Two decades on from the release of Half-Life 2, Valve has shown off some of what Half-Life 2: Episode 3 could have looked like.
I apologise to those of you that will feel instantly aged by this, but Half-Life 2 is 20 years old now. Yes, yes, I know it only seems like yesterday, but nope, Half-Life 2 is a legal adult capable of drinking in almost every country bar the US. To celebrate that, Valve has released a big update for the game, which has some great additions – for one, Episode 1 and 2 are now in the based game, so you don’t need to pick them up separately, and a developer commentary mode has been included for some behind the scenes tidbits. A whole bunch of bugs have been fixed too, and best of all you can pick up the game for free until November 18.
Most interesting of all, though, is that a two-hour-long documentary about Half-Life 2 has been released pulling in a bunch of the game’s original devs to talk about all sorts of things like trying to build Steam, an early version of the game being shared online, and most tantalising of all, a glimpse at what Half-Life 2: Episode 3 could have somewhat looked like. Towards the end of the documentary, the devs show off some concept art and even gameplay footage from work done on the infamous and unreleased Episode 3.
The footage shows that Episode 3 would have been set in the Arctic, with a special gun that would let you build ice walls to defend yourself, or paths to run along. There are some interesting quotes from Gabe Newell himself too, with the Valve head saying, “You can’t get lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving the story forward.’ That’s copping out of your obligation to gamers. Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next, you know—we could’ve shipped it, it wouldn’t have been that hard. The failure, my personal failure was being stumped. I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.”
Obviously in 2020 we saw the release of Half-Life: Alyx, but that came down to the fact that VR allowed for more innovation in the game’s design. So whether or not we will ever see more from the world of Half-Life in a non-VR capacity is mostly down to whether Valve thinks it can do something really different. Fingers crossed for you, Half-Life fans.