This story originally appeared in issue 123 of games™, which featured a Valve special, including an investigation into the company’s rumoured Steam console.
“When we announce Half-Life 3 it won’t be on a T-shirt or a forum or some obscure internet game,” chuckles Chet Faliszek. “We’ll do it in our own way.” Faliszek is wrong to some degree. Valve did announce Half-Life 3, or rather what it was initially intended to be Half-Life 2: Episode Three. Due for release Christmas 2007, Valve has remained vigilant in its silence over the several years since the announcement as gamers wait impatiently for a conclusion to Episode Two’s cliffhanger ending.
Talking to Portal co-creator Kim Swift, we ask if she knows why Half-Life 2: Episode Three hasn’t materialised, and her answer is teasing. “Yes, in fact I do, but I’m not going to tell you anything. It’s definitely not my place to say and you should probably ask Valve that one.”
So that’s exactly what we did…
“I think there are still a lot of interesting ideas in terms of crossover that we know we want to explore,” says Jeep Barnett, one of the DigiPen alumni whose project Narbacular Drop earned him a place at Valve. “The Half-Life universe is so deep and so involved and kind of puzzling – there’s a lot of elements that tie together in unusual ways. Portal is just a piece of that, which provides interesting angles of that same universe. But there are going to be more crossovers.”
Portal 2 contained many cryptic clues relating to Half-Life 3’s narrative. The most significant discovery within is the ship Borealis, lying dormant at the very bottom of Aperture Laboratories during the second half of the game’s single-player campaign. The ship is a crucial narrative thread, spoken of in Half-Life 2: Episode Two as being located in the arctic and holding a very important piece of technology that will save the world – that’ll be the portal gun, we suppose.
“There are a lot of things that we have planned,” Barnett alludes. “There are definitely things we plan ahead but we change things in reaction to the new ideas for the games that we come up with, as well as things like what the community fully understands and the things that they are still puzzling about.”
Valve has stated in the past that Gordon Freeman will not be heading back to City 17 in the next installment; instead the likely location will be the Arctic, where he and Alyx go on the search for the aforementioned Borealis. And what of Alyx – Gordon’s ever-faithful companion? Well, she may play an even more integral part in the next installment than expected, with sources claiming a cooperative strand to the single-player, in a similar vein to Portal 2’s co-op campaign, will feature heavily.
Speculation has reached supernova levels recently, with T-shirts, fake ARGs, hidden files and even a joke in May’s Portal 2 DLC all pointing toward an imminent announcement. With the universe of two of Valve’s biggest franchises so closely knitted together, the possibilities of where the next chapter will take us are mind-boggling.
Rumours today suggest that Half-Life 3 is being shown at Gamescom in Germany. See NowGamer.com for further details.
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