So this happened, and half the internet is in a frenzy. Now, admittedly, it doesn’t take much to frenzy the internet, but this is truly a doozy:
The lesson here is “never go to sleep”. All sorts of things happen while people sleep. Cats go on adventures, presidents threaten nuclear war and, well, ex-Valve writers post thinly-disguised plot summaries of the unreleased and, so far as best guesses go, long-cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Long time Half-Life scribe, the excellent Marc Laidlaw (who left Valve last year), casually tossed out a link to his website last night, which led to a short story about Gertie Fremont, Alex Vaunt and their climactic battle against evil alien invaders the Disparate (the site’s having a wobble, but the page is archived right here).
While that might sound like satirical tomfoolery, the actual story very much sounds like how the final chapter of Half-Life 3 could have played out. It involves time-travelling cruise liners, resurrected overlords, the heart of the Combine and the fate of one Doctor Gordon Freeman.
This is really happening.
Everything points to this being a thinly-veiled act of rebellion against Half-Life’s creators never getting the chance to finish the story they were telling. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 ended on probably the biggest unfulfilled cliffhanger in gaming history, and for almost ten years now, we’ve been waiting for a continuation or a conclusion. This must be incredibly frustrating for the original creators of the Half-Life series, and honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken them this long to start breaking rank.
From everything we’ve heard over the years, we can conclude that there will never be a Half-Life 3 or even an Episode 3. Many – if not most – of the original creators of Half-Life 1 and 2 have left Valve, and the company has little to no incentive to create a game that, like Duke Nukem Forever, will never live up to the hype they themselves created.
The established theory regarding why there’s no Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 is that Valve wanted the game to be as defining and revolutionary as Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, but I think that’s the wrong mindset to have. Gaming has come a long, long way since the late 90s and early 2000s, and over roughly the past decade or so there simply haven’t been any games that rebooted or revolutionised entire genres, or established new ones. The only game I can think of in the past ten years that created a new genre of games and had an everlasting impact on the industry is Minecraft, and that was a fluke.
The industry is more mature, more settled now, and it’s much harder to be revolutionary today than it was 20 years ago. The great games of today aren’t revolutionary; they are evolutionary, perfecting and polishing established genres, taking them to new heights. Games like The Witcher 3 and Horizon: Zero Dawn aren’t loved because they changed the industry; they’re loved because they took existing genres and executed them in the very best ways the current generation of technologies allows us to do.
I see no reason why Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 should change the world or revolutionise what we think of as games. Just let it tell a great story with the characters we love, polish its chosen genre to perfection, and people will love it just as much 20 years from now as we love Half-Life 1 and 2 today.
2+9+9+8+0=28 and 28 is a triangular number! HALF LIFE 3 CONFIRMED!
Seriously, this is the best possible way that the conclusion could have been delivered. It’s been too long, and Valve has clearly shown that the follow-up to the cliffhanger isn’t a priority. Ever since Valve realized that they could print money through Steam, DOTA, and CS, it’s just not worth the effort, cost, and risk to complete the Half-Life story. It’s a lot more difficult to get away with a game that performs any less than spectacularly these days, especially when the anticipation is as high as a Half-Life entry.
Valve’s business model has changed. I’m okay with that. I’ll just never forget how blown-away I was when I was the HL2 and Source engine tech demo for the first time. It really looked like absolutely nothing close to what was out on the market.
Edited 2017-08-27 02:19 UTC
Meh, not really. In 2004 I was at university and it was Halflife 2 vs Farcry and Doom 3. Farcry was the best game of the three. Mainly because there was so much variety in how you could attack the missions, at least in the first half of the game. Sure the Trigen stuff was dumb, but in terms of impressive engine, Farcry stomped all over Halflife 2. Most people I know never returned to Halflife 2 once they’d played it through once but many people replayed Farcry to see what weird combinations they could come up with. Hell the demo for Farcry was in many ways almost a complete game in itself. I just wish they’d make a new Farcry game that just had mercenaries and some sort of Uncharted style plot. Tropical islands, open world and guns were what that game got perfect.
Edited 2017-08-28 20:58 UTC
Doom 3 was the least impressive, mainly because it was ridiculously demanding. I could run both Far Cry and HL2 in 16:9 on a modestly specced laptop while Doom 3 quite often almost died in 640×480. What the hell was that about?
And yeah, Far Cry was awesome. I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving that Thomas Magnum meets Indiana Jones vibe that it had. Tropical islands, a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, mercenaries, WW2 Japanese bunkers, murderous monsters and the bad guy’s base is IN A VOLCANO! It’s so much awesome it hurts.
Edited 2017-08-29 09:36 UTC
I suppose that Far Cry looked more impressive, but after I got done with the campaign, the multiplayer was where I spent most of my time from HL2DM and CS:S. The multiplayer on Far Cry was laughably bad.
The main thing that was impressive about Source at the time was its ability to scale to older hardware. I had a friend with a 1GHz P3 at the time, play through HL2, while I had a much better system. Visual effects aside, we had the same experience. The Cryengine might’ve been more technically impressive, but I was looking at Source with the same perspective of GoldSrc, and the amount of content that was created using the engine. I had high hopes back then of seeing almost endless content being created using Source. Today, anyone with a computer made in the last 10 years can play HL2 online in co-op from start to finish without a hitch.
Short but sweet. It would be nice if Valve could some day come out with a fun successor to HL 2.
What is the Half-Life’s half life ? Life pass on.
Good interview with Gabe Newell (owner of Valve): https://www.polygon.com/features/2017/2/15/14616192/gabe-newell-inte…
They could’ve kept the same engine and provided some decent ending to the series or just open source it if they were done with single player classics.
Many of us would have crowdfunded any initiative from someone to continue the series.
Deep down I still believe that they will release something based on it, at least from VR perspective.
Like any other gem it will be under “it will be revealed when it’s ready” politics.
So you think they should’ve open-sourced their game engine, and let whoever do whatever they wanted with their IP too? I’m damn glad they did NOT do what you’ve proposed.
They really don’t need anything new, they might as well release an updated graphics/physics version of the second one and finish the story and finish the series, or an animated film or something.
If it doesn’t happen it’s not a big deal, because that’s what’s more likely to happen.
And now, gamers are bombing Dota 2 with complaints about a lack of Half-Life 3
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/08/steam-reviewers-bomb-dota-2-o…
Supposedly they have 3 games in the works for VR. So Half-Life 3: Episodes 1-3?
You know we all wish it…
Weird thing is I swear I played through HL2: Ep 2, but don’t even remember the ending… may have to play it again.
They have been updating their Source engine, considering it originated as a fork of the Quake Engine for Half-Life 1, into Source for Half-Life 2 you’d think Source 2 would be aching for a Half-Life 3….
I think They truly needn’t bother with anything new, they should discharge a refreshed designs/material science adaptation of the second one and complete the story and complete the arrangement, or an enlivened film or something. http://www.gurgaonfairy.com