I just realized how I want them to reveal Half-Life 3.
I want them to put out a trailer for Ricochet 2. Like a full trailer for a game based on Ricochet, with a big ridiculous singleplayer campaign and extensive multiplayer modes.. and then at the end, the screen glitches and you see the HL3 logo for a fraction of a second.
And then they officially announce the Purple Box with Ricochet 2 and Half-Life 3.
That would prevent them from taking out a magazine ad with the gravity gun claws forming a 3.
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
I just realized how I want them to reveal Half-Life 3.
I want them to put out a trailer for Ricochet 2. Like a full trailer for a game based on Ricochet, with a big ridiculous singleplayer campaign and extensive multiplayer modes.. and then at the end, the screen glitches and you see the HL3 logo for a fraction of a second.
And then they officially announce the Purple Box with Ricochet 2 and Half-Life 3.
That would prevent them from taking out a magazine ad with the gravity gun claws forming a 3.
That was the "next month" preview from the magazine itself; not an ad from Valve.
So I'm putting together this article and I'm wondering, would it be better to convey this information in a timeline and just list all the events in order of date; or would it be better to turn it into an article that speaks about different elements (design talk, code leaks) as specific topics, discussed in groups, rather than as they happened.
EDIT: Also, I managed to beat the wayback machine enough to find those old computerandvideogames articles, so that's cool.
Half-life2 in general (so including all episodes), the single player was really good. The ammo limits were way too strict though. I played on Hard, but a lot of the time I just couldn't pick up ammo because I was maxed, but you could run out quick because the max you could hold was so low. While I never played HL2 DM (didn't sound too good from what I read about it), but I absolutely love HL1 DM. If Half-life 3 goes in that direction...yes please! (i realize this is probably a pipe dream).
Overall I think HL1 had more interesting weapons. They got rid of the vacuum (i forget the real name) and the gauss rifle.. that thing was super awesome because you could bounce yourself all over the place (and you could shoot through walls, which was a bit cheap imo). Where were the snarks?! Those were hilarious to use. I didn't care too much for the "bee gun" though, it kinda sucked.
HL2DM was amazing and a ton of fun. Especially using the gravity gun to pick shit up and fling it at your opponents, only to have them switch to the grav gun, catch it in midair, and fling it back at you. Or picking up a metal table and using it as a shield until you throw it at a group of people. Good times.
I always wished that they made the stuff you picked up transparent, like in Deus Ex. It was difficult to aim toilets and sinks at people when you couldn't see anything.
Man, HL2: Deathmatch reminds me of how Valve used to use steam to basically do weekly blog updates on what they were working on. I wonder if I can find an archive of them.
God dammit, that shot of HL3 Alpha in the Steam browser took me back to being a teenager and getting a .zip full of images from Unreal from one of the level designers for my birthday. This was back when any image of the game coming out was an event.
I hate wish Valve for not giving would give me that feeling for real.
In today's hilariously bad HL3 fake announcement, this image has apparently been floating around for a month
People have pointed out the shoddy lines on the HL3 logo, which is a big red flag.
The off-center "three slashes" for L4D3, "Counter-Strike: Guns On Us" and Half-Life 3-1 (1-3?) are probably the worse ideas for fakes that I've heard of.
EDIT: Also, the sheer lunacy of Valve talking about THREE unannounced games in at the same time.
EDIT2: Almost forgot, it apparently came with this e-mail
I got an E-Mail from some guy saying;
I cannot name my source. She does not work for the company. Picture taken during a screening of the work in progress E3 presentation within the office's home theater. Valve will go onto announce the Source Dos (2) engine, showing very familiar landscapes, then will cut to reveals.
Counter - Strike : Guns on Us is a Global Offensive port to the Source Dos, featuring upgraded graphics. It looks like a new game -- but it's gameplay is CS:GO. The game features a scopeless AWP. Weapon attachments are now purchasable items, the AWP's scope is in that list. Zeus skins will be introduced. Inventory will carry over from GO, stats won't, but in your profile people will be able to view your CS:GO rank. You can use skins in both GOU and GO.
Left 4 Dead 3, previously leaked earlier, will be revealed as a trailer. A hand rises from the bottom of the screen on a black background. Country music begins to play, and the hand begins to decay stop-motion style until only three fingers remain. The trailer picks up in real time, the hand turns to the camera and claws at it. Cut to black. We see the mark the hand left. Left 4 Dead fades in.
Half Life 3 is the end to the franchise, it will be split into two parts, both being 30 dollars, eventually ending as a 60 dollar package.
I am sending this anonymously to multiple sources. Thank you, and I hope you do what you do with this information.
"Guns on us" kinda makes sense as a free to play title
Except that global offensive is doing quite well
And whenever it gets a deep sale, there's a huge influx of cheaters
So why would they make a free one?
