12 May 2007
Ferry

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

20 April 2009 14:59
hjioglkj

You Sire Half Life 3 is going to realease?I played the second version,but i am not sure about the third.i want to playe half life 2 episode one really badly though

20 April 2009 15:00
hjioglkj

Half life 3? i was blocked from looking at the gameplay!well,tell me about it

2 June 2009 17:35
Scott

I think this is a pretty disgraceful excuse and a piss poor way to treat their fans. “The episodes ARE the third game!” - that’s like giving a child his dinner, promising a yummy dessert if he eats it all up, and then when he’s finished telling him that the dinner WAS the dessert! This was obviously something they thought up afterwards, since surely if the episodic content was to take the place of the third game release it would be titled “Half Life 3; episode X”.

Valve aren’t even working on episode 3, even though they ended ep2 with the storyline set up for it. They’ve just given up, abandoned their fans, like they don’t care anymore. That’s the impression they’ve given me. No discussion about it, no press , no coverage, no development news. They ranted on about how episode releases will be better, that they will mean more releases. Yet in the time it’s taken so far since the last release they could’ve made a whole third half life game. I don’t care how long it took between the first two games, it doesn’t count because they didn’t spend all that time developing the next one. Exclude “valve procrastination time”.

I personally think valve should spend more time developing games, and less time cheaping their customers out of releases, and finding excuses to not work on things. Or worse, making commitments to release episodic content that they can’t keep. I honestly hope that they’ve kept so quiet because they’re going to surprise us with some kind of amazing HL release. I hope that for their sake.

3 June 2009 20:33
cheez117

hey i think that they should atleast end gorden freemen or something goog before quitinging the series. other wise leaving it at episode 2 is just randon

6 June 2009 18:07
Ken

Hello, I have played HL1/HL2/HL every episode. As a regular HL fan, I seriously think that the Valve corporation should get their finger from out of their bottoms, and start paying attention to their fans, and produce half-life 3. If they don’t do it soon, I sincerely feel that they will lose out in the RPG games market. Regards, Ken

27 June 2009 00:47
Abhishek

I totally agree with the above comments about valve not paying attention to there customers actual demand but rather making them to suffer because we are there fan. Each day I am convincing myself to give up Half-life for good, since there developers have gone so damn greedy, they dont deserve this kind of fan following anymore. It’s so unproffessional for the valve guy to say something like “it took us six years to make the hl2″ whats next…. that hl4 will be developed by our grand children. How lame…..they want to make easy profit by our liking by making such small modules and charging us a price which just ain’t worth it. We have to give up half-life for good period