HomeNews
Valve haven’t made Half-Life 3 yet because their attempts weren’t good enoughGood enough isn’t good enough
Good enough isn’t good enough
Half-Life: Alyxis out today and, as you’d hoped, it is good. Graham-certified good, in RPS’sHalf-Life Alyx review. For all its goodness, Alyx is not officiallyHalf-Life 3, which Valve still have not made. There are a few primary reasons that the fabled “3” hasn’t made an appearance, Valve have now explained. Chief among them, they just weren’t happy with what they came up with.
Valve veteran and level designer Dario Casalitold IGNtoday that a combination of “scope creep”, cautious tech development, and ideas that just weren’t good enough have kept the official third sequel from ever materializing. So far, anyway.
Casali recounts how long it took Valve to developHalf-Life 2alongside the Source engine. You shouldn’t build on shifting sand and, as Valve learned throughout six years of HL2 development, you shouldn’t build a game at the same time as its engine.
After finally getting HL2 out the door and feeling as though they had a handle on the Source engine, Valve decided to release new episodes for the game. They’d hoped to release an episode each year, but they got stuck on the number 2 again. Episode 3 never arrived.
“We found ourselves creeping ever forward towards, ‘Well, let’s just keeping putting more and more, and more, and more stuff in this game because we want to make it as good as we can,'” Casali says, “and then we realized these episodes are turning more into sequels.”
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings
In an earlier interview withGame Informer, Valve’s Robin Walker said that the studio “absolutely seeHalf-Life: Alyxas our return to this world, not the end of it.” However long it ends up taking Valve to conceive of and create Half-Life 3, it sounds like they’re determined that it will be worth the wait.
It may not be Half-Life 3, but Half-Life: Alyx is out today.On Steam, naturally.