Valve has actually been attacked and held hostage by gunmen for the past few months, which is why they have been fairly quiet. The name "guns on us" is a desperate attempt to inform the public that they need rescuing - we are supposed to deduce that people are pointing guns at them.
You know, I have to respect whoever thought up that fake just for coming up with all the intricacies. Like HL3 being split into two parts, Counter-Strike having scopeless AWPS and that ridiculous Guns on Us name, etc. Also, the logos, even though all of them suck. The HL3 one particularly is ridiculous... Yes, let's confuse people by putting a 3 and a 1 with the Lambda. Still, more effort went into that than most fan fakes over the last couple of years.
You know, I have to respect whoever thought up that fake just for coming up with all the intricacies. Like HL3 being split into two parts, Counter-Strike having scopeless AWPS and that ridiculous Guns on Us name, etc. Also, the logos, even though all of them suck. The HL3 one particularly is ridiculous... Yes, let's confuse people by putting a 3 and a 1 with the Lambda. Still, more effort went into that than most fan fakes over the last couple of years.
No, look, Gaben personally wrote to me to confirm HL3 is in the works and the email had an attachment to it and L4D4 (I've been playing 3 for the last year on private test servers) but I deleted the email in my excitement. Legit.
I'll probably miss the release of HL3 for like a week because I didn't check this thread or something and I'm sure as hell not trusting any other place.
Also, everybody make sure they've read all of Breengrub. Most official Half-Life lore we're probably ever getting again.
Laidlaw has said Breengrub is just him fucking around and isn't canon or anything.
Also, I think people would revolt if it took that long to move through vents in HL2. Though I do agree that I would like to see more involved animations in whatever Valve does next. Shooting a dude in the foot and watching him suddenly be dead always bugged me. This video reminded me of that HL1 trailer someone made a few years ago and lo and behold its the same guy. :biggrin:
Yeah, the picking-up-glasses thing was my idea 8-) Video actually got him an interview at Valve too
Re Breengrub: I dunno, I think of it as canon-until-proven-otherwise. I know he said it's just HL fanfic, but like... it's HL fanfic from the author of HL. Laidlaw tweeted at me something to the effect that the most he can hope for is that it gets taken into account by whoever when the time comes. I dunno how much of this is just me reading into what he told me but the subtext felt like, Laidlaw really wanted to be working on Half-Life, but he wasn't, and he was maybe a tiny bit bitter about it, and Breengrub was his way of getting away with continuing his story.
Yeah, Laidlaw may have a ton of story ideas for a theoretical sequel, but no one is working on the gameplay side enough (or at all) to justify it being a full project.
I'm sure Laidlaw had the full story mapped out in his head long ago. I wish Valve would either commit to cancelling it so he can put out a book or something, or just finally make it.
The story evolves based on the conceits of game design though; they didn't come out of HL1 knowing they'd be setting the game in City 17 or be fighting the Combine or what the Combine even WERE specifically.
Hell, Breen wasn't even the Administrator when originally conceived.
EDIT: Also, those Laidlaw quotes were from two years ago, so who knows what's going on at Valve today.
EDIT: Figured I should gives some thanks to the guys who maintain the "Future of the Half-Life series" page over at the Half-Life wiki, and to ValveTime.net, who have done some great investigating into a ton of topics. Seriously, that's a great website, go check it out.
So obviously the topic of the day (week, month, year, decade) is what’s going on with Half-Life? When you get down to it, there’s basically two important questions here: What happened to Half-Life 2: Episode Three, and what is Valve currently working on? There’s actually a fascinating trail of comments, forgotten code, innuendo and leaks over the past 8 years that, while doesn’t produce any sort of smoking gun or final revelation (if it did I’d be posting about it constantly), I still think it spells out an identifiable narrative. Now, this is my own speculation on these matters, but I’ll provide sources to the things I’m drawing these conclusions from.
For now, let’s discuss what the hell happened to Episode Three.
The May 2006 issue of PC Gamer magazine, (Likely written a couple of months in advance) had an article titled “The World According to Gabe,” Gabe Newell outlined the plan for the Half-Life 2 Episodes, including that there would be a trilogy, and that Valve was planning on releasing an episode every 6-8 months. (There was also talk of a fourth episode produced outside of Valve, later revealed to be the canceled “Return to Ravenholm” made by Arkane Studios.) More importantly, they detail the proposed development schedule; that Episodes 1 and 2 were being developed concurrently, and that Episode One’s development team would swap over to Episode Three once that game is completed.
In May 2006 proper, Half-Life 2: Episode One went gold, and in the press release Valve spelled out that these Episodes were part of a trilogy, that would conclude in Christmas of 2007.
Source: Half-Life 2: Episode One Available June 1
News after this point is almost non-existent. In May of 2007, Valve mentions that "Pre-production is definitely going, and it'll be ramping up rather quickly now that they're ramping down on Episode Two," The article also mentions that there is a “skeleton crew” doing the work, splitting their attention between Episodes Two and Three.
