RUMOUR: Something may be up with HALF-LIFE 3

Here we go again.

Almost quasi-credible rumours are swirling from previously-reliable Valve insiders (including those that broke the news of the existence of their previous games) that Valve Software may be on the verge of formally announcing Half-Life 3, for release in early 2026. The mega-delayed video game was at one time slated for release as early as 2009, and its continuous non-appearance has made it one of the Internet's most famous, long-running gags. Fans had given up hope of ever seeing it before Valve released the VR-based spin-off game Half-Life Alyx in 2020, which ended with a strong tease that Half-Life 3 was indeed on the way.

Series protagonist Gordon Freeman and key ally Alyx Vance in publicity art for Half-Life 2.

A Short History of Half-Life

The original Half-Life was released in 1998 and was a revolutionary game in the development of the first-person shooter genre. With its commitment to total immersion - your character never spoke and there were no cut scenes that took you out of the action - the game broke new ground in telling story and depicting action in a first-person environment. Almost every major FPS series that followed after it owes it a debt of gratitude, including BioShock, Far Cry, Call of Duty and Halo. Three expansions followed, namely Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay, that expanded the story and background lore. The game was also a huge step forwards for modding, with some mods becoming official releases, including the single-player action game Gunman Chronicles and multiplayer games Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. In 2020, after five years of partial releases and betas, Half-Life received a Valve-sanctioned remake release as Black Mesa.

Half-Life 2 was released in late 2004 and was again a giant jump forwards for FPS gaming, mostly down to its stunning graphics (which still hold up well today), lighting and physics puzzles. Half-Life 2 also massively popularised the game distribution platform Steam, which has now become the single most popular game distribution platform on PC, and is credited with saving the PC as a gaming platform. The game was followed by two direct expansions, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two, the latter released in late 2007 as part of The Orange Box alongside Team Fortress 2 and physics puzzler Portal.

Valve indicated that Half-Life 2: Episode Three should follow within about eighteen months, but the game never appeared. Instead, it developed Portal 2 (2011) and the multi-player Left 4 Dead series. Constant rumours about the status of Episode Three swirled but nothing definitive was announced, aside from a nod that if a new game should appear, it would probably be a full Half-Life 3 rather than another expansion. Finally, in late 2019, Valve confirmed that Half-Life: Alyx was on its way, an interquel set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Released in March 2020 to blanket critical acclaim, Alyx became (and remains) the definitive VR game, as well as a strong game in its own right. With the ending of the game apparently recontextualising the end of Half-Life 2: Episode Two, fans began theorising that a new, mainline (non-VR) entry in the series was in development.

The Combine Citadel in City 17 under construction (from Half-Life: Alyx).

The Rumours

Rumours of Half-Life 3 began circulating after Half-Life: Alyx's release, specifically its ending which revisited the massive cliffhanger ending of Episode Two and provided a stronger jumping-off point for a new game. It was also noted that the making of Alyx required the creation of 4K assets for City 17 locations and Half-Life weapons and items, that could be reused either in Half-Life 3 or a comprehensive remaster/remake of Half-Life 2 (or both). The creation of Alyx also meant huge adjustments to the Source 2 Engine that cold only be fully justified through the release of additional games (Counter-Strike 2 was subsequently released in 2023, and multiplayer game Deadlock has since been announced, both also using Source 2).

Rumours began gathering pace last year, with rumours stating that a project known as "HLX" or "Half-Life X" had been in development since Alyx wrapped, alongside new hardware projects. These rumours gathered pace in late 2024 and early 2025, with noted industry insiders with excellent track records confirming that Half-Life 3, or at least a new Half-Life game, was an active project. Hardware rumours also continued to proliferate.

This week, Valve formally confirmed the existence of a new generation of Steam Machine home consoles, a new range of VR equipment, and a second generation of Steam Controllers. Insiders became more confident that Half-Life 3 was a thing, stating that Valve had not announced it at the same time as the hardware so one news would not drown out the other.

The date for Half-Life 3's official confirmation is unclear, though some have suggested 16 November (today), as the 21st anniversary of Half-Life 2's release. However, that hasn't happened so far and it'd be odd to make a major announcement on a Sunday (though it's Valve, who delight in not being bound by commercial conventions, so who knows?). Wednesday 19 November may be more likely, as the 27th anniversary of the Half-Life franchise as a whole. Otherwise the next likely date is Thursday 11 December, at the 2025 Game Awards, though it's likely Valve would not want to share the stage with other games.

As for a release date, a shadow-drop like that done by Bethesda for Oblivion Remastered earlier this year seems less likely, with a Q1 2026 release more plausible. The rumours also suggest that the game will only be released on PC via Steam, Linux and SteamOS, and may be a launch title for the new Steam Machine hardware, estimated in early 2026. Console versions of the game would only follow at a later date. The game is rumoured to not be a VR-exclusive, Valve acknowledging that too many gamers are not fans of the VR experience (or even can't enjoy it due to medical reasons). There may be an optional VR mode.

If Half-Life 3 did launch in 2026, it would likely only be eclipsed in sales and profile by Grand Theft Auto VI (currently scheduled for a November 2026 release).

Of course, that's assuming the news is real and Valve don't actually announce Alyx 2, Portal 3 or some other title.

The Aperture Science vessel Borealis from Half-Life 2: Episode Three concept art. The Borealis is believed to be a key location in the next Half-Life title.

NOTE: Spoilers for the Half-Life series follow

The Half-Life series tells the story of an alien invasion of Earth that begins when scientists at the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico inadvertently breach the dimensional barrier between Earth and another world called Xen. Aliens flood the complex, but are ultimately stopped and their master, the Nihilanth, is defeated by Black Mesa research scientist Gordon Freeman. Freeman is the only survivor of the crisis equipped with a Hazardous Environment Suit, allowing him to reach Xen and destroy the threat once and for all. Having achieved his mission, Freeman is "recruited" by the enigmatic "G-Man" to serve as his agent. Other expansions explore the fate of other characters during the original Black Mesa Incident, including US Marine Adrian Shepherd and Black Mesa security officer Barney Calhoun.

Half-Life 2 is set twenty years later and reveals that, although the Black Mesa Incident was successfully resolved, the events attracted the attention of the Nihilanth's masters, the mysterious Combine, an ultra-powerful, trans-dimensional, post-Singularity alien force. The Combine invaded Earth in the Seven-Hour War, defeating its armies and occupying the planet with trivial ease. Draining the oceans, suppressing human reproduction and reducing the population to "manageable" levels, the Combine are interested only in draining Earth's resources and leaving the planet for dead. Gordon Freeman is returned to the frey by G-Man. Rapidly joining forces with a resistance movement led by veterans of Black Mesa (including Barney, Dr. Kleiner and Eli Vance), Gordon leads a successful uprising that destroys the Combine Citadel in City 17 and frees humanity. Gordon leads a further military assault that ensures the survival of the resistance and the destruction of the Combine "superportal" that is summoning reinforcements from one of the Combine homeworlds. During this latter battle, one of Gordon's key allies is killed and Combine Advisors are revealed to be at large on Earth, whilst a resistance group has located the Borealis, a ship created by Aperture Science capable of travelling through portals. The Borealis may hold the key to permanently sealing the portals to Earth and preventing future Combine invasions.

Half-Life: Alyx is set a couple of years before Half-Life 2 and focuses on Alyx Vance, the daughter of Dr. Eli Vance from Black Mesa. Alyx plays a major role in Half-Life 2 and its expansions as effectively a co-protagonist. Alyx sets out on a routine reconnaissance mission which escalates when the resistance discovers evidence of a major Combine "superweapon." Her investigations eventually defeat this Combine plot but attract the attention of the powerful G-Man. G-Man agrees to intervene to help her during her moment of highest need, which results in him changing time to alter the end of Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Unfortunately, this is only possible if she agrees to replace Gordon as his most trusted agent. Gordon finds himself discarded, but with a new, incredibly daunting mission: to defeat G-Man and rescue Alyx, and ensure the Combine threat is ended for good.

