The developers of the Half-life 2 mod "Outcast" recently posted this update: moddb.com/mods/half-life-2-outca… In it they detail a side-project they are working on. A choice they made with it was to include a few child characters, since the project they are working on predates Half-life 2 chronologically and that is possible. Another choice they made was to have zombified versions of said children as well, which to me makes logical sense, headcrabs are animals they don't have notions like "don't hurt the child", they just want to... well, eat. One person in the comments disliked the addition of headcrabbed children, and there was a conversation about it afterwards; that made me wonder, what would it have been like if Valve *did* include children in Half-life 2? How do you feel about that idea in general? I think perhaps they dodged a bullet, since it may have made Half-life 2 a little bit controversial, depending on what happens to them, it's hard to tell if it would have added anything interesting to the story, since we simply don't have that version of Half-life 2, but Valve managed just fine without them? I dunno. (also if you're going to reply to this, please be cool towards anyone who has a different opinion, regardless of what that opinion is, and be cool to the authors of Outcast too)
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Hello, one of the devs here. I am very happy to see that you think the same way we do, the zombie child has been more controversial than expected but we are glad to see that there are people who support us.
this is the one time its justified to shoot a kid, remember that the headcrab hosts are still alive and in increddible pain, and have no control over their body, its better to put these poor souls out of their misery as quick as possible
I am suddenly reminded of all of the times I set zombies on fire. Whoops.
The addition of the children and the zombie children is a well thought idea, especially for the zombie children, because it shows how ruthless the headcrabs are and how scary they might be.
That's true. Zombies in Half-life are kind of trivial at this point, they might as well be walking mannequins. There's the notable "yabba my icing" (as it is colloquially known) that led to discussions of how the hosts are still aware and conscious in some form, but that was discussed over a decade ago, and then we got desensitized to them. HL: Alyx doesn't really do anything narratively new with the zombies, that was not the focus of the game anyway, but it contributes to their relative irrelevance. Most of the time the zombies are just... there, filling a background role that you barely pay attention to, as zombies often did in various stories created in the 2000's. At most you'll remember certain sections of the games because of the *quantity* of zombies you have to kill, and that is as far as they get in terms of leaving a lasting impression. Zombie children could bring in a renewed attention to what these things are, the tragedy of their hosts, to put it that way.
Would a headcrab even fit on a child's head?
I figure they could, given that they are a big mouth thing with a beak to clamp down on their unfortunate victims. Naturally humanity is not their first prey, and they figured us out in like 3 seconds after being transported across the entire universe, so that suggests that they are very simple in how they do their thing, which makes them adaptable.