Valve claims you can play Half-Life 3 right now instead of waiting for a future release date
Last year when Valve was asked why they went with the Half-Life 2 episodic system, Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell answered that Half-Life 2: Episode One released on June 1st 2006, Half-Life 2: Episode Two that’s now coming in late 2007, and Half-Life 2: Episode Three that’s hopefully coming in 2008, all put together serve as the third game in the series. Rather than make gamers wait another six-plus years for Half-Life 3, the developer thought people might appreciate playing the game in smaller chunks if they didn’t have to wait as long. So you’ve been playing Half-Life 3: Episode One right now!
To quote Gabe: “The original Half-Life took us two years to develop. With a considerably larger team Half-Life 2 took us six years to develop, so we thought if we were going to continue our trend with Half-Life 3 we would basically ship after we had all retired.
We’re trying to come up with a better way of getting more timely updates to our customers and also come up with something that didn’t have the complexities. Projects increased logarithmically with how much we tried to do, so if you tried to put twice as much content or technology into a box it ends up taking you four times the amount of work, right, and so we’re trying to figure out a better solution.
We left Half-Life 2 on a cliffhanger …[spoiler break]… with the Citadel blowing up, Alyx is a couple of feet away from the explosion, so what’s going to happen? People were pretty clear that they didn’t want to have to wait as long as they had previously to find out what happened.
Probably a better name for [the three Half-Life 2 Episodes arc] would have been Half Life 3: Episode One, but these three are what we’re doing as our way of taking the next step forward, but Half-Life 2 was the name we used…
A big focus [in Episode One] is Alyx, both from a storytelling perspective and from a gameplay perspective. We really liked her as a character, and the fans did too, so we wanted you to be spending a long time with her, and seeing how far we could push this notion of single player co-op. Being in this world with someone who’s operating pretty intelligently and acting more as an ally, rather than this dumb collection of polygons that sort of troops around and gets in your way.
The arc of the trio of episodes is also about the G-Man. He appears briefly in Episode One, and we’ll get more info on him later. If you think of Half-Life 1 as the G-Man trying to turn you into something that was useful to him - the transformation of the player into hero. And then Half-Life 2 was about how he was using you.
Half-Life 3 [a.k.a. Episodes One to Three] is about the relationship with the G-Man and what happens when he loses control of you, when you’re not available to him as a tool and how he responds to that, and what are the consequences of that. Alyx and the relationship with her is a big focus in Episode One and the larger story about your evolving relationship with the G-Man. That’s the text of the trio of episodes.”
Despite these revealing comments, fans are still dying to see the Half-Life series continue after the 3 new episodes, that much is evident from fake Half-Life 3 photos like these:
Quotes via Eurogamer
6 August 2009 18:52HEMIHUDSON
Hey, ive read most of these comments and i think people are way to focused on half-life, i mean half-life got me into gaming and i own all of them but nowaday if your not playing COD on a console your wasting your time, with the release of MW:2 in November the FPShooter’s on the PC have no chance to compete. If you disagree, you are blind. PC games are great yes, but the hardware requirements are to much to have the top of the line, console games make it easy to connect with people, cheaper for those who are totally commited and you can play them on huge T.V.s I own HL on both of my consoles and enjoy them greatly, as for HL:3, I would be estatic if they come out with it, but im not waiting for it and i’m deffinatly not getting my hopes up. A word to the HL developers, your fans are leaveing and your doing nothing about it. Theres nothing you can do about it. Take ten years and realease a new HL and put you life into it, and maybe when it comes out i’ll drop COD for a bit and play HL. Untill then i’ll still have fun calling in airstrikes on 6 noobs and droping gold crosses at PBR useing a M40 W/ACOG and red tiger. Gamertag: HEMIHUDSON
5 September 2009 12:45HLgamer
ok so here is my catch on it, half-life:1 half life1:opposing force, and Hlaflife1: blue shift were all excellent games, and i love how they showed the over all story from 3 different points, as well has having a plot to there own. Half life 2 was also a very good game but i was a little confused at first, as i played through i understood a little better, but i was like “wtf, how did all this happen?” so i went back and played through all the older games to see if i could tell, and i got nothing. it went from Gordon testing some experiment and then saving the ppl in black mesa, Sheperd going to save to ppl and killing an alien boss, and Barnie getting out alive. to aliens now somehow own the earth and a rebellion has happened.
i want to know how it went from an invasion by xen to owned by some other alien. i would understand if the other aliens were from xen, but if they were then y would the vordigaunts b on our side.
anyway ill stop my endless rant and get to the point, the original Half life was excellent, the second one as well but i dont see how u can call the episods Half life 3 because it picks up where half life 2 left off where as half life 2 jump ahead like 14 year from the first and left me wonder WTF. i would love to see a real half life 3 and not expansions that u call half life 3 because ur lazy. if it takes another 6 years hell i’de wait. if u did, bring back the old gameplay, the followers, the alien weapons, the bosses, and bring back the full game then expansions b take from other characters from the series like gordon, sheperd, and barnie. deffinatly bring back sheperd because u left your self open for it. but i think it would b great to have a real halflife 3 that u play through as gordan, then get to do different parts by other characters, such as playing as one of the main resistance ppl, or as alex, or hell idk Barnie again