Source: Valve comments on Episode Three progress
Half-Life 2: Episode Two is released in October of 2007 as part of the Orange Box, and unlike its predecessor, there is no teaser to set up Episode Three, though the first piece of concept art is released in an issue of PC Gamer.
The digital book “The Final Hours of Portal 2” describes how Gabe Newell, after the launch of the Orange Box, shut down all production at Valve in November 2007 to enact an initiative called the “Directed Design Experiments” where Valve encouraged its employees to assemble into small groups and work on whatever cool or interesting things they could think of.
2008 is a fairly quiet year, with some allegedly old code found in the Source SDK and the final two pieces of official concept art being released.
In October, Valve VP of Marketing, Doug Lombardi, says in an interview that they may have more information to share by the end of the year, and that the distance between Episodes Two and Three will be longer than between HL1 and Ep1 or between Ep1 and Ep2. Obviously, no news came out that year.
Source: Interview: Valve's Doug Lombardi
Left 4 Dead is released in 2008, and work on Left 4 Dead 2 begins shortly thereafter. Doug Lombardi later mentions that Turtle Rock Studios (aka Valve South, developers of Left 4 Dead) were shut down and absorbed into Valve’s main headquarters, due to the difficulty of moving personnel between projects with two locations on opposite sides of the country. Left 4 Dead 2 has been an internally developed game for an unknown time.
Source: E3: Valve's Lombardi On What Happened To Turtle Rock
In August of 2009, Gabe Newell mentions that “Episode Three is sort of this victim of our willingness to experiment but as soon as we have stuff that we’re ready to talk about, we will.” Earlier that month, Gabe appeared in a discussion about deafness discussing potentially adding sign language to one of their games, specifically citing a potential example involving Alyx and D0G. Incidentally, the experimentation quote marks the last time (as far as I can find) that Valve mentions Episode Three by name.
Sources: Episode #9: Exclusive interview with Gabe Newell Steamcast Episode #9: "Exclusive interview with Gabe Newell" Transcript Gabe Newell w/ Deaf Character - Part Two
In January of 2010, CinemaBlend states that an article in the February 2010 issue of Game Informer magazine says something to the effect of “there won't be a new Half-Life game released in 2010. What's more, it's not even clear what form a new game would take. It could be Half-Life 2: Episode Three or it may be Half-Life 3.”
Source: Rumor: No Half-Life In 2010
Around March or April, EDGE Magazine runs an article with Valve in issue 213, discussing the future of the Half-Life franchise. Information available is secondhand, but Gabe Newell apparently stated that they weren’t planning on changing Freeman, leaving him a mute cipher for the player, and that he felt that Half-Life had gotten too far away from “genuinely scaring the player.”
Sources: Gabe Newell: Next Half-Life won't change Gordon Freeman Gabe Newell: Next Half-Life needs to scare
Also in March of 2010, Portal 2 is announced for a “Holiday Season” 2010 release date, but is delayed several months later to a February 2011 (and eventually an April 2011) date. Meanwhile, another bit of old code for Episode Three is discovered in July, this time in the Alien Swarm SDK. In August, PSM3 interviewed Doug Lombardi about Valve on the PS3, and asked about the next Half-Life, to which he replied "We hate to make you wait. But we have no announcements regarding Mr. Freeman or his ongoing adventures at this time"
Source: How Valve will change PS3
At this point Valve official statements get into a loop of not being able to talk about things, but assuring us they’re working on things. In February 2011, Valve writer Chet Faliszek says "We’re not prepared to talk about that at the moment." when asked about Episode 3, and in March 2011, when asked if we will ever see “more Half-Life” Doug Lombardi responded “You will ever see it, yes. We are not done with Gordon Freeman’s adventures. I have nothing other than that to tell you today, but hang in there with us.”
Sources: 'When is Half-Life 2: Episode 3 coming out?' 'What? Sorry, we can't hear you...' AusGamers Valve Software 2011 Video Interview
April 2011 sees the release of Portal 2, and shortly thereafter in May, Develop Magazine states that in an interview, Gabe said the Episodic model within Valve has been replaced, with a more service- based model being what Valve is aiming for. “We went through the episodes phase, and now we’re going towards shorter and even shorter cycles.” Ironic, given May saw two more sets of old Episode Three resources found in the Portal 2 SDK and VPK files. The Valve manifesto
When asked about Episode Three in June 2011 at the “Games for Change” keynote, Gabe responded , "If you know enough to ask the question, you know enough what the answer is.” In September we find the last code references to Episode Three in a leaked DOTA2 beta client of all places.
Sources: When is Half-Life Episode 3 Coming? You Know the Answer Dota 2 Client datamined
So there are the facts and rumors for Episode Three, here comes the speculation.
