So what was it that alerted the combine to earth

[Bitwolf]

G-man setting off the nuke, or Gordon launching the rocket? I've heard both.

[Mλrtin2H]

The death of the Nihilanth allowed them to take over Xen, where they found the portal to earth.

[Deckster]

It was gman setting the nuke off which led them to Earth

[Ghidrah1]

Lousy perfume commercials

[Mλrtin2H]

Originally posted by Franklin:

It was gman setting the nuke off which led them to Earth

Can you provide your source on that? I'm curious.

[Kolibria]

Originally posted by Mλrtin2H:

Originally posted by Franklin:

It was gman setting the nuke off which led them to Earth

Can you provide your source on that? I'm curious.

It's wrong :)

[Mλrtin2H]

Originally posted by TCE Nomad:

Originally posted by Mλrtin2H:

Can you provide your source on that? I'm curious.

It's wrong :)

Well, where do people get this idea from?

[Bitwolf]

Originally posted by Mλrtin2H:

The death of the Nihilanth allowed them to take over Xen, where they found the portal to earth.

So its neither? Was it ever talked about in game, or is it one of those some obscure interview from 2006 thing.

[Mλrtin2H]

Originally posted by Darkwolf:

Originally posted by Mλrtin2H:

The death of the Nihilanth allowed them to take over Xen, where they found the portal to earth.

So its neither? Was it ever talked about in game, or is it one of those some obscure interview from 2006 thing.

Obscure interview I guess. Half-Life's writer Marc Laidlaw said that The Nihilanth's race was running from The Combine.

"What we saw in HL1 was the very end of a long struggle between the Combine and the last of the Nihilanth's race. The Nihilanth's "world" (if it could be said to have) was long since in the past as far as the Nihilanth was concerned; Xen was their final retreat, and they had their back to the wall"

It's implied that the Nihilath was the only thing stopping The Combine from coming to Xen.

[Sovereign]

Mλrtin2H is mostly right, they were following the last Nihilanth and were attracted to Earth by the Resonance Cascade and the Nihilanth's death at the hands of Gordon. However the Combine do not control Xen or have any presence there as far as we know. Last we heard it was under the control of the G-Man's "Employers", not the Combine. Though that was 20 years before HL2 so who knows what the case is now.

[Noir]

true

[Noir]

Originally posted by Darkwolf:

G-man setting off the nuke, or Gordon launching the rocket? I've heard both.

[Vzzdak]

Answering the OP is complicated, and there will not be an absolutely satisfying answer.

Good writing takes effort and time, with much revision and tweaks. People prefer continuity in their stories, such that everything is literally and figuratively consistent. This requires substantial effort.

Complicating the Half Life story is its ties to game development, which involves long development cycles that can allow for improvisations that made sense at the time, yet conflict with what the original writer had in mind. And over time, even the writer, having a knowledge of the broad strokes, will later revise their work when better ideas occur to them.

Sometimes the author simply dies before the work has been completed (i.e., brought to a satisfying conclusion). This was the case with Frank Herbert's Dune series, where he literally wanted to complete one more book before his death. After dying, his son helped produce multiple books "based upon Frank Herbert's notes."

Naturally, stories written by someone other than the original author led people to be divided upon the value of the additional Dune volumes. This is akin to the release of Half Life expansions (i.e., Opposing Force, and Blue Shift). Valve apparently accepted these story expansions as cannon, much like George Lucas had, before the Disney purchase, accepted Expanded Universe (i.e., spin-off materials) as canon (and we all know how rabid Star Wars fans can be about their canon).

Fundamentally, Half Life is a series of games. If a game has satisfying gameplay in its own right, then that could be considered a success. But the succss of Half Life is a combination of gameplay and storytelling, and due to the nature of game development, there will be difficulty in obtaining a satisfactory reconciling of all the Half Life story elements.