It has been 19 years because the launch of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and but the ceaseless clamour for a Valve recreation with a quantity ‘3’ in its title continues. And following a swell of studies suggesting Half-Life 3 is not simply actual, its improvement is nicely underway, a Valve developer has gone and despatched the web a-chatter over again by publicly, albeit by accident, referencing its codename throughout a livestream.
Valve’s first try at releasing a Half-Life recreation with a ‘3’ in its identify would have been the ill-fated Half-Life 2: Episode 3, which was deserted – regardless of Valve beforehand asserting it as a part of a deliberate trilogy – someday round 2009. After that, the studio seemingly had a crack at making a full-blown sequel, with Valve boss Gabe Newell confirming just a few years again that Half-Life 3 had been in improvement round 2013/2014, however was finally scrapped as a result of it was constructed on the unfinished Supply 2 engine.
Someday in 2021, nonetheless, dataminers started to note one thing attention-grabbing: repeated references to a challenge codenamed “HLX” in Valve-related recordsdata. Inevitably, this led to a frenzy of hypothesis that Valve may lastly be reviving its long-anticipated first-person shooter sequel. And proof has seemingly continued to amass over time. In 2024, as an illustration, Valve insider Tyler McVicker shared a few of his datamined findings, claiming what he’d discovered pointed to a brand new “fully-fledged Half-Life recreation” – a declare coinciding with a leak from an actor doubtless concerned within the challenge.
All of it reached one thing of a crescendo when McVicker launched a brand new video final yr suggesting the rumoured Half-Life 3 was now “playable, end-to-end”, and claimed it may even launch earlier than 2025 was by. Followers, in the meantime, did some sleuthing and concluded Half-Life 3 would doubtless launch in both November or December final yr. All of this, clearly, didn’t come to go, and the Half-Life 3 hype has died down a bit since then. And but right here we’re once more, with the most recent twist within the saga being a public reference to the codenamed ‘HLX’ by a Valve developer, albeit seemingly by accident.
Allow us to leap to a latest GameSoundCon Q&A panel (promptly clipped and shared by McVicker once more), by which Valve’s music designer Mike Morasky spent a while discussing the audio work on the corporate’s video games. “Impasse has their very own model of HDR,” Morasky defined, “HLX has its personal model, and so forth and so forth.” Halfway by the sentence, Morasky appears to taper off, as if instantly realising the error of his methods. Quickly after, Valve sound designer David Feise seems to lean over and whisper “good work”, which some have understandably taken to be sarcasm.
So what does all this inform us? Not loads, actually, past the very fact it suggests HLX is a factor (which we largely already knew) and that it is nonetheless being labored on. Morasky’s framing would, nonetheless, additionally counsel that no matter HLX is, it is a standalone challenge, and one requiring music at that. So I suppose these Half-Life 3 goals can stay on for one more day. The one query remaining, which is able to arrive first: Half-Life 3 or the warmth dying of the solar?