Looking at things, it seems that Episode Three did not have full development attention put towards it during Episode Two’s development (the skeleton crew quote) like the original plan, so by the time the development freeze happened; I doubt it was very far beyond the planning stages. Once the freeze was over, 2008 seems to be when the bulk of the initial design happened, and given that Lombardi believed it was feasible enough to make an announcement by the end of 2008 that he’d say it in an interview three months earlier, that implies to me that they had enough of an idea of what they wanted that they were willing to start talking about it, but that’s just my take on it.
Obviously, that didn’t happen, and given their talk of experimenting, I imagine at some stage in 2009 they started reexamining what they were trying to accomplish with Episode Three. If Episode Three did return to some level of a concept stage, I would imagine focus would be put towards more immediate releases, like Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009 and then Portal 2 in 2010.
In 2010, we start to see the first rumors of Valve being unsure of whether to stick with an Episodic format, which coincides with them ceasing to refer directly to Episode Three and only ever speaking in general terms about Half-Life franchise. Most often though, they simply just do not speak about it at all, aside from occasionally saying they’re stilling planning on doing things with Half-Life. At this point, I suspect the protracted development period of what was originally intended to be just an Episode lead to Valve evaluating if what they would wind up producing would justify the development time and the amount of time fans had waited.
2011 is the closest we have to a bombshell, where Gabe states they’ve moved on from the Episodic phase of development. As Portal 2’s development came to a close, Episode Three was probably given closer scrutiny as it would become Valve’s new focus, and at that point is where I believe Valve decided that putting out an episode at that point just wouldn’t cut the mustard, and that episodes just weren’t doing what they wanted them to do; which was put out new content faster. It’s hard to guess where Episode Three died exactly, but I think that comment from Gabe was definitely its eulogy.
So that’s what I think happened to Half-Life 2: Episode Three. As mentioned, it is just my own speculation on the matter, but I hope I’ve at least provided enough sources to explain where I formulated this opinion. So anyway, we’ve gotten the boring section out of the way. Next time I’ll get into the fun stuff! (Note: it’s not terribly fun)
So, we’ve discussed why I think Half-Life 2: Episode Three is deader than a doornail. Now is the time to discuss what I think is happening next, both with Half-Life and Valve in general. As I mentioned, there’s no smoking gun here; this is a list of comments, innuendo and alleged leaks, none of which proves anything. Like before, I’ll list out all the facts and rumors and then I’ll put together my own speculation on the matter.
In response to the September 2011 finding of Episode Three assets in the DOTA2 Beta leak, Valve writer Chet Faliszek said “Anything people get out of that rumour, they shouldn’t take it as meaning anything,“ “I mean, I guarantee that if you went into the original Half Life source code now, you’d probably find mention of unrelated stuff labelled ‘HL3′ there already. Its just the way it happens.” I only note this because it seems to be the very first time a Valve employee refers to Half-Life 3 and not Episode Three, though that doesn’t mean anything in the long run.
Source: Half Life 2: Episode 3 Same Old Story
Flash forward to December 2011, where game developer Chandana Ekanayake tweets the following picture, stating “All I'm saying is I saw this at a local game developer event worn by a Valve employee.” A Russian fan e-mails Marc Laidlaw about the t-shirt, with Laidlaw responding “I can confirm the existence of a shirt. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you.” Lambda Generation states they’ve confirmed the e-mail as valid.
Sources: @Ekanaut on Twitter Marc Laidlaw Confirms That There Is A Half-Life 3 Shirt Out There… With A Vague And Suspicious Non-Answer
Also in December 2011, OXM says they’ve been contacted by an unnamed voice actor who has recorded lines for Episode Three, but John Patrick Lowrie, (Voice of Odessa Cubbage, the Sniper and several other Valve characters, and wife to Ellen McLain, voice of GlaDOS) when asked if they’ve done anything for Half-Life 3/Episode three, states “No Half Life 3 stuff yet. Haven’t heard anything.”
Sources: Valve voice actor working on "Half Life: Episode 3" Ellen gets nominated for a VGA award, Part 3: Into the belly of the beast.
In April 2012, Gabe Newell was interviewed on the Seven Day Cooldown Podcast, and at one point was asked "My final question and the question in the back of all your fans' minds and everyone has been waiting to ask you for a long time: When can we expect the release of Ricochet 2?" to which he responded "In terms of Ricochet 2, we always have this problem that when we talk about things too far in advance, we end up changing our minds as we're going through and developing stuff, so as we're thinking through the giant story arc which is Ricochet 2, you might get to a point where you're saying something is surprising us in a positive way and something is surprising us in a negative way, and, you know, we'd like to be super-transparent about the future of Ricochet 2. The problem is, we think that the twists and turns that we're going through would probably drive people more crazy than just being silent about it, until we can be very crisp about what's happening next." He then goes on to deny that there have been staffing issues on the “project”: "No, everybody who has worked on Ricochet 2 continues to work on Ricochet 2."