The spin-off Portal series focuses on Aperture Science, a rival to Black Mesa. Aperture focuses on portal technology, short-range teleportation using interdimensional portals. A research subject named Chell discovers that the Aperture Science computer, GLaDOS, has gone loopy and is trying to kill her. She defeats GLaDOS but is unable to escape from the facility, and is put into suspended animation. She wakes up to find the world in ruins (possibly a result of the Combine invasion) and tries to escape again, but inadvertently reawakens GLaDOS. GLaDOS is in a battle of wills with a rival AI, Wheatley, with Chell caught in the middle, having to cut deals and work with both as she tries to navigate the Aperture Labs and escape. There are various connections to the Half-Life series, including the discovery of the empty Borealis dry dock, but these are limited.

The Black Mesa Incident, or Resonance Cascade, that triggers the events of the Half-Life universe. Depicted here in remake game Black Mesa.

A Wertzone History of the Wait for Half-Life 3

• What's up with Half-Life 3? (January 2012)
• Finally! An official quasi-update on Half-Life 3 (April 2012)
• Happy 15th Anniversary to Half-Life (November 2013)
• Half-Life writer leaves Valve (January 2016)
• Half-Life writer reveals where the story would have gone in Episode 3 (August 2017)
• Happy 20th Anniversary to Half-Life (November 2018)
• Valve to release third full Half-Life game in March 2020 (but not the one you want) (November 2019)
• SF&F Questions: Will We Ever See Half-Life 3? (December 2019)
• Half-Life 3 (probably) confirmed (March 2020)
• Valve tease next-generation Half-Life game (July 2020)
• Footage of unreleased Half-Life game emerges (May 2022)
• Idea for Portal 3 floated at Valve (December 2022)
• Half-Life 2 turns twenty years old (November 2024)

HALF-LIFE 2 turns twenty years old

November 16th marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Half-Life 2, one of the most iconic and influential video games of all time.

The original Half-Life had come out in late 1998 and established new standards for first-person shooters. The game focused on total immersion, with the protagonist, Gordon Freeman, never speaking and the player never seeing outside of Gordon's POV, even in cutscenes (which were fully interactive, with Gordon able to walk around during them). The game had very sophisticated AI for the time, and ferocious combat with both alien creatures and cunning enemy soldiers. The game was noted for its bonkers ending, which saw Freeman recruited by the mysterious "G-Man" to work for him in some unspecified fashion.

Valve subsequently published two expansions, Opposing Force (1999) and Blue Shift (2000), which focused on other characters during the events of the original game, as well as revising and expanding the original for ports to the Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Valve also welcomed the activities of modders, commercially releasing the multiplayer titles Team Fortress Classic (1999) and Counter-Strike (2000), as well as the single-player Gunman Chronicles (2000), which all came from the modding community.

Most fans were clamouring for a direct sequel but Valve remained tight-lipped on the subject. In the spring of 2003 they confirmed that yes, Half-Life 2 was real and would be released that year. But, famously, Valve were hacked and an early build of the game was leaked onto the Internet. Valve furiously reworked almost the entire game in response, rebuilding it from the ground up over less than a year, something that was hugely expensive and annoying, but later was credited with making the game better.

Half-Life 2 finally released in November 2004 and, despite the backlash over the required use of the Steam software (see below) to authenticate and play the game, the game was a huge success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in its first few days on sale. That may not sound like much by modern standards, but by 2004 the PC platform was starting to slide into sales decline, and a PC-only action game requiring an Internet connection and a reasonably robust graphics card was a fairly challenging requirement, so its success was impressive. Sales would dramatically accelerate over the following years, with over 12 million copies sold by 2011 and more than 30 million of the entire franchise by 2020. The game also achieved immediate critical acclaim, with PC Gamer awarding it 98%, a score that would not be equalled until the release of Baldur's Gate III in August 2023. Maximum PC magazine memorably gave the game 11/10.

Half-Life 2 is also notable the first (and, for several years, only) release requiring the installation and use of the Steam distribution platform. Steam itself had launched a year earlier but the release of Half-Life 2 introduced it to vast numbers of people for the first time. Valve's use of Steam was highly controversial, especially with people who only planned to play Half-Life 2 offline for the story and campaign, but still had to authenticate the game online.

The game's critical reception was down to its incredible sense of atmosphere, its moody restraint with moments of quiet punctuated by satisfying action set-pieces and moments of visceral horror (Half-Life 2 is as much a horror game as it is an SF action blockbuster, sometimes that tended to get overlooked at the time). The setting was incredible, with a sense of melancholy bleakness you'd be hard-pressed to find in any modern shooter. The story was low-key but solid and the supporting cast of supporting characters incredibly popular, with Valve using cutting-edge tech to help them emote and act more believably like real people (well, by the standards of the day). The game did have some tough competition from the recently-released Far Cry, which had far superior environments and use of vehicles, but Half-Life 2 boasted a better story, more interesting characters, stronger music and a more unsettling atmosphere.

Half-Life 2 ended on a huge cliffhanger, one that was swiftly resolved in Half-Life 2: Episode One, released in mid-2006, and then Half-Life 2: Episode Two, released in late 2007 as part of a compilation called The Orange Box, alongside legendary multiplayer game Team Fortress 2 and the experimental puzzle game Portal (which not so much stole Episode Two's thunder as also had its lunch and then tapdanced on its head). Episode Two ended on a cruel humdinger of a cliffhanger, with Valve assuring fans that Half-Life 2: Episode Three was in development.

Except, infamously, Episode Three never appeared. Valve would periodically say it was on its way but instead released other games: Left 4 Dead (2008), Left 4 Dead 2 (2009), Alien Swarm (2009), Portal 2 (2011), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012) and Dota 2 (2013). Steam, that much maligned online launcher, had started generating insane revenues for Valve, rising to billions of dollars a year within a decade, removing the financial impetus to release a new Half-Life title. Eventually Valve acknowledged that Episode Three was dead, with instead the story more likely to continue in a Half-Life 3, but that was never formally announced or confirmed to be in development either.

In 2020, Valve abruptly announced a new Half-Life game. Half-Life: Alyx would be an interquel set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and focusing on the popular side-character of Alyx Vance. The game would be VR only, upsetting long-term fans of the franchise who could not afford a VR setup or could not use one for medical reasons. The game had a surprise ending, which revisited the ending of Half-Life 2: Episode Two from a different perspective and seemed to finally hint that a proper, full sequel was possible.

Four years on, there has been no further news on that front, although Valve have released Counter-Strike 2 and have announced a new hero shooter game, Deadlock. But still, hope springs eternal.

To celebrate Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary, Valve have released a new documentary about the making of the game, an update to HL2 revising some of the level design quirks they'd been meaning to fix for years and updating the game's lighting, and announced a new edition of the iconic Raising the Bar book about the making the game. The new edition of Raising the Bar launches in early 2025 with new sections about the making of the episodes.

Oh yes, and you can get Half-Life 2, Episode One and Episode Two for free for the whole weekend, which is a very good price for total gaming classics.

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Steam turns 20 years old

PC video game distribution platform Steam turns twenty years old today. Normally that wouldn't be a major milestone outside of technical interest, but Steam's achievements and position in the industry remain unique, despite some criticisms.

PC games company Valve Corporation launched Steam on 12 September 2003. The first - and for a while only - thing you could do on Steam was use it to patch up your existing Steam games, particularly Counter-Strike. The service did not even have a store front on release. Valve had identified the enthusiasm for online multiplayer early, but also identified that many gamers experienced frustration when new patches were released, as these tended to be released ad hoc and it sometimes took days for them to be disseminated over the entire playerbase. Valve proposed developing a universal updating service with several other companies, including Microsoft, but were shot down. They began development of their own service in 2002. This idea wasn't totally new, as Blizzard had released their Battle.Net service at the end of 1996, but Steam was working on a different scale.

Valve quickly realised the same system could be used to sell and download games in their entirety. Valve ran videos and interviews demonstrating how this would work with the video game Impossible Creatures by Relic Entertainment, with the entire game being downloaded over broadband in just a few hours. Ironically, Impossible Creatures would not be actually released on Steam until 2015.

Valve also sold the benefits of the service for combating piracy, which was widely believed at the time to be killing the PC gaming market. This led to consternation from gamers, already wary of DRM (Digital Rights Management) software trying to restrict when and where they could play games. To assuage concerns, Valve also demonstrated that the system could be used as a mass distribution system for free mods by releasing the popular Half-Life mod Day of Defeat on the service.

