Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

I can never understand why they haven't made a HL3. Given that they could literally make approximately 3.88 bajillion dollars from it in 24 hours.

I suppose this is the very definition of developer integrity.

They already make 7.76 bajillion dollars every hour from Steam, they don’t need to make anything for money.

For a while their stated reason was that they felt they couldn’t live up to the hype and the gaming community was too toxic and would have crucified them for it. True or not, I can see why they’d think that.

However it’s also worth noting that they were spending that time on other projects making them likely even more money. HL3 isn’t going to have live service or esports applications that make money like their other games do. It probably won’t be a big earner compared to those other games.

Valve are also a privately held company and the rumour is the top people there are crazy rich, and even those further down the ladder earn a lot more than they would elsewhere. They don’t need HL3.

I doubt it'd be the guaranteed best seller you think. Most people spending a ton of money on video games weren't cognizant when HL2 came out. And those that were have been burned before/changed and would probably need to see raving reviews to be that interested.

Portal 3 seems like the easy money grab. That had more lasting pop culture relevance, and "it's more Portal" would be enough for a bunch of people to buy it.

they made several money printers with cs and dota boxes

It might not make as much money as live service but it might work like halo cars for the auto industry, giving them lots of press and attention and higher status as a game developer.

No rumor needed, they’re a 500 employee company with billions in estimated profits.

I believe they also said they don't want to do more of the same, they only want to work on something new. Hence why the only new Half-Life anything in 20 years is Alyx - it did something genuinely new.

We all want HL3, but other than the story it would probably be fairly stagnant in terms of gameplay - nothing new has really happened in the genre.

I think there is so much potential for a HL3. For example, messing with more recent discoveries such as the Higgs Boson to try to explain why stuff from another universe managed to be compatible with our universe, and have compatible DNA. That in itself would make for an intriguing plot.

Gabe owns yachts worth a billion dollars. I'm sure the others are doing just fine as well.

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yach...

I thought the guy who was in charge of writing the story left, and published the plot for HL3 as a thinly veiled short story.

I wished they hire the Arkane team that got laid off. Put them to work on a new single player ip and let Victor Antonov add some of his design into it.

They dont have to do anything new, just make it good enough, like Titanfall 2.

Half-Life: Alyx is as close as we got

For what it's worth, I never even wanted Half-Life 3. I just wanted Episode 3, which was what they originally promised. It didn't need to be some gigantic groundbreaking thing, just another episode to finish off the story.

Holy hell, he spends hundreds of millions per year just maintaining that fleet.

See the No clip documentary about how they did hire Arkane then backed out:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xMygnmB9Zw8

Damn. I do not understand owning more than one yacht. It's like private planes. Why more than one?

According to leaks they tried several times and gave up. Which is strange, it's not like episodes 2 and 3 were revolutionary. They're just more of the same. Alyx too wasn't particularly deep, it's only innovation was showing that narrative action games can work in VR.

Alyx is so far beyond any other VR game. It is a masterful accomplishment and a masterpiece in its own right.

One needs more than one yacht. Once you've hosted a massive orgy, you need a clean and sanitary retreat to escape to while the first one is worked on by your cleanup crew.

Because they live off the misery of others.

As everyone pointed out there’s lots of reasons Valve as a company hasn’t done it, but also the corner they wrote themselves into of convoluted story telling, everything about it was headed toward being a mess and unsatisfying. It’s almost better to be left undone so that nobody has to take responsibility for trying to tie all this randomly assembled stuff together

The documentary on this page does explain why they didn't make it, at the very end (it's half the section on the HL2 episodes).

In short, they started working on episode 3, and made it about the point where the game development progresses from "here's demos of what could be set pieces in the episode" to putting together the sketch of the game narrative [1] when the developers were pulled to crunch for Left 4 Dead. After Left 4 Dead released, Gabe felt the window for an HL2e3 had closed, so it would be HL3 instead... and that because HL1 and HL2 had both heralded genre shifts, HL3 needed something to push that shift as well. But there weren't any such ideas for that shift (except maybe VR, which hasn't exactly panned out), and Gabe also felt that releasing a HL3 just to complete the story wouldn't cut it, so it never got made.

Which pretty much matches everybody's speculation for the past decade.

[1] About 18-24 months away from being releasable at that point, to give a sense of how far from complete it was.

But that would go against

> I believe they also said they don't want to do more of the same

I've heard this too, with Half Life they want each game to be groundbreaking. Arkane have done great games, but they're not all groundbreaking, and arguably none of them are to the level that HL1/2 were.

I would assume because moving yachts requires a lot of planning, so he'd likely have one in each location he wants to stay.

Not excusing this behaviour, but there is a reason for it.

Half-Life 3 would not align with Valve’s long-term focus on monopolising PC distribution, skins, microtransactions, and innovative hardware tech (hence Half-Life: Alyx instead of HL3)

I guess they could, if not flat structure and billion-dollar yachts and what else is there.

That's why they should hire someone else to do the leg work (That's what they used to do anyway). There isn't exactly a lot of unique things in Portal 2 compared to the original but the sheer polish and testing Valve applied to their games (when they want to) is still unmatched.

Portal 2 added co-op as the big gameplay change vs. 1.

But Gabe has said Half-Life specifically is what they consider their ground breaking series now. So there won't be a 3 until they can push a boundary again like the first 2 did.

My guess is he's treating them as collectibles. If he can afford another, different yacht from the ones he already owns, he buys it. It's a passion.

Well, that makes a lot of sense. Why make games when one could just have yachts? Wonder when will the gaming community stop coddling and adoring that company.

Gabe Newell speaks about it in the documentary. Here's an article about it: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/16/24298091/gabe-newell-hal...

Basically, they wanted more than just simply finishing the story, they wanted to make some cool new features, similarly to what HL2 was compared to HL1.

From all the leaks, it sounds like the big change for HL3 is currently advanced materials – destruction, traction, behaviour, conductivity, etc. This would make sense as it plays into the material work in Portal 2 and the deformation work in HL2:EP2-3, as well as the physics puzzles in HL3. Additionally it sounds like gravity may be a core feature of the game.

This is all speculation based on code leaks, and it's possible this is all true and they still don't release anything because the project stalls. Supposedly the game has moved into the later stages of development, but I'm not fully convinced by that part of the leaks.

Exactly. They probably make more profit from most Steam games than the publishers of those games themselves. Basically like Apple with the App Store. Steam exemplifies a failure mode of capitalism: Rent seeking.

> For a while their stated reason was that they felt they couldn’t live up to the hype and the gaming community was too toxic and would have crucified them for it.

[citation needed]

Valve has been mostly silent on the issue (after hyping up EP 3 themselves).

They already did hire the original Arkane to work on Episode 4, then cancelled it along with 3.

That says more about the VR game industry than Alyx.

HL1 and HL2 each changed the industry. Alyx is mostly forgotten.

Too bad that they didn't communicate that instead of continuing to egg on the fanbase for years.

We already have Laidlaw's own version of what an EP3 could have been in Epistle Three.

Exactly, the Ep2 cliff hanger was a particular shitty place to leave the series to rest. Just some closure would have been nice.

I too am unfortunate enough to have read that version of the ending