Xen was a big letdown in the original Half-Life. The exciting battle at Black Mesa is replaced by boring platforming in an empty space slowing down the game's pace. The game never picked up again after arriving at the inter-dimensional edges of this strange frontier world (wow) so it's no wonder it left such a sour taste even Gabe Newell remembers it with regret.
Half-Life 3 gives Valve a chance to fix this mistake after almost 30 years. Xen has been mentioned in HLX leaks suggesting it might return which makes sense given the cliffhanger ending of Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
With Nihilanth Dead and Aliens Flooding Earth What’s Left of Xen?
What modern Xen will look like is a complete mystery. As we saw with Black Mesa Valve could completely change the frontier world with a more colorful environment adding new biomes and jungle like areas or it could stick with the barren rocky wasteland that many of us disliked crossing years ago.
I'm excited to see what direction Valve will take when Half-Life 3 finally releases. It's hard to be sure just from a few lines of code but one thing we can guess is about the inhabitants of Xen.
The alien invasion in Half-Life was led by the Nihilanth and their army of controllers who enslaved the Vortigaunts and forced them into slavery as factory workers and foot soldiers. But nothing is native to Xen and even the Nihilanth is a desperate refugee fleeing the tyranny of the Combine the border world being their last refuge.
After the Resonance Cascade and Nihilanth's Defeat What’s Left for Gordon Freeman?
A few years ago lead writer Marc Laidlaw wondered about this. He mentioned that if any Controllers survived they would likely be stuck in a place that isn’t their natural habitat. But without a reliable food source they probably wouldn’t have lasted long.
The Nihilanth is no more, and it seems the Controllers and the Alien Grunts died with them. But then we have the Headcrabs, Bullsquids, Houndeyes, Vortigaunts and Barnacles which are found in abundance on Earth by the time of Half-Life 2 (though some were left out for cut content). It's safe to assume that most of them fled during the Black Mesa incident and the portal storms that followed leaving the border worlds mostly empty but I'm not so sure.
Thanks to leaks we know that there are Xen jellyfish in Half-Life 3 but they're not a new species. One creature that Alyx cut was called the Jelly Blobber an aquatic-looking alien that floated harmlessly around the Quarantine Zone which was teeming with Xen life. The Jelly Blobber also appears to be a variation of Half-Life's cut enemy the Flocking Floater which was a living balloon that floated around unharmed. So the Xen jellyfish have always been there lurking in the background of cut content.
If we assume that these leaked Xen creatures are only found on Xen and nowhere else on Earth that would mean that not every creature could survive the portal storm. so we'd probably still get headcrabs, bullsquids, Hunters, barnacles and maybe Vortigaunts but in smaller numbers.
The Xen gorilla is a big mystery I’m not sure what to think of it. Could it be a code name for an existing creature like the alien grunts? Or is Valve following up on a small detail from Alyx where the hero asks about Juice at the central zoo? Could a headcrab turn a gorilla into a zombie?
We'll have to wait and see but I am curious about what modern Xen will be like and how decades of migration will affect it. It might be even emptier than before or maybe a new species has come into the space left by the Nihilanth.
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