White Forest

White Forest is a major Resistance base located in the Outlands, north of City 17, used by the Resistance to build a rocket intended to shut off the Combine Superportal. Reaching the base is the first Episode Two main goal.

Features


The base is installed in an aging Cold War missile silo, apparently designed to house a pair of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Most of the facilities are underground, but there are several bunker-like structures, a hangar, and a radio tower at surface level. White Forest is powered by generators and seems to be totally self sufficient. It contains two silos, the primary silo and the (mostly abandoned) secondary silo.

The silos have an alarm system which is triggered by movement. False alarms in the decrepit secondary silo are sometimes triggered often by nesting crows, and the structure suffers from the same decay as most of the Half-Life series' architecture.

While the silos are used for research (mostly closing the Superportal with the rocket, the only known use), the storage areas are used for more normal means. They are used to store supplies such as food and ammo, and used as barracks for the Resistance personnel.

An area also includes a small courtyard where training to the use of the Magnusson Device can be performed on a dead Strider installed on tracks.

Certain areas of the base are above ground. These include the south and north entrance, linked by a garage for vehicles. The north entrance has a gate which can only be opened with a valve, and a watchtower. This area is totally walled off aside from the gate. A radar station is also set up above.

The north entrance connects to a valley featuring small and larger buildings such as the sawmill, the cabin, and the lodge, each carrying important supplies and Magnusson Device teleporters in anticipation of a Strider assault. The valley also includes two cranes, a water tower, and train tracks going inside sealed off tunnels.

Research


The research that takes place at White Forest is led by Doctor Arne Magnusson, one of the surviving Black Mesa Science Team members. Uriah, a Vortigaunt, is his research assistant. The subjects researched by White Forest include portals and stopping them, Superportals, and rocketry. White Forest's research was the key in stopping the Combine from overwhelming Earth with armies through a Superportal, like they did during the Seven Hour War.

Personnel
In addition to Magnusson and Uriah, there were some other Resistance personnel of note stationed at White Forest. One is Mirt, a mechanical handyman for the Resistance, and another is Sweepy, the Vortigaunt janitor of the base.

Background
Arne Magnusson had been operating a Resistance base at White Forest for an unknown amount of time before Gordon's arrival. In the years before the City 17 uprising, the White Forest personnel built an operable rocket in an old missile silo, with plans to launch it and use it to dissolve a Combine Superportal should a revolution take place. After arriving at the base, Isaac Kleiner and Eli Vance helped with the research as well.

Half-Life 2: Episode One
When Eli and Kleiner are seen during the monitor transmission at the start of the game, they are likely already at White Forest.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two


Soon after the uprising in nearby City 17 and the Citadel meltdown that follows, the Combine grow aware of the threat posed by White Forest and begin taking measures to destroy it. They first try to terminate Alyx Vance and Gordon Freeman, who are taking vital information about the Combine to the base, but fail when the couple is able to reach White Forest safely after driving through the Outlands.

After Gordon and Alyx reach White Forest, the Combine try to halt the advances of the Resistance once more by breaching the base's secondary silo. While this set off the alarm, the staff at first think it is merely crows nesting. While the others prepare the data packed for viewing, Freeman is sent to the silo to investigate, until it appears that a real Combine invasion of the base is occurring. The Combine forces include Hunters, Overwatch Elites, Overwatch Soldiers, and Manhacks. When Freeman successfully closes the silo doors and ends the Combines assault, Kleiner, Eli and Alyx Vance, and Freeman himself watch the data package, to realize Judith Mossman has found the Borealis, an Aperture Science vessel lost years prior, that the Combine has not yet located.

As more Combine are arriving to attack White Forest, a final battle is to occur before the rocket launch. A single Strider is enough to destroy the rocket, so all Striders must be defeated. Freeman is trained in the use of the Magnusson Device, a powerful bomb deadly to Striders. He is then sent on the field with his Muscle Car, and fights Striders and Hunters with assistance from the White Forest Rebels, and finally defeats them all thanks to the Magnusson Devices, halting the Combine efforts once more and saving the rocket. Afterwards, Freeman gets back inside, the rocket is launched, and the Superportal is successfully closed.

