The latest rumors suggest that Valve is already working on Half Life 3 but only 10 people are working on it at the moment. Fans already gave up any hope of an upcoming Half Life installment but we witnessed a lot of miracles this year.
With The Last Guardian, Final Fantasy VII remake, and Shenmue III being revealed at E3 this year, Half Life fans can surely expect something a miracle and the ultimate release of this title. However, you need to keep in mind that Valve is a very different company from the makers of all these long-awaited titles and YouTube channel ‘The Know’ reports that although the script and gaming events in Half Life 3 are complete, it hasn’t achieved full-production yet.
According to the channel and their ‘alleged sources’, around 10 people are currently working on it but overall, Valve Management Team doesn’t have any interest in releasing this title anytime soon. At the same time, rumors have surfaced that Valve might release a VR involved Half Life 3.
Rumors suggest that the team was quite big in 2009 but most of the members got assigned to other projects, especially after Valve noticed gamer reaction and response to Mass Effect 3 ending. It seems like Valve was worried about a negative fan reaction and they didn’t think it was worth the trouble of making another Half Life game.
However, you cannot ignore the fact that The Know has been known to break some successful stories like Dark Souls III and Silent Hills. Another fact that increases chances of a Half Life release is that Valve doesn’t need any extra money to develop it.
They are already earning loads from games like Team Fortress 2 and the massively-popular Dota 2. In the meantime, Marc Laidlaw, the writer for all the Half Life games so far, implicitly declared that the story is complete but he denied all the other rumors.
In the meantime, Laidlaw responded to Reddit comments and declared that The Know is probably trolling. Meanwhile, Laidlaw declared that the Half-Life story cannot exist beyond the game. According to him, “The story is created through the process of trying to figure out how to best use the features of the engine within the interesting set of constraints it poses”.
He declared that the story is a part of the game and it cannot exist independently as a separate script. The story can’t be simply handed out to game designers and somehow expected to be made interesting through combat and puzzles. In spite of disheartening comments from Laidlaw, keep in mind that this is the internet and all his comments could be unoriginal.
Laidlaw responded to a fan e-mail and declared that he can’t comment on Valve’s internal processes. However, according to him, someone is definitely ‘trolling’. He further reported that various anonymous sources have been declaring that they have information on release and development, ever since the Half Life 1 delay in 1997.
He further mentioned from his experience that Valve will never be a company that is intimidated by what could arise out of gamer disappointment. He addressed the latest Mass Effect 3 rumors and considered it to ‘be a bridge too far for me the first time I heard it’.
He admitted that harassment in the gaming industry has reached menacing levels but he would never even remotely consider that a huge developer like Valve will be bullied into withholding the release of a tremendously-anticipated title like Half Life 3.