After a successful launch, Valve shut down all of their other online matchmaking and updating websites and systems, effectively forcing gamers to migrate to Steam over the course of 2004, to some controversy.

On 16 November 2004, Valve released Half-Life 2. One of the most eagerly-awaited games of all time up to that point, preceded by months of hype, Half-Life 2 was sold at retail and as a Steam download, but all copies of the game had to be activated and authenticated on Steam, even if the game was to be played solely offline in single-player mode. This led to vast criticism and anger from both critics and the gaming community, as broadband internet was still in its relative infancy. However, Valve stuck to their guns and the game's overwhelmingly positive reviews saw a million copies sold worldwide within a relatively short timeframe. Shortly after release Valve demonstrated the versatility and convenience of Steam by releasing an extra bonus level, Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast via the service.

In 2005 Valve signed its first distribution agreement with third-party vendors. The first third-party game was Rag Doll King Fu, followed quickly by the more acclaimed Darwinia. Over the next few years numerous other publishers and developers jumped on board, attracted by the company's generous royalty cut (far superior to boxed retail). Critics continued to complain loudly about the service being a form of intrusive DRM, but fans began to see the convenience of having all their games, multiplayer services and achievements in one place.

It is possible that Steam would have remained a relatively minor success, especially as Valve proved reluctant to release more high-profile original games, but the PC gaming market underwent serious contraction after the release of the Xbox 360 console in 2005 and the PlayStation 3 the following year. Both consoles had comparable power to gaming PCs of the time and pushed the development of HD graphics at a much more affordable price. The result was something of a stampede of gamers to the new consoles, including PC gamers who previously would have not considered switching to console but were lured over by the likes of the Halo series on Xbox. Previously PC-centric developers like Bethesda were also focusing heavily on the console versions of their next-generation games, like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) and Fallout 3 (2008). For several years the future of PC gaming appeared to be in doubt.

The result was an explosion in the indie game sector starting in the late 2000s, alongside Valve using numerous inducements to try to get PC publishers and developers to rally around Steam as a centralised, global launch platform for their games. Valve also initiated aggressively-priced "Steam Sales," sometimes selling games just a year or two old for heavy discounts. This approach proved successful, if again controversial, and PC games began to see an uptick in sales again towards the end of the decade. A good sign of Steam's success was the appearance of competitor products: Ubisoft launched the Ubisoft Games Launcher (aka Ubisoft Connect, later UPlay) in November 2009 and Electronic Arts launched Origin in June 2011.

An earlier competitor was Polish company CD Projekt. The company had enjoyed success by launching its first original game, The Witcher on Steam (as well as physical release) in 2007. In 2008 they launched Good Old Games, a variation on Steam which focused on older, out-of-print games and employing patches and community knowledge in making them compatible with modern systems. CDPR won early victories by recruiting Interplay and Ubisoft to their cause. In 2010, rebranded as GoG, they carried out a successful relaunch spearheaded by the re-release of classic CRPG Baldur's Gate. Valve noted CDPR's success and began launching older games themselves, although generally without the care and attention GoG spent on compatibility.

By the early 2010s, Steam had established itself as the de facto global PC games storefront, to the point that many bricks-and-mortar video game stores dramatically reduced or even removed physical PC games from sale. Most games sold physically still needed to be activated on Steam anyway. Steam users became numerous and passionate, calling for boycotts of other launchers from companies who refused to release on Steam as well, citing the inconvenience of managing multiple launchers and software. The success of Steam also encouraged the further development of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony's inhouse storefronts for their consoles (several attempts to create console versions of Steam came to nothing).

By 2020, most rivals had admitted defeat, with both Electronic Arts and Ubisoft agreeing to release their games via Steam once again. In 2022 EA discontinued Origin in favour of the EA App, which allows former Origin players to continue accessing their games.

In late 2018, Epic Games, flush with cash from their game Fortnite, launched a service designed to directly take the fight to Steam. The Epic Game Store used aggressive pricing, a more generous royalty scheme and the promise of completely free AAA games to aggressively expand. However, the service was hugely criticised during its launch phase for lacking basic functions like a shopping basket and user reviews, whilst Epic's attempt to lock in some games to exclusivity periods with them in return for buckets of cash was criticised as anti-consumer. It took several years to implement basic features and remains controversial, despite the number of Epic exclusives tailing off as developers discovered that the bad will engendered from not launching on Steam often outstripped the short-term financial benefits of accepting Epic's pricing terms.

Steam enjoyed a further shot in the arm thanks to the COVID pandemic, with the number of people using the service seeing a sharp increase as they were stuck at home with, in some cases, not much to do other than play video games.

In 2023, Steam is the overwhelmingly dominant games delivery service for the PC format. The service continues to set new records for concurrent players - the latest high of over 33 million was reached earlier this year - and now every major publisher and almost all publishers full stop use Steam as their main launch system. Rivals continue to hang in there - GoG has continued goodwill from its attempts to track down and release older games and Epic Games is continuing to try to make inroads through exclusives and free games - but many have thrown in the towel and admitted defeat.

Criticisms of Steam and its monopoly-like position in the marketplace continue, with criticism of the service sometimes pushing shovelware games released without much attention to quality (or sometimes copyright). The service has sometimes been used for cheating, toxic behaviour and even fraudulent activities, which Valve has sometimes acted decisively to stamp out and, at other times, less decisively. However, Steam has also been praised for almost single-handedly saving PC gaming as a viable format during the 2005-10 period when its future might otherwise have been in doubt, and for prioritising convenience and ease of use for customers.

Probably the biggest and most viable criticism of Steam has been its impact on Valve, its creators. Valve used to create vibrant, exciting and original video games. Steam has given them an astonishing annual income (comfortably in the billions of dollars) which frees them from having to rush games or, indeed, do much work on original games at all. Although Valve continued to publish popular titles in the first few years after Steam launched - Portal (2007), Team Fortress 2 (2007), Left 4 Dead (2008), Portal 2 (2011), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012) and Dota 2 (2013) - it is also unquestionable that their financial security has meant they are not under any pressure to actually make new games. The Half-Life franchise was left on a massive cliffhanger with the release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two in 2007 and the company has so far failed to follow up on it, although VR prequel Half-Life: Alyx (2021) hints at how the series might continue.

My main abiding memory of the first time I used Steam was strewing network cables across my house, to my landlady's consternation, as I tried to get Half-Life 2 to work on its release day. I now have 484 games on the service with some 5,769 hours spent on them (which isn't as bad as I'd feared, spread over nineteen years). My most-played games on the service are Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Fallout 4, Cyberpunk 2077, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, BattleTech, XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within, Death Stranding, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Grand Theft Auto IV/Episodes from Liberty City and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. Many of the criticisms and wariness about the service remain valid, but I think without Steam, it's questionable if PC gaming would have survived, let alone thrived as it has.

Idea for PORTAL 3 floated at Valve

Erik Wolpaw, one of the main writers at Valve Corporation, has confirmed that he has floated an idea for Portal 3 at the company.

Wolpaw joined Valve in 2004 and worked on Half-Life 2: Episode One and Two as a writer. He provided writing for the original Portal in 2007 and its sequel Portal 2 in 2011, as well as working on Left 4 Dead (2008) and Artifact (2018). His other credits include Psychonauts (2005) for Double Fine Productions. He briefly left Valve in 2017 to work on Psychonauts 2, but returned to the company to work on the VR title Half-Life: Alyx (2020) and Aperture Desk Job (2022), a Portal spin-off designed to show off the featurs of the handheld Steam Deck.

Valve, infamously, have been reluctant to make a third "proper" game in any of their key franchises: Portal, Left 4 Dead and, obviously Half-Life, instead making two games and then various expansions and spin-offs (the Portal games are, in fact, set in the same universe as the Half-Life series). The internal philosophy at Valve is that the first game in a franchise is where you test the concept and the sequel is where you use all the ideas you couldn't use in the original for time or money reasons. A third game would be over-egging the pudding. However, Valve have teased a Half-Life 3 for many, many years, and recently suggested that it was back on the cards after Alyx's finale apparently teed up a continuation of the mainline series.

