>>15203221
The Universal Union's Earth-occupational-government and their Overwatch peacekeeping forces are such a fascinating organisation. Alien intelligences from a massive, inter-dimensional bureaucratic empire, who in order to prove the merit of their new colony on its own terms (or just because the bureaucratic systems of the empire are that bloated and dysfunctional) have been denied access to the vast majority of the empire's technology, industry, and warfighting machinery.
Their soldiers are cybernetically augmented, wear armour seemingly made out of non-Newtonian reactive armour compounds and graphene-like alloy meshes, and are in constant contact with high-power tactical and strategic command AIs - but how much of that is even alien technology, and how much of it is really technology our own governments had developed and then kept secret from us right up until the end?
This is on-topic since Valve didn't actually build on or explore the setting (let alone any of the actual gameplay concepts in Half-Life) at all in the Episodes (fuck Epistle 3, especially) and if they made a Half-Life 3 now it'd end up just being an F2P battle royale game.