Valve claims you can play Half-Life 3 right now instead of waiting for a future release date

12 May 2007

Posted by:Ferry

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~~ ~~2009~~ ~~2010~~ ~~2011~~ 2012, 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.” — Quotes via Eurogamer

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:

Update June 2010: An anonymous source says Valve’s “surprise” at E3 2010 will be the unveiling of Source Engine 2. Supposedly Valve will be showing Half-Life 3 running on the new engine. That is how they’ve done it with past versions of their Source engine: Half-Life 1 was shown running on GoldSource, and Half-Life 2 and Counter Strike were shown running on Source back in June 2004. This may have been behind closed doors.

Categories: Features, Interviews, News, PC News, PS3 News, Xbox 360 News

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
BestDude EVAR

So, it is official.
I mean absolutely official.
Somehow, the Half-Life franchise, by the beloved Valve, company of free updates and great customer support… has become vaporware.
Half-Life has become vaporware.
Never thought I’d see the day/ with Half-Life coming my way/ believe me when I say/ they tricked us…

Half-Life is now vaporware.
defragen1

Scott

Don’t be a fool they have been working on half life 3 for a long time
there’s actually a little teaser video going around inside valve internally

let me tell you something it looks twice as good as Crysis
and remember how nvidia bought out agiea phyx and later had all those water physics videos.. well half life 3 water physics are just that and moRE!!
Eddy

Having waited so long for latest Half Life edition whatever they are going to call it I decided to try another game Crysis..what a cracking game…does anyone have any ideas on a release date for 2nd part of this game.. maybe they can develop a 2nd part from scratch quicker than Valve can…IS THERE EVER likely to be a Half life 3,part 3 subsection 2.1 or what ever they are going to call it ??? if so whennnnnnnnnnnn
Kit

Well Eddy,
They have already made crysis 2 and you can see trailers on youtube etc but problem is that like the first one for alot of gamers out there if they don’t have the latest machine available they will be lucky to run it.
Been hoping for a new Halflife but maybe the commitment aint there due to the fact that if they bring it out they gotta bring out a new counterstrike and day of defeat etc which are very popular online games even the first counter strike is still played by millions…
graphics wise you can expect them to be good but i doubt like the idiot DEFRAGEN1 says they be anything like crysis… why make a game so graphically good that so many can’t run on their machines cause at the end of the day they want to make money from it and valve makes their own engines so they make a new onefor HL1 then another HL2 and should be another for HL3 because the current ones graphics support cant cut it (crysis uses the farcry engine).
so theres my little insight for you take from it what you will.
HEMIHUDSON

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
HLgamer

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
MADCAT

for HEMIHUDSON,

We need to take a look at pc hardware again. Within 4 days is the release of a video card that has more processing power than the entire ps3 console in one chip (radeon 5870 HD). Sure not everybody is going to be buying this new tech, but it’s cheap compared to what we’ve seen in the past, dirt cheap. Leave some games for those of us who have spent the actual money to play at twice the settings any modern console could handle…otherwise what’s the point of pc hardware advancing at all?
runf

You are all fools. HL is the best ever and always will be.
Alexse

were were can i get half life 3 now