Valve’s co-founder says he could never figure out ‘why Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.’
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Unsurprisingly, yesterday’s big Half-Life release wasn’t the sequel to Half-Life 2 or even the third Half-Life 2: Episode entry, but a 20th-anniversary update to Valve’s legendary 2004 game. And given what studio co-founder Gabe Newell has to say on the subject in a 2-hour documentary that the company released in tandem with the update, it seems less likely than ever that we’ll be seeing either follow-up anytime soon.
Newell explains what he calls his “personal failure” near the end of the video (at this timestamp):
You can’t get lazy and say, “oh, we’re moving the story forward.” That’s copping out of your obligatiion to gamers, right? Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But sort of saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next… you know, we could’ve shipped it, like, it wouldn’t have been that hard. You know, the failure was — my personal failure was being stumped. Like, I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.
That’s not to say the company didn’t try. One idea for Episode 3 included an “Ice Gun” that Engineer David Speyrer says in the documentary would’ve let players spray “amorphous shapes” that could serve as barriers, platforms, or even “Silver Surfer mode” paths that they would shoot in front of themselves to cross gaps. Speyrer also talks about “blob” enemies that could move through grates or split into smaller “head-crabby things.”
But Speyrer and other Valve employees featured in the video echo Newell’s sentiment that they just couldn’t come up with ideas that seemed worth a new Half-Life game. One of its level designers said something similar in a 2020 IGN interview. He also blamed “scope creep” — the tendency of a project to slowly grow beyond its original plan — and the company wanting to get going on developing the Source 2 engine that drives VR prequel Half-Life: Alyx.
“Newell sees Half-Life 2 as an engine, a platform, or at best a whole industry unto itself,” gaming journalist Geoff Keighley, who Newell once gave a key card for Valve’s studios and told to “do whatever you want,” wrote for Gamespot in 2016. Creative blocks aside, perhaps Valve just has too many bigger fish to fry.