Wolpaw has indicated that his idea for a Portal 3 has been well-received internally at Valve and the idea is permutating around. However, it is now in active development at the moment and, given the existence of "Valve Time," it may be many years before (or even if) it leads to anything.

Still, it's another sign that Valve, who for the last twenty years have been able to simply rake in immense profits from their Steam online game service, might slowly be tilting back towards making more big games like the ones they were originally famous for.

Footage of unreleased HALF-LIFE game emerges

Superb video game documentary makers Noclip have released a full hour of footage from an unreleased Half-Life game. Return to Ravenholm was a planned self-contained expansion to Half-Life 2 set in the titular town, where the protagonist has to fight off headcrabs and zombies with a range of new tools.

Return to Ravenholm, sometimes referred to as Half-Life 2: Episode Four, began development in 2007 at Junction Point Studios, with Warren Spector in charge. The original plan was for a prequel to Half-Life 2, showing the deterioration of Ravenholm from a pleasant town to the nightmare-infested location it appears as in Half-Life 2 itself. The main character would have been Father Grigori, who appears in Half-Life 2, or possibly a new protagonist. Development of the project was only at an early stage when Junction Point was awarded a contract to make Epic Mickey instead, which became their main focus.

Valve gave the concept to Arkane Studios, who had already used Valve's Source Engine to make Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. They recast the game as a sequel to Half-Life 2, with it being revealed that Father Grigori had survived his last stand in Ravenholm. The game would have used Adrian Shepard, the long-missing protagonist of Half-Life: Opposing Force, as its main character. Shepard would have been charged with eliminating the alien presence in Ravenholm, using both traditional weapons and new physics-based weapons, including being able to push or throw enemies into traps, as in Dark Messiah, and creating new traps yourself.

The game was startlingly close to being finished, with a new soundtrack recorded and voice-over dialogue largely completed, when it was cancelled. The main issue leading to the cancellation was the perception that fighting zombies and headcrabs were played out over the course of Half-Life 2 and its first two episodes.

Noclip first uncovered information about the expansion in a long 2020 documentary on Arkane Studios, including coverage of their other games like Prey and the Dishonored series.

The Half-Life series began in 1998 with a revolutionary first-person shooter. It was followed by two expansions, Opposing Force (1999) and Blue Shift (2000). Half-Life 2 was released in 2004 and was a massive hit. It was followed by Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007), the latter released in a special "Orange Box" alongside Portal and Team Fortress 2. The Half-Life franchise went on indefinite hold, despite Episode Two ending on a major cliffhanger. The non-appearance of the promised Episode Three or Half-Life 3 led to more than a decade of memes and jokes. The VR game Half-Life: Alyx (2021) revisited the franchise and set up a new cliffhanger, leading to speculation that Valve are finally willing to make the next "proper" Half-Life game.

Valve Corporation considering a move to New Zealand

Valve Corporation, one of the biggest video game companies in the world, are considering at least a partial move to New Zealand.

Valve's CEO Gabe Newell was in New Zealand on holiday when the COVID pandemic erupted and decided to stay in the country whilst the crisis unfolded. He has since been granted residency and is pursuing citizenship. He reports that many Valve employees have expressed interest in moving the company to New Zealand.

Valve was founded in Kirkland, Washington in 1996. It has since moved its headquarters to the neighbouring city of Bellevue, both located close to Seattle. Valve made its name with developing video games, particularly the Half-Life, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead and Portal series of acclaimed first-person shooters and puzzle games. More recently they have branched into online multiplayer games like Dota 2. Their most recent release was the highly-acclaimed VR game Half-Life: Alyx, released last year.

They are, however, much more significant for creating and maintaining the online distribution platform Steam. Launched in 2003, Steam has become the de facto primary digital distribution platform for PC gaming in the world despite a strong challenge from rival services such as GoG, Origins, UPlay and Epic Games Store. Their annual income is in the billions of dollars, with well under 500 employees which makes them probably the most profitable-per-employee company in the entire United States.

Newell has noted that New Zealand's healthcare system, success at handling the pandemic (with one of the lowest infection and death rates in the world) and general quality of life make moving the company the company there an attractive prospect. He does note that many employees have family ties in the Washington state area that makes a wholesale move of the entire company less likely, but a possible move of headquarters to New Zealand whilst keeping the Bellevue office open as a satellite operation might be an option.

Newell also opined that hosting eSports championships in New Zealand could also be an option whilst other countries are struggling with the pandemic with greater difficulty. The annual Dota 2 championship has the most lucrative prizes in eSports, with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive not far behind.

As usual, Newell refused to be drawn on news about Half-Life 3 or Portal 3, but noted that the success of Half-Life: Alyx had reinvigorated the company and they do have new, single-player games in development.

Valve tease next-generation HALF-LIFE game

Valve recently released Half-Life: Alyx, an interquel in their popular Half-Life video game series, set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. The VR-only title was very successful (considering the small potential audience) and its cliffhanger ending, which revisited that of Half-Life 2: Episode Two, suggested that a proper Half-Life 3 was finally in the offing.

A new documentary about the making of the game, The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, expands on Valve's activities since the release of their last big single-player game Portal 2 in 2011, and popular online arena game Dota 2 in 2013. The documentary confirms at least six different iterations of Half-Life 3 were prototyped and abandoned, as well as a Left 4 Dead 3 and an open-world Left 4 Dead game that would revamp the entire series. An action-RPG to compete with the likes of Skyrim was at one point considered, as well as a number of VR games.

The documentary chronicles Valve's infamously open and relaxed approach to project development. Since Valve own Steam, the most popular and successful PC digital storefront in the world with annual revenue in the billions, they don't actually have to release games to remain solvent. After Dota 2's release, the company also become more interested in hardware, leading to some interesting ideas which ended up not being hugely successful (like Steam PCs and Steam controllers) and some other areas which did work out better (particularly VR tech). Most interesting is the acknowledgement by Valve that their "open development" environment may have been fun, but it was also extremely frustrating. Eventually the company decided to focus back onto the Half-Life franchise, leading to Alyx.

A key point in the documentary is Valve confirming that they are no longer "afraid" of the legacy of Half-Life and now want to make a full-scale Half-Life sequel for next-generation consoles (and PC, presumably). Slightly surprising is that Valve may have to scale up to do this; their recent projects have been generally smaller in scope, so they don't actually have the battery of artists, programmers and coders that making an actual Half-Life 3 would require. Even Alyx was made somewhat on the low-down, re-purposing assets from other games and featuring significantly less action and enemies than a "proper" game would require. But obviously Valve have the resources to do this pretty much at will.

This isn't confirmation that Half-Life 3 has been greenlit, but it is a statement of intent by a company that seems to finally be waking up. And it'd be nice to get a new Half-Life game that non-VRheads can play before Half-Life 2's twentieth anniversary in November 2024.

Black Mesa 1.0

For Gordon Freeman, it's just another day at work at the Black Mesa Research Facility. At least, until portals to another dimension open up, depositing hostile creatures into the facility and overloading its power systems. Equipped only with his Hazardous Environment Suit and a number of mundane and experimental weapons, Gordon must fight his way to the Lambda Complex, overcoming aliens and a secret US marine force sent in to restore order...and eliminate witnesses.

Black Mesa is a fan-made recreation of classic first-person shooter Half-Life (1998), made with the approval of original developers Valve Software. The game was previously released in 2012 (my review here) after eight years of development, but was missing the final chapters set in the mysterious alien world of Xen. After a further eight years of development, the Xen chapters have been added and the rest of the game overhauled and given a shine. It's now possible for players old and new to enjoy the full Half-Life experience from beginning to end.

The question is how the game holds up, and the answer is remarkably well. The Source Engine is getting on a bit and early chapters of the game do feel a lot more dated than they did eight years ago, especially character models. The outdoor areas also feel like they could do with a bit more of an overhaul, with lighting effects and distance views feeling distinctly under-par, although not too bad.

