Gabe Newell says Half-Life 2: Episode 3 didn’t happen because he was ‘stumped’

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Unsurprisingly, yesterday’s large Half-Life release wasn’t the sequel to Half-Life 2 or adjacent the 3rd Half-Life 2: Episode entry, but a 20th-anniversary update to Valve’s legendary 2004 game. And fixed what workplace co-founder Gabe Newell has to accidental connected the taxable successful a 2-hour documentary that the institution released successful tandem with the update, it seems little apt than ever that we’ll beryllium seeing either follow-up anytime soon.

Newell explains what helium calls his “personal failure” near the end of the video:

You can’t get lazy and say, “oh, we’re moving the communicative forward.” That’s copping retired of your obligatiion to gamers, right? Yes, of people they emotion the story. They emotion many, galore aspects of it. But benignant of saying that your crushed to bash it is due to the fact that radical privation to cognize what happens next... you know, we could’ve shipped it, like, it wouldn’t person been that hard. You know, the nonaccomplishment was — my idiosyncratic nonaccomplishment was being stumped. Like, I couldn’t fig retired wherefore doing Episode 3 was pushing thing forward.

That’s not to accidental the institution didn’t try. One thought for Episode 3 included an “Ice Gun” that Engineer David Speyrer says successful the documentary would’ve fto players spray “amorphous shapes” that could service arsenic barriers, platforms, oregon adjacent “Silver Surfer mode” paths that they would sprout successful beforehand of themselves to transverse gaps. Speyrer besides talks astir “blob” enemies that could determination done grates oregon divided into smaller “head-crabby things.”

But Speyrer and different Valve employees featured successful the video echo Newell’s sentiment that they conscionable couldn’t travel up with ideas that seemed worthy a caller Half-Life game. One of its level designers said thing akin successful a 2020 IGN interview. He besides blamed “scope creep” — the inclination of a task to dilatory turn beyond its archetypal program — and the institution wanting to get going connected processing the Source 2 motor that drives VR prequel Half-Life: Alyx.

“Newell sees Half-Life 2 as an engine, a platform, oregon astatine champion a full manufacture unto itself,” gaming writer Geoff Keighley, who Newell once gave a cardinal card for Valve’s studios and told to “do immoderate you want,” wrote for Gamespot in 2016. Creative blocks aside, possibly Valve conscionable has excessively galore bigger food to fry.

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