The Elusive Quest for Half-Life 3: A Tale of Anticipation and Disappointment

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 was a phenomenon, a game so good one of the few complaints levelled against it was that it didn’t go on forever. As time regrettably stopped for Gordon atop City 17’s Citadel, the question on everyone’s lips was, “What’s next?” Surely Valve wouldn’t leave Alyx stranded beside an exploding portal. Surely Gordon wouldn’t remain trapped in the G-Man’s limbo. Valve had followed-up the most celebrated shooter of its day with something even better. Surely it would do it again.

Valve’s answer was unexpected, and has only grown stranger as the years turned to decades. Two expansions, a VR prequel, a host of aborted spinoffs, and a rumour-mill so productive that it became a running joke. But never the one thing Valve fans have craved more than anything else, that trio of magical words, Half-Life 3.

Valve’s evasion of its most famous series baffled players for years. But it isn’t 2010 anymore, where the only clues to Half-Life 3‘s whereabouts were a few cryptic allusions from Gabe Newell and a few cruelly staged internet hoaxes. There are answers to be had. Dig through the interviews, the news stories, the rumours and the leaks that have stemmed from and revolved around Valve for the last 20 years, and it’s possible to build a surprisingly complete picture of Half-Life’s history during its long absence. We can confidently answer the two most important questions—what happened to Half-Life 3? And why didn’t Valve make it?

Episodes 1 & 2

Following the success of Half-Life 2, Valve decided to continue the story through episodic content. This strategy aimed to deliver the game to players in a more timely fashion, reducing the long wait times associated with traditional game development cycles.

• Episode 1 was released 20 months after Half-Life 2, a significant improvement over the six-year development of its predecessor.
• Episode 2 followed shortly after, continuing the trend of delivering high-quality content at a faster pace.

Valve’s plan seemed to be working, with both episodes receiving critical acclaim and managing to innovate within the constraints of episodic storytelling. The company also found time to develop other groundbreaking titles, such as Team Fortress 2 and Portal, further showcasing their ability to push the boundaries of PC gaming.

Episode 3 was expected to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors, but as time passed, the anticipation turned to uncertainty. The gaming community began to wonder if they would ever see the conclusion of the story they had become so invested in.

Episode 3 Might Happen

Initial plans for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 were rife with excitement and speculation. Fans eagerly awaited any news or concept art that might give insight into the continuation of Gordon Freeman’s journey. Early ideas suggested new settings, characters, and the resolution of cliffhangers left by Episode 2.

Concept art released in 2007 hinted at new environments and story elements, including a focus on the mysterious ship Borealis. This vessel, first mentioned in Half-Life 2 and further alluded to in Episode 2, was to be a central piece of the narrative puzzle, potentially bridging the gap between the Half-Life and Portal universes.

Despite the excitement, Valve remained tight-lipped, releasing only cryptic hints and allowing the rumor mill to churn. The community’s hope for Episode 3’s release began to wane as years passed without a definitive announcement or release date.

Episode 3 Might Not Happen

The journey towards Half-Life 2: Episode 3 was fraught with challenges that eventually led to its cancellation. The episodic model, once seen as a beacon of innovation, began to show its limitations. Retail confusion and the logistical complexities of bundling smaller games like Episode 1 and 2 with other titles such as Team Fortress 2 and Portal in The Orange Box proved to be significant hurdles.

Valve’s internal struggles with the episodic format, coupled with the desire to explore new technologies and storytelling methods, led to a shift in focus away from Episode 3. The company’s growing interest in the live-service model, as evidenced by the success of Team Fortress 2, further diverted resources and attention from the episodic continuation of the Half-Life saga.

As Valve’s vision for the future of gaming evolved, the prospect of Episode 3 materializing in its originally intended form grew dimmer, leaving fans to wonder what could have been if the episode had seen the light of day.

If Episode 3 Happened

The speculative plot of what Half-Life 2: Episode 3 could have been continues to intrigue fans. The narrative was expected to pick up from the cliffhanger ending of Episode 2, with Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance heading to the arctic to uncover the secrets of the Borealis.

Leaked concept art and story elements suggest a journey that would have taken players through new, icy environments teeming with Combine architecture and technology. The story would likely have delved deeper into the lore of the Half-Life universe, exploring the connection between the Borealis and the enigmatic Aperture Science.

While Valve has never officially released details of the cancelled episode’s plot, the community has pieced together a narrative that would have been both a continuation and a significant expansion of the Half-Life story, potentially setting the stage for future games in the series.

If Episode 4 Happened

While the fate of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 hung in the balance, there were whispers of a potential fourth episode. This project, which was to be developed by an external studio, aimed to explore untold stories within the Half-Life universe.

The potential for Episode 4 to expand on the lore of Ravenholm and provide a deeper understanding of its characters, such as Father Grigori, was significant. However, despite the promise of new gameplay mechanics and storytelling opportunities, the project was ultimately shelved, leaving fans to only imagine what could have been.