Luckily, for the most of the game you're fighting alien monsters in relatively tight confines, and then enemy soldiers in larger and more elaborate areas and for this the graphics are more than adequate. Half-Life's prize assets, in its sense of pacing, location and level design, remain intact and improved upon. Enemy AI also remains formidable, especially for the soldiers, and combat is still ferocious and fun without getting bogged down with modern frippery like cover systems and regenerating health. If you enjoyed Black Mesa's original release in 2012, you'll still enjoy the Black Mesa parts of this game and possibly even moreso. Some changes for the 1.0 release include slimming down several levels and making them shorter and leaner to improve the game's ferocious pacing, simplifying a few puzzles and generally making the experience tighter.

And then we get to Xen.

Xen has always been a millstone around Half-Life's neck. After fighting alien monsters in familiar surroundings (ordinary office rooms, industrial locations, warehouses), we take the fight to the alien homeworld, a collection of floating asteroids and moons linked by teleporters or long-range jumps. It worked okay in 1998 but some of the platforming jump puzzles were tedious and the unfamiliar visuals made finding the path forward a chore. The main thing in its favour was that it was short: from beginning to end Xen took maybe an hour to an hour and a half to get through, considerably less than the 10+ hours spent in Black Mesa itself.

Black Mesa's Xen has been radically overhauled. It looks graphically gorgeous, with constant, amazing vistas that look like they've jumped off a 1970s prog rock album cover. The soundtrack in this part of the game is also fantastic, with ethereal, haunting tunes. It's all very moody.

It's also now very long. Xen is more than twice as long as its 1998 incarnation and maybe closer to three times. The first half of Xen has been improved a lot with pacing and more focus on traversing larger environments through logical puzzles and ferocious combat, with a lot of the detailed platforming from the original release thrown out. There's even some new enemies, such as underwater barnacles that pull you down rather than up, and infant houndeyes which now explode rather than erupting sonic blasts at you. This part of the game is great fun, with a lot of thought that's clearly gone into how to make Xen better from a gameplay perspective whilst retaining its alien landscape and atmosphere. There's a few too many power cable puzzles in this part of the game, but nothing too outrageous.

Unfortunately, things get less impressive when the player encounters the Gonarch. The infamous pendulous mobile testicle monster was a horrific revelation in the original game, but a bit of a chore to fight. For some reason, the Gonarch boss fight has now been increased in length several times over, with Freeman playing cat-and-mouse with the creature through an underground cave network full of flaming gas traps and not-always-clear paths forward. Even worse, the Gonarch is completely indestructible until you finally corner it in its lair, but no information is relayed to the player to confirm this, meaning a lot of ammo is wasted before you can finally kill the damn thing.

The section after the Gonarch is then mind-numbingly tedious. The sumptuous vistas disappear and Freeman instead spends what feels like ages clambering through narrow pipes connecting power cables together and trying to find the path forward, which becomes progressively more laborious (especially when the path forward is sometimes just blindly hurling yourself onto a conveyor belt or standing on the edge of a bit of scenery that looks more like a bug than a clear path forward). The only good point in this section is a sequence where Freeman apparently (it's a bit unclear) frees the vortigaunts from slavery, which much better sets up the events of Half-Life 2.

Things rally at the last hurdle: the battle against the Nihilanth is much more involved, with Freeman ascending on a huge lift through different environments home to various aliens that he must fend off before proceeding. The ferocious combat in this section makes up for the final boss fight, which was perfunctory in the first game and, though better in Black Mesa, still a bit too straightforward.

The addition of Xen makes Black Mesa functionally complete, but it also feels like it could have done with a lot more polishing and cutting. The sequence is far too overlong and doesn't add much to the game. In fact, condensing the time between the Gonarch and the Nihilanth (which in the original game were much less than half an hour apart) back to the original and streamlining out some of the more tedious forcefield and power supply puzzles is all that's needed to bring the game to perfection. Crowbar Collective have promised a Black Mesa 1.5 at some point which will bring all the graphics up to a much higher quality and iron out the problems, and I hope they considering making big changes to Xen to make it more worthwhile. I do wonder if they rushed Black Mesa 1.0 out of the door to tie in with the release of Half-Life: Alyx (a VR interquel set between Half-Life 1 and 2), which is due in a few days.

As it stands, Black Mesa 1.0 (****½, falling to *** for the final section after the Gonarch fight) is the best modern way of experiencing Half-Life, with most of the game now a crisp, fast-paced, action-packed shooter which still stands head and toes above the competition. I played Halo: Reach, reportedly the best game in that series, a few weeks ago and Black Mesa is superior on every front, from enemy AI and weapons loadout to level design and pacing. The first part of the Xen section is also breathtakingly impressive and enjoyable to play. The second half is much more of a chore, and drags down the game's overall quality. This is something that hopefully will be fixed in forthcoming revisions. The game is available now via Steam.

Valve to release third full HALF-LIFE game in March 2020 (but not the one you want)

In highly unexpected news (well, before rumours started circulating a week ago), Valve have confirmed that they have all but completed work on a third full-length video game in the Half-Life series and will be releasing it in March. In less welcome news, the new game is not the long-awaited Half-Life 3 but will instead be an interquel, set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and will only be available as a VR title.

Half-Life: Alyx is approximately the same length as Half-Life 2 (about 12-13 hours) and is a first-person shooter where the player controls Alyx Vance, a key supporting character from Half-Life 2 and its expansions, Episode One and Episode Two. The game is set in City 17, an Eastern European metropolis now under occupation by the alien Combine, with many of the alien structures seen in the previous games (including the massive Citadel) still under construction. The game sees the founding of the resistance group which plays a larger role in the other games in the series.

Half-Life (1998) and Half-Life 2 (2004) are two of the biggest-selling video games of all time, regarded as iconic titles for pushing first-person and physics technology forward and featuring atmospheric, organically-told stories that mixed action and horror. However, Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007) ended on a massive cliffhanger which has not been resolved in the twelve years since release, with Valve occasionally insisting they were working on a Half-Life 3 but never confirming a release date. Valve have made two spin-off games set in the same universe, Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011), but nothing since then. Several key creative personnel from the Half-Life franchise have left the company since then, one of them publicising a story document confirming where a third game might have gone, story-wise.

Half-Life: Alyx will be available exclusively as a VR game on PC, via Oculus Rift or any other compatible VR technology. The game will not be available to play on standard hardware, although Valve have acknowledged that modders will probably try to make it work somehow. Valve are keen to push VR technology to the masses and feel it has stalled over the last year or two after a promising start, so have gone all-out to make the first VR game which is a full-length title and makes every possible use of the technology. However, according to some hardware surveys only 2-3 million people worldwide have VR hardware in the home, which severely limits the potential customer base for the game.

More interestingly, though, the game means that a huge number of assets from Half-Life 2 and its expansions have been upgraded and ported to the Source 2 Engine, making a remastered version of Half-Life 2 now much more likely and possible. Some commentators have also pointed out that development of Half-Life: Alyx must have cost tens of millions of dollars and it would be insane even for Valve to do that with little or no chance of making that back.

Half-Life: Alyx might be an interesting and fascinating demonstration of what VR can really do, but it may be much more important in showing that Valve actually do want to continue making stories in the Half-Life universe and now have the technology and commitment to doing so.

Epic vs. Valve: The Battle for PC Gaming

For the past fifteen years, the PC gaming market has been dominated by one retailer above all others: Steam. An online sales, downloading and gaming service, Steam is run by Valve Corporation and has utterly dominated the market since launch, fending off several competitors along the way. But that has now changed, with Fortnite developers Epic Games launching a rival service that means to do nothing less than smash Valve's monopoly forever.

The Epic Store launcher.

Steam was launched in late 2003 as a system for updating Valve's online games, titles like Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress Classic, keeping players all in sync with one another and allowing new maps and patches to be rolled out quickly and efficiently. In 2004 the service transitioned to a store, selling new games. It was mostly ignored until the November 2004 release of Half-Life 2, arguably the most eagerly-anticipated video game in history up until that time. It was the sequel to Half-Life, the 1998 game that rewrote the first person shooter rulebook and established Valve as a force to be reckoned with in the PC gaming scene.

