Valve put out a doc for Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary last weekend, and actually showed footage and concept art from Episode 3. So naturally my feeds started buzzing with “Episode 3” news.
Almost 20 years on, I’m pretty over this idea of more Half-Life at this point, though it would still be pretty seismic if this thing ever DID drop. But hearing “we couldn’t find any cool new mechanical tricks and didn’t feel like making a game just for the story” is such a wild take after ending Ep 2 on a cliffhanger.
honestly though, its not a bad reasoning. rather have game that is good than a game thats just a plot closer.
But…. why not both?
My assumption is that Valve feels like they can’t get both, and just one reason isn’t good enough?
does it mattter if it’s good if it makes money? Look at Hollywood
It’s an argument somewhat lessened by the fact that they weren’t exactly pushing the boundaries of gameplay innovation with the episodes. That said, I don’t really think that they would have ended Episode 3 with much of anything in the form of real closure, so I’m not actually *that* bothered it never came out.
It’s not bad reasoning for a game in and of itself. For a standalone project. But when you’ve announced a trilogy of smaller, episodic content in order to tell more of a story (for a game/engine people already enjoy), and you get two chapters in and leave people with a cliffhanger, then it’s pretty weak reasoning. Because the HL2 episodes were never about reinventing the wheel, gameplay-wise. They were about continuing the plot. So as a storyteller, hearing that they didn’t finish it not because they couldn’t figure out an ending (I could understand that) but because they couldn’t find… Read more »
This. I get them being the artists and not being happy with it, but people want the damn closure, and to rob them of it is criminal.
The timeline where “Eh, we could’ve made a third movie and called it ‘Return of the Jedi’, but resolving the story isn’t a good enough reason to make a movie”.
If it was remade now, with the look of the old game, and the same game play, but had a story, we’d probably consider it, but new players would go ‘WTF? That’s old dusty yesterday’s torn jeans….’ – its just not iconic to the current younger gamers. And frankly, with companies looking for all sorts of money everywhere now, any attempt to make a Ep 3 would probably feel like necromancy (bringing out the look and feel of a dead game but then infesting the corpse with some sort of pool of evil that only wants your money). We all… Read more »
If you’re never going to do it give me a few paragraphs summarizing the anticipated plot. At least then we get the end of the story.
The closest you’ll probably get was the “fan fic” that Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw posted on his blog a number of years ago. It has since been deleted and he’s publicly expressed regret about sharing it at all, but it can still be found on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210421065600/https://www.marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/
Its full of very thinly veiled names and references to the other Half-Life stories and is generally accepted as a rough draft of the overall plot they were (at one point) planning for Half-Life Episode 3.
The writer (no longer with Valve) did that last year with names & genders swapped.
Do you have a link to that?
It is much older than ‘last year’. It’s called “Epistle 3”, and you should be able to find it by that name. It’s worth noting that the author has expressed regret posting that, since it’s based on the ruminations of one person on something that is normally developed by many people. It is also from before Alyx came out, so it has been superseded in that sense as well.
Except that there’s no real reason NOT to make the game. Both Half Life and Half Life 2 were insanely popular games. Valve has huge amounts of money because they’ve managed to avoid actually making games and just profit off other developers.
What they’re not saying is: “we’ve realized that it’s way easier to just set yourself up as a huge bloated middleman and pretend that hosting some servers justifies the “standard” 30% revenue slice.
What not enough people realise is that story in video games can be great slash important, and there are some of us who’d rather be able to enjoy even a mid story with good gameplay than a good game with no story BotW and TotK are two of my least favourite Zelda games because their stories were crap compared to past entries in the franchise. I don’t enjoy most open world games because I’ve never seen one where the story was engaging. Xenoblade style is the closest I’ve gotten to enjoying an ‘open world’, and I love those games. “Just… Read more »
To each their own I suppose. Gameplay is #1 on my personal priority list. It has a good story? That’s gravy
Well, “Epistle Three” (the draft made for Episode 3 published on the author’s site – you can google it) was neither good or bad. If it would become the Episode 3, as intended, it would probably be a bit underwhelming compared to the previous instalments. I felt slightly disappointed by it (didn’t explain much), but it was the first draft that never got to be further worked on.
