of the structure, the Combine have constructed the shell launcher. At a regular interval shells are loaded into the chamber and launched at the town. Gordon destroys the launcher by jamming the mechanism with debris, triggering an alarm and prompting the Combine to launch a second attack into the church itself, with a Hunter-Chopper acting as air support. Gordon fights his way out of the church and shoots down the helicopter with a rocket launcher. With his task complete, Gordon then rides an elevator back down to the docks to meet The Fisherman, at which point the level fades to black.

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, as well as Episode 2. Team Fortress 2 and Portal also has such commentary feature.

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.

Behind the scenes
The subtitles file indicates a longer game where the Fisherman would be with the player longer and would mention Bullsquids.

Trivia

 * The Fisherman does not have an actual ragdoll and if killed he will either crash the game or his animations will be forced into a ragdoll pose.
 * The Hunter-Chopper that opposes the player towards the end of the demo behaves and even sounds like the Gunship Synth; It shoots down incoming rockets and its pulse gun is the much more accurate type used by gunships.
 * The Hunter-Chopper scene is a nod to the Half-Life chapter Surface Tension.
 * If you use noclip and destroy the Hunter-Chopper, it will reappear in the fight scene before the end of the demo.