Half-Life 2 launched with the required use of Steam. You could buy Half-Life 2 in stores, but to install it you had to also install Steam and sign up to the online service. In 2004, when not every gamer was online and certainly most gamers did not expect to have to sign up to an online service to play a single-player-only game (Half-Life 2's multiplayer mode wasn't patched in until months later), this idea was hugely controversial. Gaming communities rebelled, some gamers tried to report Valve for breaches of the law (no such claim was ever upheld) and so on. But Half-Life 2 was anticipated in a manner almost no other game in history was, and the sheer juggernaut force of the game's hype and its overwhelmingly positive critical reception saw gamers swallow their pride and buy the game in their millions. In many cases, they used the service to buy and download the game at midnight on release day, and were playing hours before their friends could get to the shops to pick up their copies.

After Half-Life 2 showed that online PC sales were viable, other publishers signed up to the service and more and more games appeared there. Valve had been either lucky or prescient, as 2004 arguably marked the last highwater for PC gaming in the 2000s. The 2005 release of the X-Box 360, followed a few months later by the release of the PlayStation 3, saw a huge crash in PC gaming sales. Within just a couple of years, the number of big titles being developed for PC dropped significantly. 2007-08 was arguably the nadir of PC gaming history, with few big titles coming out, almost no PC exclusives doing well (The Witcher, from CDProjket, being an honourable exception) and the platform being almost dead on its feet.

Remarkably, though, Steam had continued to grow in popularity and success. Valve jumped on the rise of indie gaming, adding lots of popular, low-budget titles to the platform. Valve also pushed their big sales hard. They won back support from big publishers through various tactics designed to promote sales. Rockstar Games had released the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV after a long delay, but noted that although initial sales had not been as high as the console versions, the "long tail" of the game was significant, with sales picking up years later every time the game was put in a sale, making it far more profitable in the long run on the PC platform. By the start of the 2010s the platform had recovered most of its losses, bolstered by the arrival of Kickstarter as a platform for funding niche, mid-tier games. By the end of 2018, Steam had 150 million accounts (30 million more than Netflix) and dominated the PC gaming market with a share of between 18 and 20% (but 75% of the online market). According to some reports, Microsoft has offered over $20 billion to buy the service and the company behind it outright, but Valve's owner, Gabe Newell (who worked for Microsoft in the 1990s, quitting to co-found Valve), had rejected such overtures out of hand.

Understandably, other services have tried to compete with Steam. CDProjekt launched GoG (Good Old Games) as a rival service which focuses on getting older games updated to work on modern hardware. Their main selling point is not using an form of DRM (Digital Rights Management), which they feel hinders the customer experience. Meanwhile, Electronic Arts, UbiSoft and Blizzard-Activision launched rival services to exclusively launch their games, respectively Origin, UPlay and BattleNet (although many UPlay games are also available on Steam). With relatively small game catalogues and niche target audiences, these services have existed alongside Steam, rather than trying to compete directly with it.

This has now changed thanks to a company whose pedigree in PC gaming is even older than Valve's: Epic Games.

Founded in 1991, Epic Games spent the 1990s releasing a large number of low- and mid-budged action games before releasing their first 3D shooter in 1999, Unreal. Unreal was followed by both sequels and the immensely successful multiplayer spinoff series, Unreal Tournament. In 2006 launched a new single-player focused series on console, Gears of War, which was immensely successful. They also made immense amounts of money by licensing their Unreal Engine to other companies and publishers. In 2017 they redeployed the Unreal Engine to make a new, fun and lighthearted co-op shooter called Fortnite: Save the World, and its multiplayer spin-off, Fortnite: Battle Royale. Better known just as Fortnite, the game has become the biggest global success story since Minecraft, with Epic Games making significant profits from the game's downloadable extras and content.

Late last year, Epic Games launched the Epic Store, which they proudly proclaimed was going to take the fight directly to Valve. At first gamers chuckled and moved on: many companies had vowed to do the same thing and all had failed. But then Epic Games started doing something that no other would-be Steam-killer had done before: actively seeking out PC gaming developers and offering them staggering sums of money for a 12-month exclusivity period on PC. In addition, Epic Games offered to take only a 12% cut of the sales of games, as opposed to Valve's huge 30%. Developers, watching profit margins drop steadily over the years due to an inability to keep development costs down and also an inability to raise prices accordingly due to market saturation, started signing up enthusiastically.

The first casualty was Metro: Exodus. The third game in a popular first-person shooter series, following on from Metro 2033 (2010) and Metro: Last Light (2013), Metro: Exodus's Ukrainian developers were offered a huge sum of money for a 12-month exclusivity period. They agreed. Fans of the series and more casual gamers railed angrily against the development, citing it was bad form for a company to wall off a game behind a new service, especially a new service that did not have the ease of use or many of the most basic features of Steam. They were also suspicious of Tencent, a Chinese company accused of spying on customers, which had acquired a 40% stake in Epic in 2012. Despite these complaints, Metro: Exodus sold exceptionally well on release, outselling Metro: Last Light more than two-and-a-half times on launch day.

Last week Epic flexed its muscles by locking in Phoenix Point to an exclusivity period. Phoenix Point is the eagerly-awaited new turn-based tactics game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop and his company Snapshot Games. Using an approach similar to Firaxis's recent XCOM games, the game goes for a more simulated-based approach and has been praised for its gameplay decisions. For a tiny company like Snapshot the deal was apparently "impossible to resist," as the money offered could keep the company going for "years." For fans, the anger was much more palpable this time around and also more readily supported: Phoenix Point had been crowdfunded with the explicit promise that the game would be available on Steam and GoG on release day, and that was now not going to happen. Possibly the most eagerly-awaited PC game of 2019 became reviled overnight, with an absolute flood of refund requests pouring in.

But this has not stopped Epic's onslaught. In the last few days they have announced a blizzard of new acquisitions and deals. Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds, another of the most eagerly-awaited games of 2019, has joined the exclusivity deal (or, more accurately, publisher Take Two signed up for them). Quantic Dream, known for their moody console games with jaw-dropping graphics, were offered a deal so lucrative that they have gone back and dusted down all of their previous games going back to 2010 for release through Epic (comprising Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human). Remedy Entertainment's promising Control has also signed up, along with RTS Industries of Titan and The Sinking City. The full list is extensive and surprising, encompassing many mid-range upcoming PC games, which are the bread and butter of the platform.

This is nothing less than a full-scale assault on Valve's control of the PC gaming business. Whether it can be sustained is unclear, but it represents the biggest challenge to Steam's supremacy in over a decade. Valve will have to respond and in some respects it already has, promising to fix long-standing problems like people gaming the review system and offensive zero-budget, zero-effort games being shovelled onto the platform. The real test, I think, will come when a real AAA big-hitter that should be on Steam goes Epic Store exclusive. Take Two putting some games exclusively on Epic has to be a major concern. It's an open industry secret that Take Two and Rockstar Games are prepping a PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2, 2018's biggest game on console, for release likely in 2020. If they decided to make that game an Epic exclusive, it would be a huge and fundamental blow to Steam's position in the marketplace.

This battle could determine how PC games are bought, sold and played in the 2020s, so is hugely significant. But it may also be futile, as waiting in the wings is Google's Stadia system, which may offer a completely different, more Netflix-esque approach altogether. How this pans out will be very interesting, and no doubt contentious.

Happy 20th Anniversary to HALF-LIFE

"Good morning and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system."

On 19 November 1998, the course of video game history shifted. Half-Life, the first game by a brand new developer called Valve, was released to not just critical acclaim, but blanket critical awe. It changed the conversation over what players could expect from first-person video games in terms of immersion, narration, storytelling and AI. Almost every first-person shooter made in the last twenty years can trace its DNA back to the game.

Rewinding a bit, Valve was founded by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, former developers at Microsoft who'd cashed out with large bonuses in the mid-1990s and decided to create their own video game development studio. Impressed by games like Doom and the in-development Quake, they believed that 3D, first-person games were future and set about creating their own, assembling a disparate collection of coders, artists and level designers. They drew on the Doom modding scene, recruiting people who'd done great work in level design for the more primitive game engine.