At this point we cannot confirm or deny any connection to the crowbar throwing of last comic.
At this stage, as much as people say they want it… I think it’s better left alone.
It’s had almost two decades of hopes being built, expectations being grown, and anticipation going rabid. There is no version of Episode 3, with any amount of polish or features, that could remotely live up to the hype now.
Let sleeping dogs lie, I say. Better to have Half Life sat on its pedestal forevermore than to take it down with a sequel that could never meet fan’s expectations.
From a gameplay perspective, if it’s a fun game without a lot of bugs they’d be fine.
From a story perspective however.. The kind of overarching story that HL employs relies heavily on the mystery. It’s *really* fucking hard to end a story like that well. It’s really easy to explain too little, making it unsatisfying, or too much, making it mundane. This is aside from the fact that it’s really easy to have your story “jump the shark” in this scenario.
Unpopular opinion, but I find the Half Life series to be overrated. They were good games, sure, but not epic, much less genre-defining experiences some people make them out to be, like Ultima Online was for MMOs or Doom for shooters.
I’m yet to meet a gamer where another HF installment is in their top 5 most wanted sequels to buy.
I mean it may be a bit of a ‘Seinfeld is Unfunny’ thing going on there, but the thing is HL 1 and 2 *were* genre-defining in their own ways. Half-Life’s method of never breaking away from your first-person perspective and not pulling away to do cutscenes or things like that was very revolutionary at the time, and it did setpieces in a way other FPS didn’t. And 2 was groundbreaking from a physics perspective. You will still see the Gravity Gun on the top lists of video game weapons of all time because it was so crazy fun and… Read more »
most ppl I know never even heard of uo, but most ppl I know have heard of half life. And if i’m correct, hl engines gave birth to TF, CS and Poral…
I think this Gabe guy is the only one allowed to make another half life game but he has run out of ideas, so everyone who has ideas (good and bad) just waits for him to die of natural causes so that can make another game.
That is my theory.
I feel like Valve always tries to release something unique and different – in retrospect Half Life basically re-defined First Person Shooters from just being corridors with guns Half Life 2 redefined the use of physics and eventually gave us the source engine Portal again delivered a fantastic puzzle physics game nobody has been able to top and is funny, irreverent and still holds up to today Alyx was their attempt to show how to make a VR game and Aperture Desk Job on how to use the Steam Deck as more than a PC Emulator What can they do… Read more »
Yeah, you’re talking about big, standalone releases. This isn’t Half Life 3 we’re talking about. This is Half Life 2 Episode 3. Once they decided to do smaller episodic content following Half Life 2 (in order to put it out faster), they have to have known they weren’t going to be able to reinvent the wheel which each of those smaller releases. So at that point, they’re positioning story/plot as the main selling point, not this idea that they’d shift the paradigm every time. Getting 2 episodes in and then saying “we have the story, but can’t find a cool… Read more »
They were pretty vocal at the time that each episode had a focus on breaking ground with a new technical accomplishment — Ep1 was NPC AI, and Ep2 was map expansiveness, IIRC.
And it’s great if they can push a boundary alongside their story . But I guess I disagree with refusing to advance your story just because you can’t find a boundary to push.
Especially when a piece of content being “just” a really good execution of existing ideas has never stopped any of us from enjoying it.
I didn’t want to edit my comment and have it go through moderation again but I also realized that Alyx was to help sell Steam VR.
I guess we’ll see Half-Life 3 when the Steam Gaming Pods™ are ready to envelop our soft squishy human bodies in their warm embrace 😄
Along with another release of Skyrim, naturally.
I thought for sure this was going to be a comic to poke fun at gamerant/screen rant for their clickbait titles that end up having absolutely no facts or don’t tell you anything about the title.
“PLAYERS FROM HELLDIVERS HAVE NOTICED A GAMEBREAKING BUG THAT….”
