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Half Life 2 was interesting. Breen's speeches about collaboration were kind of thought-provoking. Humanity got stomped in the war, it makes sense to collaborate and evade total destruction. He wasn't a stock bad guy, even though the collaboration he oversaw was the slow death of humanity.
There's lots of rich ambience going on in that game, lots of implications left for players to come debate: G-man, the Vortigaunts...
Fall From Heaven 2 also has pretty good writing IMO, at least the base version of the mod does. The modmods get a bit crazy and weaker.
It's one of the few pieces in a subgenre of science fiction that I love which is seeing humanity deal with getting colonized by a much more powerful force.
There's V of course, but that's kinda campy by today's standards, Colony was great but got cancelled, and Captive State was really well executed but still fairly obscure.
I think it's underutilized which is a shame because it's a setup that allows you to completely erase cultural and ethnic lenses and deal with colonization as a pure concept and understand how people who may think of it completely differently from you are coming from.
HL2 is also cool in that I think it legitimately contains the most totalitarian society ever depicted in fiction. I've yet to see worse than the Combine. And yet it seems so understated and natural (unlike the more typically gloomy ambience of the beta). They're not cackling in your face, you just see the effects of a system, and the implications are horrifying if you think about it for a minute. It's great storytelling.
The Three body problem series gets into that kind of thing, albeit from different angles. There's also parts of the Xeelee sequence that deal with it.
HL2 was great, I think a big part of a game's quality is in how many fanatics it generates. The people who go to great efforts making mods. Gmod, Entropy Zero 1 & 2, Black Mesa... the Half-Life franchise produced an enormous fountain of creativity.
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