While 2020's VR title Half-Life: Alyx was a prequel rather than the full sequel that many were hoping for, it has rekindled some hope and marked the end of a drought. It's amazing that after the series had lain dormant for so long, Half-Life fans were still scrambling for another release. Half-Life 3 release date-will it ever be made? Which takes us to the present day, 13 years after Half-Life 2: episode 2, with no idea what the future holds for the series. And the following five years have been taken up with the VR-exclusive Half-Life: Alyx. Of course, Source 2 wasn't announced until 2015 when Dota 2 was released. The other reason that goes hand-in-hand with this is explained in another IGN interview with Valve's co-founder Gabe Newell who said that “Half-Life games are supposed to solve interesting problems“ and that the studio doesn't just want to release Half-Life games in order to 'make the quarterly numbers.' When it comes to a new Half-Life game, then, Casali says that Valve is “looking for what is going to make that next big impact.” Making a big impact would, therefore, require an exciting new technology or a new engine. The first is that the team didn't want to work on another Source engine alongside game development again and needed to work on Source 2 before creating another sequel. So, why didn't Half-Life episode 3 emerge as a fully-fledged Half-Life 3 sequel as many thought it would? Well, there are two primary reasons. When it came to Episode 3, however, Casali explained that “We found ourselves creeping ever forward toward ‘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, and then we realized these episodes are turning more into sequels.”

Instead, the team decided to work on smaller, episodic releases, with Episode 1 releasing in 2006 followed by the infamous Episode 2 in 2007.

In a 2020 interview with IGN, Valve explained why Half-Life 3 never emerged as its own release or a shorter episode.Īfter a difficult six-year period which saw Valve developing Half-Life 2 and its Source game engine concurrently, level designer Dario Casali said that the team didn't want to repeat this, stating that “I think our main take away from that is ‘get some stable technology and then build a game on top of it.'

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