Half-Life 2's 2003 beta reveals the mystery behind a City 17 river that once led players to the foot of the Citadel

There are various unfinished versions of Half-Life 2 that have come to light over the years, all of which reveal interesting things about how Valve's plans changed over time as it painstakingly refined and pruned one of the PC gaming greats.

A new video by YouTuber and Half-Life 2 obsessive CMDR RileySV delves into the 2003 beta, and specifically one of the finished game's little mysteries: "The elusive City 17 river." This is a river that can be seen at a couple of points in the final game, but the player never travels to it. Yet at one point it was intended to play a much greater role in the lead-up to the game's climax.

The closest you physically get to this inaccessible river in the finished game is in the waterways near the start, and again in chapter 10. City 17 in earlier versions of Half-Life 2 had more emphasis on the waterways, and a beta file called "streetwars/proto_c17map" shows a large but untextured cityscape where the river bisects the map and various waterways run beneath the streets ("Street Wars" was apparently the working title for what would become the "Anticitizen One" chapter of the game, focused on the Uprising against the Combine)

In the finished Half-Life 2, there's a section where Gordon and Alyx are fighting through City 17 trying to reach Barney, and come to a destroyed bridge. You end up dropping down to the canal before a short underground section and into a factory, before returning to the streets.

In the 2003 beta version, you instead drop down into the canal and go through a more involved underground section, fighting various enemies and Combine soldiers, before emerging at another bridge that crossed a river. Here you'd fight a Hydra before entering the same street that appears in the finished game.

The Uprising section of the game was at one point intended to last much longer, and in the 2003 beta features the E3 Strider demo fight, after which the player fights further through City 17's streets before reaching a park next to a waterway. Here you go down into the canals, with two more untextured maps featuring the scout car: the player was to race through these canals, presumably with encounters along the way, before finally emerging right at the base of the Citadel. Even in the unfinished state you can see this would've been a great visual reveal of the Citadel as the player turns a corner to see the base and looks up…. And up, and up.

So at one point this river and the canals were basically how the player was intended to eventually reach the Citadel. In the final version, certain elements of them remain (which can be seen by clipping through the scenery or using mods) but, for example, whatever was once planned for this canal section during the Anticitizen One chapter was repurposed into the final game's canal section (which some players have mixed feelings about, but I think is great).

There's also an amazing comment under the YouTube video (miracles do sometimes happen):

"One thing I love about Half-Life 2 is the level of detail," says @FlintExp. "Even though the game itself takes place in Eastern Europe, the city layout as seen is from New York City. You can place these coordinates in google to see the exact location of that image."

@FlintExp goes on to explain how to reconstruct the image in order to easily "match the two bridges, roadways, and the 'Wallabout Bay' and other locations that follow the river to help confirm. I honestly want to say the Citadel's location is around Prospect Park in NYC based on the location of the screenshot."

So that retextured image you see of City 17 as you rise up the Citadel is actually an aerial view of a portion of New York. And the river you see here, which can also be glimpsed during the sequence with a Superportal in Half-Life 2: Episode Two, was once a major part of your journey through City 17 and, eventually, towards reaching the Citadel.

There's little doubt (in my mind at least) that Valve made all the right choices when it was shaping Half-Life 2's final form, and I think extending the City 17 sections in these ways would probably have been to the detriment of the game's pacing. But that's why this stuff is so fascinating, that look behind-the-scenes at how Valve was thinking and editing its work right up until the last minute: the 2003 beta is very similar to the retail version of the game, as you'd expect, except when it isn't. To give one more tiny example, in the beta you got the Gravity Gun after Ravenholme.

All credit to CMDR RileySV for explaining this nugget of Half-Life 2 history, and if you enjoy these kind of deep-dives into Half-Life esoterica then their channel is an absolute treasure trove of goodies (and also has some excellent lore videos about the series).