They licenced the Quake engine from id Software and heavily modified it into GoldSrc, a considerably more sophisticated piece of software. Ideas for the actual content of the game fluctuated, and at several points the new team considered making two separate games: Quiver, a fast-paced action game where the player fought monsters; and Prospero, a moody, literate and story-focused game. With insufficient manpower to do both, Prospero was canned and the work folded into the Quiver game design, bringing on board more atmosphere and a stronger focused on narrative into the game. At this point the game was also renamed Half-Life.

When was first publicly shown at game fairs in 1997, gamers and publishers alike were astonished by the game's ambition, graphics and action, but the developers were dissatisfied, feeling they could do better. Astonishingly, at a time when games were frequently still designed, produced and shipped in a year, Valve decided to give the game an additional full twelve months of development time.

It was well worth it. On release, Half-Life was an instant smash hit, receiving critical acclaim and huge sales. Two well-received expansions followed, Opposing Force (1999) and Blue Shift (2001), along with a PlayStation 2 port of the game. Fans hungrily used the game's editor to create their own mods, including Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Gunman Chronicles (all good enough to be released as their own stand-alone products). And, of course, Valve took the lessons and profits from Half-Life to work on two more projects: the video game delivery system Steam, which launched in 2003 (and has been credited with arguably saving PC gaming altogether), and Half-Life 2 (2004), which garnered as much, if not more, critical acclaim as its forebear.

Going back to Half-Life, it's astonishing to remember that it came out only a few years after Doom, with its blocky graphics and awkward controls to look around. Half-Life was slick, intuitive and minimalist. It was a game that knew when to throw down a massive set-piece battle involving tons of aliens and soldiers, and when to isolate the player in a remote part of the Black Mesa facility with limited ammo and health, and absolutely no warning when aliens would attack. The game dished out its storyline and lore with skilful economy, avoiding infodumps and non-interactive cut scenes. By not giving the player-character, Gordon Freeman, a voice, they allowed the player full immersion in the game, able to project whatever personality they wanted onto the character.

The game was also long, taking a good 15 hours or so for a single play-through. Given that the game was really one massive super-level (divided into discrete chapters), it felt longer. You played the whole game in real-time, so when you staggered in the alien Nihilanth's lair, exhausted and determined to finish off the threat, it felt like a tremendously well-earned victory.

The DNA of Half-Life continues through the Call of Duty and Halo franchises, and more directly through the constantly-updated online games Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2. However, it has to be said that the linear, long, story-driven first-person shooter is not in a good place. Bethesda's Wolfenstein series is keeping the flag flying, but it's more the open world, first-person RPG franchises like Deus Ex and Fallout, and semi-open world games like Dishonored and Prey, which seem to be keeping the spirit of Half-Life alive.

As for the Half-Life universe itself, there's been no fresh entry in the core series since Half-Life 2: Episode Two (and its enormous cliffhanger ending) in 2007 and spin-off game Portal 2 in 2011. Valve occasionally pipe up to say the series will continue, but no-one really believes them any more.

A pity, but it should not detract from the fact that Half-Life was a terrific work of art and a blisteringly good game which is surprisingly still playable today (particularly via its remake, Black Mesa). Good job, Mr. Freeman.

ETA: As a special bonus, the Black Mesa team have released a trailer for Xen, the second part of their remake of the original Half-Life. It looks spectacular.

Rumour: Microsoft planning a shock acquisition of Electronic Arts or Valve

Polygon has broken a story that Microsoft is planning a shock acquisition of a major gaming company in an attempt to revive its flagging fortunes.

As of the end of 2017, Sony had shipped 76 million PlayStation 4 consoles, comfortably outstripping Microsoft's X-Box One. Although Microsoft have refused to publish sales figures, industry estimates have put the number of X-Box Ones sold at around 30 million, considerably less than half of the PS4 figures. Microsoft is also facing challenges in the business space - open-source alternatives are making its expensive Office suite of software look unappealing - and in its bread-and-butter desktop business, especially with many casual users preferring to use smartphones and Apple and Android tablets rather than traditional, Windows-powered PCs.

Microsoft certainly aren't hurting too badly - their global operating revenue in 2017 was $89 billion compared to Sony's $69 billion - but clearly they have decided that drastic action is required to stop the rot and regain the initiative in the gaming space. The primary reason for X-Box One's poorer showing, despite (on paper) superior hardware, has been pinned on the format's lack of compelling format-exclusive titles compared to the PS4.

According to reports, Microsoft are eyeing two possible plans. The more aggressive and larger-scaled would be buying Electronic Arts, the world's second-largest video game publisher. EA was the largest for many years, but has recently fallen behind Activision-Blizzard. A purchase of EA, along with its Origin game-delivery service and myriad franchises (ranging from the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series to Titanfall, Battlefield, The Sims and Star Wars titles), would signal a major return by Microsoft to the publishing field. It would give them control over a swathe of major games, respected studios (such as BioWare and DICE) and, in Origin, a content-delivery system far superior to Microsoft's poor Windows 10 Store. It would also mean that all EA titles going forward would be X-Box One exclusive on console (although most titles would likely continue to be released on PC). This would be a particularly powerful move given the popularity of EA Sports, particularly the world-conquering FIFA football franchise of games.

Although EA is a behemoth in game publishing, it's less than half the size of Microsoft with a combined value of around $35 billion, making an acquisition possible, if not without challenges.

The second, if more remote, possibility is that Microsoft could purchase Valve, the owners of the incredibly popular Steam game delivery system on PC. Valve also have fingers in the VR space through the HTC Vive headset, home-streaming through Steamlink and indie gaming developing via Steam Early Access. Valve also own a number of high-profile (but all now long-dormant) video game franchises including Portal, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and, of course, Half-Life. Valve are worth about half of EA, but a purchase is much more difficult as Valve are a fully privately-owned company, meaning Microsoft can't buy out the company publicly as they could with EA. They would have to try to convince Valve's owner, Gabe Newell, to sell the company, which given Newell's history (he once worked for Microsoft and quit in the early 1990s to found Valve) may be unlikely.

Both plans are bold. Buying EA would position Microsoft much more powerfully in the console gaming space, although it may also backfire: a franchise like FIFA going X-Box exclusive might just drive sales of the rival Pro Evolution Soccer series on PS4 instead, and of EA's other game franchises only arguably the Star Wars titles will really drive sales. Given that Disney and EA's Star Wars deal expires in a few years and Disney will likely want their games released on as many formats as possible, it might that this move would simply lose them this licence in the long term.

Buying Valve would not mean much for the console field, but it would give Microsoft near-total control of the PC gaming market in one fell swoop, with a foothold in VR development as well. This approach may be more appealing to those in Microsoft who want to double down on the areas where Microsoft is strong - the home PC market - rather than trying to play catch-up on Sony's now-insurmountable lead.

It'll be interesting to see if either of these rumours is true, and if so how it will affect video games going forwards.

HALF-LIFE writer reveals where the story would have gone in Episode 3

Marc Laidlaw, the writer of Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and Episode One and Two of the same franchise, has (cheekily) revealed where the story would have gone in the Episode Three that Valve were planning in 2007.

His original blog entry "creatively" reinterprets some of the names and concepts in the Half-Life franchise to (mildly) disguise what he is saying. However, I have penetrated his confusing veil and revealed the true story as follows:

Dearest Player,

I hope this letter finds you well. I can hear your complaint already, “Gordon Freeman, we have not heard from you in ages!” Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the greatest of them being I’ve been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach you by the usual means. This was the case until eighteen months ago, when I experienced a critical change in my circumstances, and was redeposited on these shores. In the time since, I have been able to think occasionally about how best to describe the intervening years, my years of silence. I do first apologize for the wait, and that done, hasten to finally explain (albeit briefly, quickly, and in very little detail) events following those described in my previous letter (referred to herewith as Episode 2).

To begin with, as you may recall from the closing paragraphs of my previous missive, the death of Eli Vance shook us all. The Resistance team was traumatized, unable to be sure how much of our plan might be compromised, and whether it made any sense to go on at all as we had intended. And yet, once Eli had been buried, we found the strength and courage to regroup. It was the strong belief of her brave daughter, Alyx Vance, that we should continue on as her father had wished. We had the Arctic coordinates, transmitted by Eli’s long-time assistant, Dr. Judith Mossman, which we believed to mark the location of the lost luxury liner Borealis. Eli had felt strongly that the Borealis should be destroyed rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the Combine. Others on our team disagreed, believing that the Borealis might hold the secret to the revolution’s success. Either way, the arguments were moot until we found the vessel. Therefore, immediately after the service for Dr. Vance, Alyx and I boarded a seaplane and set off for the Arctic; a much larger support team, mainly militia, was to follow by separate transport.

