Listening to the developer commentary regarding Alyx is interesting. They put a lot of effort into making it seem believable that she would fall for a mute.
In fact, they spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a way to keep the players from resenting Alyx, and not just gravity-gunning bottles to her head all day.
One time I took my gravity gun and slapped a black guy upside the head with a watermelon slice (What is up with fresh watermelon growing in a wasteland anyway!)
I must have triggered some script because he shouted "THIS IS BULLSHIT!"
I can only think of one way to make the gravity gun awful and that's to force you to use it to lob sticky bombs at striders while hunters try and kill you.
Are you kidding? That weapon was shitty. And Valve knew it. That's why they had the scientists jokingly name it after their egomaniac boss Dr. Magnusson who much to their sniggering delight I'm sure, took it as an honest gesture.
It was only the fact that Gordon Freeman is so awesome that he was able to defeat those things with that device. But it took ten times as long as it would have taken to do the job with rockets.
And thus players learned to hate Dr. Magnusson as much as his colleagues.
Reddit
Digg
Stumble
Facebook