Soon after, Alyx and Gordon get ready to leave for the Borealis and rescue Mossman. As they walk with Eli to the hangar where the helicopter they will use is waiting, two Advisors appear and one of them kills Eli. Dog then suddenly appears to defend them, and fights off the Advisors, as Alyx mourns over her father's dead body. The screen then silently fades to black and the credits for Episode Two roll.

Behind the scenes



 * White Forest is apparently based on one of the many abandoned Cold War bases located in Belarus and Ukraine. Textures, layout and signs were apparently reused with only a few changes.


 * According to Doug Wood, the team intended White Forest to offer a change of pace from the constant action that preceded it - a few moments to reunite with old friends and get to know Magnusson, a breather before the big battle ahead. However, their first version of the sequence was an accumulation of long scenes with a lot of dialogue. Gordon and Alyx stood around listening to Kleiner and Magnusson argue at the top of the rocket silo, then rode an elevator to the bottom of the shaft while Kleiner lectured them about rockets and satellites. They wandered into a control room to watch Mossman's transmission, and then hatched a plan to get her back. The team understood there was a problem when even the authors of the scene were bored, and no one had patience for the revelations that followed. So the sequence was divided into a number of smaller pieces that could be interleaved with solitary exploration and some combat. This required rebuilding the path and moving the control room upstairs, where the transmission scene became a reward for surviving the secondary silo part. Wood concludes that as a result of these changes, the White Forest experience is more varied, the narrative comes in digestible portions, and players are able to play at their own speed, rather than being led by the nose the entire time. In the second Episode Two teaser trailer released August 2006, the control room is still downstairs, and appears slightly different, and apparently with a direct view of the rocket silo. Furthermore, the elevator along the silo is still used in the final game, but by Gordon alone.


 * Matt Scott stated about the scene during which the characters reunite in the rocket silo that the team found that the actors were constantly pushing the player around in order to get to their marks, due to the number of characters involved in the scene and the cramped spaces. So they developed scripts that allow the actors to gauge the position of the player and the other actors, and choose among a selection of marks. This solves the congestion problem and makes a scene feel more dynamic.


 * According to Matt Wright, the team designed Magnusson's rocket around blueprints from the Titan family of missiles instead of just making up something that fit their fantasies of a rocket. He adds that grounding the details of their world in reality, making them as precise as possible, makes the invented, fantastic elements seem that much more believable.


 * According to Kelly Bailey, the steam jet met at the foot of the rocket is an example of something the team calls a 'mechanic refresher'. It is meant to refresh the player's memory on how to perform a certain task they may not have used in a while. In this case, the team reminds the player about using valves to turn off steam in a relaxed environment. In the map just ahead, this trick will be fresh in their mind and they will be far more likely to realize they can use steamjets tactically when they encounter them in a combat situation.


 * According to Matt T. Wood, one of the team's main goals for the Hunter was to make the player feel vulnerable wherever hiding or not. The Hunter arena before the secondary silo became their testbed for improving the Hunters' close-combat behavior. A classic combat space, featuring multiple exits and many possible paths, the team tuned it for a strong cat-and-mouse gameplay experience. While players have many options for escape, the map is designed so that Hunters will never completely lose them - but always be able to pursue and flush the player out of hiding.




 * According to Richard Lord, the diagram explaining how to use the Magnusson Device against Striders went through several iterations, from highly stylized, to absurd, to something the team believed they could ship.


 * According to John Guthrie, the massive Strider battle was in production longer than any other map in Episode Two. Tuning it required many, many months of testing and iteration to address playtest feedback, and this was complicated by the fact that every time the team playtested, they saw individuals adopt completely different approaches to defeating the Striders. Some threw logs at Hunters; others relied on their Rebel companions to kill them. Some players never sprinted, while others never used the car. They tried to keep supporting all the different strategies that occured to players, so that their experiments with tactics would be rewarding rather than frustrating. Meanwhile, they had to make sure the Strider and Hunter behaviors were consistent, and balance the experience so that it would be a satisfying game experience for all different play styles at every skill level.


 * As seen in the Episode Two Gameplay Demo 5 released in 2006, the Strider battle was also to feature Overwatch Soldiers.