Episode 3 Isn’t Happening but Half-Life 3 Might Happen

As the promise of Episode 3 dwindled, the gaming community tried to fathom why Valve would leave the Half-Life story unfinished. The logical conclusion was that Valve must be developing something bigger. It isn’t clear when the narrative shifted from focusing on Episode 3 to Half-Life 3, but the idea was certainly in transition by the time two Canadian fans picketed Valve headquarters in August 2011, sitting on lawn chairs with cardboard signs that read, “CANADA 4 THE RELEASE OF HALF LIFE 3,” and, “HALF LIFE 3 IS IT LEFT 4 DEAD?”

This wasn’t the only time fans demanded more information from Valve regarding Half-Life. In 2011, a Steam group called A Call for Communication (Half-Life) evolved from a forum petition first started in 2009, attracting 50,000 members as of February that year (the group remains active, celebrating its tenth birthday in 2021). In January 2012, a group of Steam users launched Operation Crowbar, purchasing crowbars on Amazon and mailing them to Valve as a form of protest.

These may appear like petty, entitled stunts, but at the same time Valve seemed unable to help teasing its community with hints and allusions to a new Half-Life game. In April, Newell was jokingly asked on a podcast “When can we expect the release of Ricochet 2?” to which he responded “We’d like to be super-transparent about the release 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.” Two months later, Newell appeared in a video forging a crowbar. Asked, “Hey, is that about ready?” He responded, “These things, they take time.” Then, in August, Newell appears in another video in which he jokes, “You’ll never get Half-Life 3 if you eat me.”

Among these vague hints of Half-Life 3 were outright fabrications. In 2012, an April Fools prankster posted an image on Steam of a faked Half-Life 3 logo with the words “Now Available” underneath, fooling several legitimate news publications. Speculation about Half-Life 3 ramped up significantly in 2013, when Valve apparently filed a trademark request in the EU for the name Half-Life 3. Fanning the flames was a leak from Valve’s bug-tracking database Jira that revealed the names of two development groups, one titled Half-Life 3, and another listed as Half-Life 3 core. But the trademark was fake, while the validity of the Jira leak is impossible to confirm.

Half-Life VR

As the 2010s progressed, the hints and rumours became more accurate. In 2015, Valve programmer Jeep Barnett revealed the company was experimenting with Half-Life assets in virtual reality, but stopped short of confirming Valve was making a Half-Life VR game. “Would we like to make all our franchises in VR? Absolutely, but we don’t have enough time or people. So we have to figure out what’s the best fit, what plays to the strengths of VR.” Later that year, Valve released a VR app, which included a data string for something called HLVR.

Then, In November 2019, came the news that everybody, yet also nobody, was waiting for. Valve was making a new Half-Life game, and it was coming out soon. But it wasn’t Half-Life 3. Instead, it was Half-Life: Alyx, a VR-exclusive prequel to Half-Life 2 which put players in the shoes of a young Alyx Vance years before she meets Gordon Freeman. For those who could afford to play it, Alyx would prove worth the wait, offering all the imagination, excitement, and innovation expected from a Half-Life game. But its reveal, PR campaign, and post-mortems also provided fresh insight into what happened with Half-Life 3.

In summary, the challenging development of Half-Life 2 left Valve averse to the idea of building a conventional third Half-Life game, so the company opted to release Half-Life 3 in bitesize episodes, making the project more manageable and taking advantage of Steam. Yet by 2007, the episodic model was outdated, and Valve couldn’t find a way to make Episode 3 an artistic solution to a technical problem as Episode 1 and the Orange Box had been. Eventually, Episode 3 was cancelled, and through internet speculation and Valve’s cryptic allusions, the narrative becomes that the next Half-Life game will be Half-Life 3.

After completing Portal 2, Valve felt ready to tackle ground-up game development again, and as it began building Source 2, it also experimented with either one or several Half-Life 3 prototypes, one of which definitely featured procedural generation, while another may have involved Freeman liberating an American city with a physics-enhanced robot arm.

Then, in July 2012, John Carmack appears at E3 with the early prototype for Oculus Rift, and Valve sees in VR a revolutionary technology that can be used to make a landmark Half-Life title. By 2015, Half-Life 3 is dead, and Valve begins development of Half-Life: Alyx the following year, releasing the game to acclaim in March 2020.

After all this, 16 years and a whole new game, Valve left fans in almost exactly the position they had been in before, dangling over the edge of a narrative cliff with no resolution in sight. But one thing has changed. We now know Valve’s interest in making Half-Life games remains, and may in fact have grown during development of Alyx. Compare Robin Walker’s words on the launch of Half-Life: Alyx to how Valve talked about finishing Half-Life 2. “We really enjoyed making this game,” Walker told Kotaku in March 2020. “I think we’d really like to keep making some games like this again.”