Within the story, there are reasons why you are in City 17. Outside of what is happening in the story, two factors influenced our inclusion of City 17 - the first was that Viktor Antonov grew up in Romania and without really intending to he got a bunch of the artists excited about an art direction that drew heavily on eastern European source material, and the second was that thematically present day eastern Europe exists at a really interesting crossroad between the past and the future which resonates with what goes on in Half-Life 2.
"Take2 would be scaling back their E3 presence next year and they are hoping for a Max Payne2 release around January of 2004."