 * According to Jon Huisingh, the team wanted players to use the Muscle Car as much as possible, both to move around the valley quickly and to run over Hunters as a quick and satisfying way of killing them. To encourage this, and to help with orientation problems, the team added a radar to the car which indicated the location of enemies. This made the car a more valuable tool in the battle and solved the navigation problem once and for all.


 * According to Ido Magal, one problem the team faced in the Strider battle map was that players would abandon their car in the heat of battle and were not be able to find it later. Given the time pressure and large scale of the map, some of these players could not succeed in protecting the base on foot. To address this they started by adding flashing hazard lights to the car, which helped when the car was in view, but they still saw players lose the car among the trees or behind hills. Eventually they added a vehicle locator to the HEV Suit so that players could find the car wherever it was.




 * According to Chris Chin, a great deal of work went into making sure players see the buildings get destroyed as they travel around the valley during the final battle. While the team cannot (and does not wish to) force the player to see these events, they tried to increase the odds that the player would end up in the best possible position for the show. Measures ranged from simply hiding a Strider behind rocks, to setting up complex logic conditions that must be met in order for the destruction to occur.


 * According to Joe Han, players under pressure can overlook basic tasks, so they try to make the important ones foolproof. On the Strider battle map, players often forget to check their health level, but rarely forget to seek out Magnusson Devices. They narrowed doorways and set health supply racks right by the entries, so that players rushing in to get explosives would find themselves automatically picking up vital supplies.


 * According to Tom Leonard, the Hunter's escort behavior includes specific formations and flanking strategies. The Strider battle valley environment was designed specifically to enhance those behaviors by providing cover and visually interesting paths. In this way the environment reinforces the design of the Hunter as stealthy, aggressive, and intelligent.


 * At the end of the second Episode Two teaser trailer, Kleiner can be seen in an humorous situation in the rocket silo at White Forest, saying "Mmhh... Now, that's interesting! I think we're getting somewhere!", then screaming when sparks spew from the rocket. This sentence/sequence is not featured in Episode Two; the scream is recycled from the scream Kleiner makes when Gordon appears behind him at the end of the teleportation failure at the start of Half-Life 2. The console Kleiner stands at is instead used by Magnusson, and is at a different place. Furthermore, no Vortigaunt can be seen on the level right below.


 * In the base, an Easter Egg referring to the TV series Lost can be found. In Uriah's lab, there is an inaccessible room containing a computer terminal with the six factors of the Valenzetti Equation shown on the screen and, on the wall, a Dharma-style octagon with the three pines from the White Forest logo in the middle. According to Steve Bond, many Valve employees are fans of Lost, and they noticed several strong Half-Life references in the first season of Lost. Gabe Newell and Lost creator J. J. Abrams exchanged e-mails, and Newell promised Abrams there would be a Lost reference in Episode Two, and this room was created. This being merely an Easter Egg, the connection between the two universes is however not to be considered canon.

Trivia



 * The Consoling Couple appears to have managed to leave City 17 alive, as it is seen through Eli's / Kleiner's office window when first going to visit Uriah.


 * If Gordon fails to defeat all the Striders attacking White Forest, the last one will destroy the White Forest antenna in a single shot. Afterwards, the message "The rocket has been destroyed - Magnusson's misgivings about the Freeman are completely justified. - The game now ends" is shown, and the game reloads.


 * There are several Orange Box Achievements related to White Forest: "Little Rocket Man", which requires to send the Garden Gnome into space by putting it with Lamarr in the opened rocket. Another is "Secondary Silo Secured", requiring to secure the launch doors in silo 2. Two achievements are related to the battle: "Neighborhood Watch" and "Defensive of the Armament"; the first one requires saving all the buildings outside White Forest and the second preventing the Striders from reaching the base.


 * It may or may not be a coincidence that the name "White Forest" is diametrically opposed to the name "Black Mesa".


 * The missile silo mirrors Black Mesa Research Facility rooms such as the Anti-Mass Spectrometer Test Chamber or the Tentacle chamber in the chapter Blast Pit.


 * Left of the rocket launch button can be seen the word "launch", with the "A" hidden with tape to make the word "lunch".

List of appearances

 * Half-Life 2: Episode One
 * Half-Life 2: Episode Two