Where on earth is Half-Life 3?

I will literally kill someone in order to play Half Life 3 this decade.

A brief recap, for those of you who don’t understand why a video game would inspire this kind of crazy talk. In 2004 Valve released Half Life 2, their follow up to 1998’s Half Life, which was kind of a big deal in its own right. Half Life 2 was rabidly anticipated, and was hailed as one of the best FPS games ever made. For me, personally, it remains my favorite video game of all time.

Thrusting players into a near future version of Earth which is ruled by a brutal alien force known as the Combine, you’re tasked with sparking a human revolution against the oppressive regime. The plot borrows from 1984. The fabulous art design leans heavily on Cold War era Soviet architecture and propaganda. The game play is, or was, highly innovative, placing heavy emphasis on simulated physics in both puzzles and combat. Nowadays, every game has little breakable boxes and objects you can interact with but before Half Life 2 this kind of play was almost unheard of. Armed with a ‘gravity gun’ which could manipulate any object which wasn’t bolted down, Half Life 2 required smart and aggressive play to defeat the legions of transhuman soldiers and shrieking aliens which stood between you and victory. I could go on, but suffice to say the game was polished to perfection and was an enormous hit.

Valve followed up with the announcement of ‘episodes’, downloadable level packs which would advance the story and allow them to continue the narrative at greater pace, preventing the six year gap which had followed the original Half Life. The memorably titled Half Life 2: Episode 1 was released in 2006, followed by Episode 2 as part of The Orange Box in 2007. So far so good, even if Episode 1 is arguably a little weak. Since then, however, there has been absolutely jack squat.

Now, let me get something straight here. Part of what I like about Valve is that they take their time over projects. There’s no rushing them, they don’t pump out game after game in order to hit that Christmas sweet spot each winter. That’s great, I appreciate that great art can’t be hurried, but it has been five porridge gargling years, Valve, during which time you have released one piece of concept art (http://images.wikia.com/half-life/en/images/5/52/Borealis_Advisors.jpg). If you want to argue for the episodes as expansion packs rather than games in their own right, that makes it a whopping eight years since we’ve seen something genuinely new from the Half Life universe. The idea of the episodes shortening the development time has turned out to be nonsense, and if anything one could argue they allowed Valve to cling to the increasingly dated source engine longer than they could have done. As it stands, Half Life 2: Episode 3, or Half Life 3, whatever you want to call it, doesn’t officially exist.

That’s not to say there aren’t rumors flying about, including this purported leak of concept art: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/109033-Rumor-Leaked-Concept-Art-Hints-at-New-Valve-IP. Now Escapist magazine seem to believe this art points towards a new Valve IP, although I beg to differ. The drawings are clearly science-fiction, so they can’t be for Left 4 Dead or Counter Strike, and we know with benefit of hindsight that they’re nothing to do with Portal 2, which has since been released without wonky faced women in black leotards playing any significant role. There’s nothing to say the art can’t be a new IP, but I feel there’s no reason the characters shown couldn’t fit into Half Life’s surreal, dour universe. I want to believe it’s Half Life 3 art, at any rate.

Allow me to reach my point: I will commit foul murders if I get an assurance that you will release some kind of announcement at E3 this year, Valve. But be warned. If you announce another Left 4 Dead game, or yet more hat expansion packs for Team Fortress 2, it’s you I’m going to be gunning for.

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