Players from helldivers have noticed a gamebreaking bug that could’ve been if it hadn’t been fixed in the earlier stage of the game development.
I remember a few years back Game Informer (RIP) released an issue with different cover variants (which I didn’t know), celebrating iconic game series (which I also didn’t know). All I know is my mail box had a GI with a cover adorned by a very unmistakable crowbar on the cover. I tore through that issue looking for the cover story and Gordon Freeman and Half Life. I was so utterly disappointed when I realized what actually happened.
this is on Amanda B’s head and the friggin clickbait title.
Honestly, I think he just went “I’ll work it on it later” until he reached the point where he realised whatever he made would never live up to the hype, so he doesn’t want to make something just for the sake of making a conclusion, since he knows it will underwhelm.
Lets ask the Black Mesa devs to finish it! They got this.
Yeah, that might be the only way we get a continuation.
Given how many gamers complain when a sequel is more of the same and expect new mechanics, this doesn’t sound like a bad reason.
I just think back to stuff like Spider-man 2 that had to add gliding mechanics and all kinds of other new gadgets that was “new gameplay” solely for the sake of having “new gameplay.” Because just being Spider-man wasn’t special enough anymore….
People just complained because Frostpunk 2 came out and was very mechanically different, and they just wanted more of the first game. So it goes both ways 🙂
Yeah this was me. I have like 2 hours in that and I have 500 in the original.
lmao it’s your fault for expecting
I watched HL2 for the first time via a friend playing it and I’m honestly unsurprised that Episode 2 ended on a cliffhanger considering the base game and Episode 1 did exactly the same, haha.
I am surprised they haven’t made an extensive remaster or even a remake of 1 and 2 and drop 3 along with it. Not only would they get all the profits from 3, but everyone would rebuy the first two games too. It is like they are not even an American company. A real American company would of sold the rights to half life to some shady company and we would have half life 15 and be entirely sick of it by now. Then half life 16 would come out and it would actually be kind of decent, and we… Read more »
At least we got HL Alyx. That game was the best vr experience I’ve ever had.
It’s on days like these that I’m glad I never got into Half-Life. Only played the first one which was fine but I always thought other games like The Thing made better use of the genre.
I just want a reasonably priced physical copy of Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar.
Duke Nukem Forever.
*Drops Mic*
Honestly they could just make it in the source engine at this point and people would be happy.
The problem is that after 20 years of hype, there’s NOTHING they could release that would live up to the wait. We’d potentially have a Duke Nukem Forever on our hands.
I kinda hate it when people use DNF as an example of why highly anticipated games wouldn’t “work”. It implies that the problem with DNF was that it was a good game for the time that was underrated due to expectations being high. That just wasn’t the case.
In this case, it’s appropriate. Without getting into the whys and wherefores, as the development of DNF dragged on, 3DRealms started shedding the talent that had made DN3D because working on a game for a decade without a release is poison on a resume. This continued until 3DRealms laid everyone off and had to pass it off to Gearbox. It’s a similar situation with Valve. If I’m not mistaken, the last mid-level dev who worked on HL2 left last year which leaves Valve with a few people who worked on it at the junior level and that’s about it. Sure,… Read more »
It was not a good game… Not even for the time.
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh… as a major story hound seeing this stuff always pisses me right off.
Like when he said “We could have made L4D3 but it would have basically been a L4D2 map pack.”
Speaking as someone who only has Back 4 Blood now Gabe… WE WOULD HAVE BEEN OKAY WITH THAT!
Funny how expectations have lowered from “Half-Life 3 when?” to “third part of Half-Life 2 when?” and things aren’t any closer to being satisfied.
New mechanic? They could’ve just released a DLC with closure, and we would’ve been happy. In fact, it’s a brilliantly sleazy mechanic done by other games: “Oh, you want the ENDING? Drop another $15 to finish the story.”
does it end on a cliffhanger? i can’t remember the ending so i looked it up. closing the portal and trapping most of the combine forces in their own dimension seems pretty definitive as an ending to me, even if there were still a lot of combine trapped on earth too.