Given Ricochet was a multiplayer only mod released for HL1, and had no story (let alone a “giant story-arc”) it’s almost certain Gabe is referring to their only long-missing franchise with an emphasis on story, Half-Life.
Sources: Seven Day Cooldown - Episode 1: GabeN Newell opens up on 'Half-Life 3' dev issues
In June 2012, Gabe makes a cameo in the Kickstarter video for the project “Clang,” hammering a heated crowbar as if it were a forged sword. When asked “Hey, is that about ready?” he responds “These things, they take time.”
Sources: These Things, They Take Time. (Relevant Clip) CLANG (Full Video)
Also in June, Chet Faliszek says ““When we announce Half-Life 3 it won’t be on a t-shirt or a forum or some obscure internet game. We’ll do it in our own way.” Seemingly debunking the t-shirt stuff from the year before.
Source: "When we announce Half-Life 3, we'll do it our own way" says Valve
Later that Summer, in August 2012, Gametrailers releases an episode of GT.TV focusing on Valve. During a segment on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, while discussing Gabe’s impending trip to South Africa to go swimming with sharks, Gabe jokingly mentions to the sharks that “you’ll never get Half-Life 3 if you eat me.” What’s interesting is that Gabe said “Half-Life 3” instead of “Episode 3,” though interviewer Geoff Keighly mentioned Half-Life 3 earlier in the conversation. This is only the second time Valve has specifically referred to Half-Life 3. GT.TV - Full Episode - Valve (About 20 minutes In)
Also in August 2012, references are found to Source Engine 2 in the Source Filmmaker program, though they were later removed. Valve would eventually refer to the current Source engine as "Source 1 Engine" on their GitHub page.
Sources: EXCLUSIVE: NEXT-GEN SOURCE 2 ENGINE IS IN DEVELOPMENT Valve Software on GitHub
In June of 2013, Valve's JIRA internal project tracker/bug reporting software was allegedly accessible by the outside world for a brief period of time, and it showed Valve employees on mailing lists for Source 2, Left 4 Dead 3 and Half-Life 3. The Left 4 Dead 3 having several groups vs Half-Life 3’s one would imply that it had more of Valve's focus at the moment. The following groups were found in the leak
Half-Life 3 (with 42 employees), L4D3, L4D3 Audio, L4D3 Developers, Source2, Source2 Artists, Source2 Builds, Source2 Characters, Source2 Entities, Source2 Minidumps, Source2 Proto-games, Source2 Tools, Source2 Triage, Source2_Assertions, Source2_Contentassertions, Source2Dev
Source: UPDATED: HALF-LIFE 3, LEFT 4 DEAD 3, SOURCE 2 + MUCH MORE FOUND ON VALVE PROJECT TRACKER
There was ANOTHER alleged project tracker leak in September, which was much more widely reported. This leak again shows people on lists for Source 2, Left 4 Dead 3 and Half-Life 3, with the team size for Half-Life having grown to 47 people (with a new “Half-Life 3 Core” group added) and around 73 people working on Left 4 Dead 3.
Source: VALVE JIRA DATABASE ACCESSED ONCE MORE - HL3/L4D3/SOURCE 2 GROUPS EXPAND
In May of 2014, former Counter-Strike dev Mihn Lee talks about things he saw while visiting Valve. "but I think it's kind of public knowledge that people know that it is being worked on. And so if I were to say that yeah, I've seen some images, like some concept art of it, that wouldn't be big news, to be honest.“ and also mentions "The one thing I'm really excited about is Left 4 Dead, the new Left 4 Dead.”
Source: "I did see some concept art for Half-Life 3" says Counter-Strike co-creator. Left 4 Dead 3 "looks great"
Finally, in March of 2015, while speaking with Geoff Keighly on the Game Slice podcast, Gabe has this to say about Half-Life 3: “The only reason we'd go back and do like a super classic kind of product is if a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation for why [they did]… …But you know if you want to do another Half-Life game and you want to ignore everything we've learned in shipping Portal 2 and in shipping all the updates on the multiplayer side, that seems like a bad choice. So we'll keep moving forward. But that doesn't necessarily always mean what people are worried that it might mean."
Source: Gabe Newell on Valve's game development plans and the possibility of more Half-Life
So there we have all THAT. Firstly, I want to say what a bunch of glorious trolls Valve are. With that said, it’s little harder to parse a narrative from this especially distinguishing what’s a sly nod to fans, and what’s a troll, what’s an actual leak and what’s a fake, but let’s go on the idea that Episode Three died around 2010 or 2011, especially given how only HL3 gets mentioned by Valve from this point one. The April 2012 “Ricochet 2” interview suggests a tumultuous development period, much like what Half-Life 2 went through in its early days. This leads us to the November 2012 interview with the 4chan visitors, which if they’re serious about “Ricochet 2” having started development (and is really Half-Life 3), suggests that sometime in 2012 Valve figured out what path they wanted to take and were comfortable with the idea of the game being in development. Though I’d also suggest the needing to develop a new engine (as a new Half-Life game would undoubtedly need at that point) would be a likely reason for the gap between the demise of Episode Three and 2012.