It is still unclear to me exactly what brought down our little aircraft. The following hours spent traversing the frigid waste in a blizzard are also a jumbled blur, ill-remembered and poorly defined. The next thing I clearly recall is our final approach to the coordinates Dr. Mossman has provided, and where we expected to find the Borealis. What we found instead was a complex fortified installation, showing all the hallmarks of sinister Combine technology. It surrounded a large open field of ice. Of the Borealis itself there was no sign…or not at first. But as we stealthily infiltrated the Combine installation, we noticed a recurrent, strangely coherent auroral effect–as of a vast hologram fading in and out of view. This bizarre phenomenon initially seemed an effect caused by an immense Combine lensing system, Alyx and I soon realized that what we were actually seeing was the luxury liner Borealis itself, phasing in and out of existence at the focus of the Combine devices. The aliens had erected their compound to study and seize the ship whenever it materialized. What Dr. Mossman had provided were not coordinates for where the sub was located, but instead for where it was predicted to arrive. The liner was oscillating in and out of our reality, its pulses were gradually steadying, but there was no guarantee it would settle into place for long–or at all. We determined that we must put ourselves into position to board it at the instant it became completely physical.

At this point we were briefly detained–not captured by the Combine, as we feared at first, but by minions of our former nemesis, the conniving and duplicitous Wallace Breen. Dr. Breen was not as we had last seen him –which is to say, he was not dead. At some point, the Combine had saved out an earlier version of his consciousness, and upon his physical demise, they had imprinted the back-up personality into a biological blank resembling an enormous slug. The Breen-Slug, despite occupying a position of relative power in the Combine hierarchy, seemed nervous and frightened of me in particular. Wallace did not know how his previous incarnation, the original Dr. Breen, had died. He knew only that I was responsible. Therefore, the slug treated us with great caution. Still, he soon confessed (never able to keep quiet for long) that he was himself a prisoner of the Combine. He took no pleasure from his current grotesque existence, and pleaded with us to end his life. Alyx believed that a quick death was more than Wallace Breen deserved, but for my part, I felt a modicum of pity and compassion. Out of Alyx’s sight, I might have done something to hasten the slug’s demise before we proceeded.

Not far from where we had been detained by Dr. Breen, we found Judith Mossman being held in a Combine interrogation cell. Things were tense between Judith and Alyx, as might be imagined. Alyx blamed Judith for her father’s death…news of which, Judith was devastated to hear for the first time. Judith tried to convince Alyx that she had been a double agent serving the Resistance all along, doing only what Eli had asked of her, even though she knew it meant she risked being seen by her peers–by all of us–as a traitor. I was convinced; Alyx less so. But from a pragmatic point of view, we depended on Dr. Mossman; for along with the Borealis coordinates, she possessed resonance keys which would be necessary to bring the liner fully into our plane of existence.

We skirmished with Combine soldiers protecting a Combine research post, then Dr. Mossman attuned the Borealis to precisely the frequencies needed to bring it into (brief) coherence. In the short time available to us, we scrambled aboard the ship, with an unknown number of Combine agents close behind. The ship cohered for only a short time, and then its oscillations resumed. It was too late for our own military support, which arrived and joined the Combine forces in battle just as we rebounded between universes, once again unmoored.

What happened next is even harder to explain. Alyx Vance, Dr. Mossman and myself sought control of the ship–its power source, its control room, its navigation center. The liner’s history proved nonlinear. Years before, during the Combine invasion, various members of an earlier science team, working in the hull of a dry-docked liner situated at the Tocsin Island Research Base in Lake Huron, had assembled what they called the Bootstrap Device. If it worked as intended, it would emit a field large enough to surround the ship. This field would then itself travel instantaneously to any chosen destination without having to cover the intervening space. There was no need for entry or exit portals, or any other devices; it was entirely self-contained. Unfortunately, the device had never been tested. As the Combine pushed Earth into the Seven Hour War, the aliens seized control of our most important research facilities. The staff of the Borealis, with no other wish than to keep the ship out of Combine hands, acted in desperation. The switched on the field and flung the Borealis toward the most distant destination they could target: the Arctic. What they did not realize was that the Bootstrap Device travelled in time as well as space. Nor was it limited to one time or one location. The Borealis, and the moment of its activation, were stretched across space and time, between the nearly forgotten Lake Huron of the Seven Hour War and the present-day Arctic; it was pulled taut as an elastic band, vibrating, except where at certain points along its length one could find still points, like the harmonic spots along a vibrating guitar string. One of these harmonics was where we boarded, but the string ran forward and back, in both time and space, and we were soon pulled in every direction ourselves.

Time grew confused. Looking from the bridge, we could see the drydocks of Tocsin Island at the moment of teleportation, just as the Combine forces closed in from land, sea and air. At the same time, we could see the Arctic wastelands, where our friends were fighting to make their way to the protean Borealis; and in addition, glimpses of other worlds, somewhere in the future perhaps, or even in the past. Alyx grew convinced we were seeing one of the Combine’s central staging areas for invading other worlds–such as our own. We meanwhile fought a running battle throughout the ship, pursued by Combine forces. We struggled to understand our situation, and to agree on our course of action. Could we alter the course of the Borealis? Should we run it aground in the Antarctic, giving our peers the chance to study it? Should we destroy it with all hands aboard, our own included? It was impossible to hold a coherent thought, given the baffling and paradoxical timeloops, which passed through the ship like bubbles. I felt I was going mad, that we all were, confronting myriad versions of ourselves, in that ship that was half ghost-ship, half nightmare funhouse.

What it came down to, at last, was a choice. Judith Mossman argued, reasonably, that we should save the Borealis and deliver it to the resistance, that our intelligent peers might study and harness its power. But Alyx reminded me that she had sworn she would honour his mother’s demand that we destroy the ship. She hatched a plan to set the Borealis to self-destruct, while riding it into the heart of the Combine’s invasion nexus. Judith and Alyx argued. Judith overpowered Alyx and secured the Borealis command area, preparing to shut off the Bootstrap Device and settle the ship on the ice. Then I heard a shot, and Judith fell. Alyx had decided for all of us, or her weapon had. With Dr. Mossman dead, we were committed to the suicide plunge. Grimly, Alyx and I armed the Borealis, creating a time-travelling missile, and steered it for the heart of the Combine’s command center.

At this point, as you will no doubt be unsurprised to hear, a Certain Sinister Figure appeared, in the form of that sneering trickster, the G-Man.  For once he appeared not to me, but to Alyx Vance. Alyx had not seen the cryptical schoolmarm since childhood, but she recognized him instantly. “Come along with me now, we’ve places to do and things to be,” said G-Man, and Alyx acquiesced. She followed the strange grey man out of the Borealis, out of our reality. For me, there was no convenient door held open; only a snicker and a sideways glance. I was left alone, riding the weaponized luxury liner into the heart of a Combine world. An immense light blazed. I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere. The vastness of the Combine’s power, the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness. I saw everything. Mainly I saw how the Borealis, our most powerful weapon, would register as less than a fizzling matchhead as it blew itself apart. And what remained of me would be even less than that.

Just then, as you have surely already foreseen, the Vortigaunts parted their own checkered curtains of reality, reached in as they had on prior occasions, plucked me out, and set me aside. I barely got to see the fireworks begin.

And here we are. I spoke of my return to this shore. It has been a circuitous path to lands I once knew, and surprising to see how much the terrain has changed. Enough time has passed that few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we hoped to accomplish. At this point, the resistance will have failed or succeeded, no thanks to me. Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Except no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final Episode.

Half-Life 2: Episode 3 was effectively cancelled this decade in favour of a full Half-Life 3, although Valve has shown little appetite in continuing the series. Instead, fans have revisited the series through Black Mesa, a superb remake of Half-Life with modern technology, and I daresay more than a few modders will be reading this outline, looking at their copy of the Source Engine code and saying, "Right..."