While Laidlaw mentioned that he “personally cannot give the world a Half-Life game” seemingly contradicts the idea that they had been working on it, but the JIRA project tracker leaks and mentions of “Ricochet 2” back the idea up, making me wonder if Laidlaw meant that he couldn’t speed up HL3’s development, rather than implying Valve not working on it at all.
When the project trackers started leaking, it paints an interesting picture, and lines up with prior leaks regarding Source 2 and Left 4 Dead 3 (as well as leaking out that Kelly Baily had returned to Valve a year before it was announced) but they could still be faked with not a terribly large amount of effort. Still, if they’re real, they show that HL3 is indeed being worked on, and that the team increased in size in-between June and September of 2013, though they seemed to be smaller than the Left 4 Dead 3 team, likely indicating they’re still earlier in development (though not necessarily having been in development for less time.) Also interesting is the journey of Source 2, starting out as a weird entry in Source Filmmaker, to showing up in these leaks, to being all but announced, to an actual released thing in the span of three years. We can see the through-line of it, (and to a lesser extent, Left 4 Dead 3) going through several of these leaks, lending them a bit more believability, though again, not impossible to fake.
Gooseman (Mihn Lee) accidently spilling the beans in 2014 isn’t something I’m going to put a lot of weight on, but the “physics_testbed.exe -game hl3 – open” reference in 2015 is probably the biggest piece of news on this list, though again, it’s not any kind of confirmation.
Now, Valve employees showing up T-shirts in 2011 is an oddity, especially when Chet Faliszek basically distances Valve from them, after Laidlaw confirmed they exist. (Though I suppose he didn’t confirm they were on Valve employees). That, coupled with the CLANG cameo, and the sly references to “Ricochet 2” give of a conflicting image of Valve as both wanting to say “Hey, Half-Life is coming” but also not wanting to say. I would imagine this is due to just how much they get asked about Half-Life conflicting with their desire not to rile people up without something concrete to show.
Gabe’s quote about going back and doing a classic product says to me that they don’t want just put out a Half-Life sequel for the sake of putting out a Half-Life sequel; it needs to push boundries, like HL1 and HL2 did, and not fall into the iterative design that the episodes went through. I especially don’t think it means they won’t do a new Half-Life game at all, even beyond everything else I mentioned. The mention of how “But that doesn't necessarily always mean what people are worried that it might mean." seems squarely aimed at people who would panic after hearing the earlier statements.
So there you have it. Episode Three likely died sometime in 2010 or 2011, HL3 was in early planning stages for awhile until Valve decided on a path worth pursuing and began formal development sometime in 2012. Needing to develop Source 2 probably slowed initial production down too. At some unknown point, before or after, Left 4 Dead 3 is also put into production. And while Source 2 finally saw release via DOTA2, Valve is still toiling away on HL3 and L4D3.
The other takeaway here, I think, is that Valve definitely wants Half-Life 3 to wow people as much as people want it to wow them, and I doubt they’ll reveal it until they have something that will do it. Which basically makes estimating when it’ll get announced futile. It could be this year, though I’d expect Left 4 Dead 3 to get announced before HL3, and I doubt we’d get a “Purple Box” or whatever. It could also be another 8 years. Or, just possibly, it could be never.
But I think as long as Valve has a flat management style, and there’s at least one fan of Half-Life at Valve, work will be done on HL3.
Nice write up scottsman. I don't know about L4D3 coming before HL3. I think the fans would basically revolt against that, since there are likely very few people who really want L4D3 more than HL3. Gabe keeps saying that people internally have to want to make HL3, and I can't conceive of why they wouldn't. Even ignoring the fan desire, that's a franchise as malleable as anything. There's a lot of possibilities for new innovation.
Finally finding the time to read through those giant posts (kudos, Scotsman!), and the first thing that sprang to mind was noticing the desire for Half Life to scare people again.
So, HL3 confirmed for October!
No, not really. But a man can dream.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
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That would prevent them from taking out a magazine ad with the gravity gun claws forming a 3.
That was the "next month" preview from the magazine itself; not an ad from Valve.
So I'm putting together this article and I'm wondering, would it be better to convey this information in a timeline and just list all the events in order of date; or would it be better to turn it into an article that speaks about different elements (design talk, code leaks) as specific topics, discussed in groups, rather than as they happened.
EDIT: Also, I managed to beat the wayback machine enough to find those old computerandvideogames articles, so that's cool.
Overall I think HL1 had more interesting weapons. They got rid of the vacuum (i forget the real name) and the gauss rifle.. that thing was super awesome because you could bounce yourself all over the place (and you could shoot through walls, which was a bit cheap imo). Where were the snarks?! Those were hilarious to use. I didn't care too much for the "bee gun" though, it kinda sucked.
As far as I can tell, anything prior to 2009 got nuked
EDIT: No sooner do I say this when I think "Hey do a search on the Steam forum" and I found this: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=690200
I hate wish Valve for not giving would give me that feeling for real.
People have pointed out the shoddy lines on the HL3 logo, which is a big red flag.
The off-center "three slashes" for L4D3, "Counter-Strike: Guns On Us" and Half-Life 3-1 (1-3?) are probably the worse ideas for fakes that I've heard of.
EDIT: Also, the sheer lunacy of Valve talking about THREE unannounced games in at the same time.
EDIT2: Almost forgot, it apparently came with this e-mail
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/38sjrq/could_someone_prove_this_wrong_email_leak_about/crxhdy7
What would that even mean?
You no longer have to buy guns, they're free now? "Hey guys, the guns are on us?"
I guess it could mean Guns on US, but that's just not a good title for anything.
Except that global offensive is doing quite well
And whenever it gets a deep sale, there's a huge influx of cheaters
So why would they make a free one?
No, look, Gaben personally wrote to me to confirm HL3 is in the works and the email had an attachment to it and L4D4 (I've been playing 3 for the last year on private test servers) but I deleted the email in my excitement. Legit.
Also, everybody make sure they've read all of Breengrub. Most official Half-Life lore we're probably ever getting again.
Laidlaw has said Breengrub is just him fucking around and isn't canon or anything.
Also, I think people would revolt if it took that long to move through vents in HL2.
EDIT: Holy shit, that guy is apparently working on Firewatch. That's awesome.
Re Breengrub: I dunno, I think of it as canon-until-proven-otherwise. I know he said it's just HL fanfic, but like... it's HL fanfic from the author of HL. Laidlaw tweeted at me something to the effect that the most he can hope for is that it gets taken into account by whoever when the time comes. I dunno how much of this is just me reading into what he told me but the subtext felt like, Laidlaw really wanted to be working on Half-Life, but he wasn't, and he was maybe a tiny bit bitter about it, and Breengrub was his way of getting away with continuing his story.
Hell, Breen wasn't even the Administrator when originally conceived.
EDIT: Also, those Laidlaw quotes were from two years ago, so who knows what's going on at Valve today.
So obviously the topic of the day (week, month, year, decade) is what’s going on with Half-Life? When you get down to it, there’s basically two important questions here: What happened to Half-Life 2: Episode Three, and what is Valve currently working on? There’s actually a fascinating trail of comments, forgotten code, innuendo and leaks over the past 8 years that, while doesn’t produce any sort of smoking gun or final revelation (if it did I’d be posting about it constantly), I still think it spells out an identifiable narrative. Now, this is my own speculation on these matters, but I’ll provide sources to the things I’m drawing these conclusions from.
For now, let’s discuss what the hell happened to Episode Three.
So there are the facts and rumors for Episode Three, here comes the speculation.
Looking at things, it seems that Episode Three did not have full development attention put towards it during Episode Two’s development (the skeleton crew quote) like the original plan, so by the time the development freeze happened; I doubt it was very far beyond the planning stages. Once the freeze was over, 2008 seems to be when the bulk of the initial design happened, and given that Lombardi believed it was feasible enough to make an announcement by the end of 2008 that he’d say it in an interview three months earlier, that implies to me that they had enough of an idea of what they wanted that they were willing to start talking about it, but that’s just my take on it.
Obviously, that didn’t happen, and given their talk of experimenting, I imagine at some stage in 2009 they started reexamining what they were trying to accomplish with Episode Three. If Episode Three did return to some level of a concept stage, I would imagine focus would be put towards more immediate releases, like Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009 and then Portal 2 in 2010.
In 2010, we start to see the first rumors of Valve being unsure of whether to stick with an Episodic format, which coincides with them ceasing to refer directly to Episode Three and only ever speaking in general terms about Half-Life franchise. Most often though, they simply just do not speak about it at all, aside from occasionally saying they’re stilling planning on doing things with Half-Life. At this point, I suspect the protracted development period of what was originally intended to be just an Episode lead to Valve evaluating if what they would wind up producing would justify the development time and the amount of time fans had waited.
2011 is the closest we have to a bombshell, where Gabe states they’ve moved on from the Episodic phase of development. As Portal 2’s development came to a close, Episode Three was probably given closer scrutiny as it would become Valve’s new focus, and at that point is where I believe Valve decided that putting out an episode at that point just wouldn’t cut the mustard, and that episodes just weren’t doing what they wanted them to do; which was put out new content faster. It’s hard to guess where Episode Three died exactly, but I think that comment from Gabe was definitely its eulogy.
So that’s what I think happened to Half-Life 2: Episode Three. As mentioned, it is just my own speculation on the matter, but I hope I’ve at least provided enough sources to explain where I formulated this opinion. So anyway, we’ve gotten the boring section out of the way. Next time I’ll get into the fun stuff! (Note: it’s not terribly fun)
So there we have all THAT. Firstly, I want to say what a bunch of glorious trolls Valve are. With that said, it’s little harder to parse a narrative from this especially distinguishing what’s a sly nod to fans, and what’s a troll, what’s an actual leak and what’s a fake, but let’s go on the idea that Episode Three died around 2010 or 2011, especially given how only HL3 gets mentioned by Valve from this point one. The April 2012 “Ricochet 2” interview suggests a tumultuous development period, much like what Half-Life 2 went through in its early days. This leads us to the November 2012 interview with the 4chan visitors, which if they’re serious about “Ricochet 2” having started development (and is really Half-Life 3), suggests that sometime in 2012 Valve figured out what path they wanted to take and were comfortable with the idea of the game being in development. Though I’d also suggest the needing to develop a new engine (as a new Half-Life game would undoubtedly need at that point) would be a likely reason for the gap between the demise of Episode Three and 2012.
While Laidlaw mentioned that he “personally cannot give the world a Half-Life game” seemingly contradicts the idea that they had been working on it, but the JIRA project tracker leaks and mentions of “Ricochet 2” back the idea up, making me wonder if Laidlaw meant that he couldn’t speed up HL3’s development, rather than implying Valve not working on it at all.
When the project trackers started leaking, it paints an interesting picture, and lines up with prior leaks regarding Source 2 and Left 4 Dead 3 (as well as leaking out that Kelly Baily had returned to Valve a year before it was announced) but they could still be faked with not a terribly large amount of effort. Still, if they’re real, they show that HL3 is indeed being worked on, and that the team increased in size in-between June and September of 2013, though they seemed to be smaller than the Left 4 Dead 3 team, likely indicating they’re still earlier in development (though not necessarily having been in development for less time.) Also interesting is the journey of Source 2, starting out as a weird entry in Source Filmmaker, to showing up in these leaks, to being all but announced, to an actual released thing in the span of three years. We can see the through-line of it, (and to a lesser extent, Left 4 Dead 3) going through several of these leaks, lending them a bit more believability, though again, not impossible to fake.
Gooseman (Mihn Lee) accidently spilling the beans in 2014 isn’t something I’m going to put a lot of weight on, but the “physics_testbed.exe -game hl3 – open” reference in 2015 is probably the biggest piece of news on this list, though again, it’s not any kind of confirmation.
Now, Valve employees showing up T-shirts in 2011 is an oddity, especially when Chet Faliszek basically distances Valve from them, after Laidlaw confirmed they exist. (Though I suppose he didn’t confirm they were on Valve employees). That, coupled with the CLANG cameo, and the sly references to “Ricochet 2” give of a conflicting image of Valve as both wanting to say “Hey, Half-Life is coming” but also not wanting to say. I would imagine this is due to just how much they get asked about Half-Life conflicting with their desire not to rile people up without something concrete to show.
Gabe’s quote about going back and doing a classic product says to me that they don’t want just put out a Half-Life sequel for the sake of putting out a Half-Life sequel; it needs to push boundries, like HL1 and HL2 did, and not fall into the iterative design that the episodes went through. I especially don’t think it means they won’t do a new Half-Life game at all, even beyond everything else I mentioned. The mention of how “But that doesn't necessarily always mean what people are worried that it might mean." seems squarely aimed at people who would panic after hearing the earlier statements.
So there you have it. Episode Three likely died sometime in 2010 or 2011, HL3 was in early planning stages for awhile until Valve decided on a path worth pursuing and began formal development sometime in 2012. Needing to develop Source 2 probably slowed initial production down too. At some unknown point, before or after, Left 4 Dead 3 is also put into production. And while Source 2 finally saw release via DOTA2, Valve is still toiling away on HL3 and L4D3.
The other takeaway here, I think, is that Valve definitely wants Half-Life 3 to wow people as much as people want it to wow them, and I doubt they’ll reveal it until they have something that will do it. Which basically makes estimating when it’ll get announced futile. It could be this year, though I’d expect Left 4 Dead 3 to get announced before HL3, and I doubt we’d get a “Purple Box” or whatever. It could also be another 8 years. Or, just possibly, it could be never.
But I think as long as Valve has a flat management style, and there’s at least one fan of Half-Life at Valve, work will be done on HL3.
Yes, but nobody knows what it confirmed.
LaCabra is working on Half Life 3.
So, HL3 confirmed for October!
No, not really. But a man can dream.