As most of you know, HL3 is pretty much the most popular “vaporware” game out there. Something always rumored and in development, but never heard again after a certain point.
What I don’t understand is why Gabens refusal to expand on the halted development of this game, it would’ve smashed sales absolutely and be the shining example in the modern gaming scene.
It just doesn’t make sense, you’d think a games firm would be smacking it’s lip ready for another full plate of gamers wallets.
Is it because the hype train is dangerous? Does Gaben prefer steam sales more?
The reason no one is making HL3 is because no one wants to, at least not long term.
Idk if you know much about how Valve is structured as a game studio, but it’s a bit atypical. It’s not like Gabe Newell comes in and says “today everybody starts working on HL3”, projects get greenlit and then whichever employees want to work on them are free to do so, and if they decide they’re uninterested, for whatever reason, they can leave the project.
What this means, is that if a project starts to pick up steam (no pun intended) within the company, more and more people join in, and this creates a passionate team. Various Half-Life projects since Ep2 have been started, none were finished (until Alyx), not because they were decisively axed for more corporate reasons like many other games, but because for one reason or another, the devs became uninterested or burned out, and went to work on other things they actually wanted to work on.
I think at this point, the only way we’ll ever see HL3 is if a team comes up with something completely groundbreaking and is absolutely dedicated to getting it done. Apparently, there just hasn’t been that winning combo yet. I can’t blame them, because if they half assed any aspect of it, they’d never hear the end of it.
That description of how the teams are structured sounds completely made up. They’d never get a game finished if the company was actually structured that way. I’ve personally never worked for a company that would just let me project hop when I felt like it.
… But you’re right that it is often considered the cause of many of their problems: Valve’s unusual corporate structure causes its problems, report suggests
If you look at the list of games developed by Valve it kinda becomes apparent that the only reason Valve is still around (or operates in such a free-flow manner) is because Steam is so profitable. Their release of notable titles is spotty, at best:
This is the correct answer I think. They’re also not interested in releasing sub-par games, and again like you say they don’t need to release games at all to make money anymore. So if they’re not that interested and haven’t come up with anything conceptually/mechanically that reaches the high bar they’ve set for themselves, it makes more sense to scrap/postpone.
Their reputation is much more important, and they’re just not going to half-ass Half Life 3. It will come out when they feel they have something truly extraordinary, or it won’t come out at all.
They seem to release these games as some sort of tech demo show showcasing what they see is the future of games. One has the set peice structure of game design, two was the physics engine, and Alex was VR. So other then the continuation of the time line, half life Alex pretty much was half life three. Also they know the hype/meme train has been building for so long that nothing will be good enough. Like Duke nukem.
Pretty much this. I’m fairly certain that I read years ago that Gabe just wasn’t interested as well. Which fair enough valve don’t need to develop games now because they have to but because they want to.
Valve these days don’t make things just to make money. They only make things that interest and excite them. HL3 would most likely just end up being more of the same, which isn’t exciting from a designer or developer point of view. They need a hook to get excited about it, and until that happens it’s just not worth the time or effort to do. In the meantime, they’re making plenty of money from Steam sales.
I think HL3 will only happen to push some frontier in gaming, like they did with Alyx and VR. It’s the only safe move with that franchise and all the hype
This is exactly it. Most of their major titles utilize some new tech or groundbreaking feature and whatever they have planned for HL3 is just not ready yet.
I mean at least Source 1 is still being used to develop games (or at least was before Source 2 code and all was released). Valve made a game engine so tough and versatile you can make it do anything you want.
GMod took that engine, and has done absolutely wild things with it. Hell, even just the modders for Half-Life have done crazy things with it, like make it into an isometric RTS game with Lambda Wars.
Half Life was always about pushing the boundaries of gaming. The first Half Life with their combination of story telling in a 3D shooter environment was absolutely at the sharp end of the field at that time. If you’ve seen the Black Mesa documentary you’ll know why HL2 was such a hit and how it was revolutionary at that time. After that they did some DLC, but Valve wasn’t happy with what they were doing. It wasn’t groundbreaking, it was just creating content for the sake of content. As they didn’t need any more money from creating games, they opted to not create HL3.
It wasn’t till VR became more mainstream they again tried to do something at the sharp end of the field, by creating HL Alyx.
I don’t know what would prompt them to ever make a HL3 if such a thing even exists.
It was, devs just realized they don’t have to break the content up into episodes or actually complete the first part they release, and can call it early access instead.
The real problem is that you can’t create content fast enough to reach the cadence that you’d want with episodic content. Even a lot of TV shows have shifted away from predictable scheduling since Valve tried this experiment (and TV, largely, got better since then too).
We know the answers to this. First, we got Half-Life: Alyx, which is a phenomenal Half-Life game that happens to be a VR game. Slight spoilers, but to say that Half-Life 3 is promised at the end of that game is an understatement.
Second, if you’ve already played Alyx, Keighley put out The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, which has a full timeline of everything they worked on since Portal 2, including cancelled games. One of those games was Half-Life 3. It would have been a game with procedurally generated levels interspersed with static set pieces, which sounds similar to a single player version of that game The Crossing they were working on. If you ask me, that design makes plenty of sense for putting a bow on a series with a time- and space-hopping protagonist in a series that always ends with cliffhangers. It didn’t come together though, so it got cancelled.
Alyx was put together in part because letting all of their employees dictate their own projects was not getting the same results that it used to, so there was a bit more direction with the project than Valve had had in the years prior.
If Valve can’t do something that will push their business and the whole industry forward, they’ll just do some other thing that will.
Doing sequels after sequels will only stagnate the franchise, making Valve lose time. For that, they rely on publishers like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft among others.
My theory is that it already has been released on Steam years ago, but not as a Valve title. It has sold millions of copies in a Humble Bundle, but nobody has ever played it.
Valve isn‘t publicly traded (AFAIK) so they don‘t have to squeeze every last penny if they don‘t want to. And Steam revenue alone can fund anything gabeN wants to do. They don‘t have any ideas for HL3 they‘re satisfied with so they don‘t make it. And I respect that a lot TBH.
I think it’s 100% that steam makes so much money on its own. Valve stopped being a game developer once steam really took off and became the behemoth it is. Valve is in the e-commerce business, period.
I loved Alyx too for what it’s worth but my expectations for the future are dim.
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The reason no one is making HL3 is because no one wants to, at least not long term.
Idk if you know much about how Valve is structured as a game studio, but it’s a bit atypical. It’s not like Gabe Newell comes in and says “today everybody starts working on HL3”, projects get greenlit and then whichever employees want to work on them are free to do so, and if they decide they’re uninterested, for whatever reason, they can leave the project.
What this means, is that if a project starts to pick up steam (no pun intended) within the company, more and more people join in, and this creates a passionate team. Various Half-Life projects since Ep2 have been started, none were finished (until Alyx), not because they were decisively axed for more corporate reasons like many other games, but because for one reason or another, the devs became uninterested or burned out, and went to work on other things they actually wanted to work on.
I think at this point, the only way we’ll ever see HL3 is if a team comes up with something completely groundbreaking and is absolutely dedicated to getting it done. Apparently, there just hasn’t been that winning combo yet. I can’t blame them, because if they half assed any aspect of it, they’d never hear the end of it.
That description of how the teams are structured sounds completely made up. They’d never get a game finished if the company was actually structured that way. I’ve personally never worked for a company that would just let me project hop when I felt like it.
You’d be starting over constantly.
And yet that’s exactly how they operate!
Valve: How going boss-free empowered the games-maker
… But you’re right that it is often considered the cause of many of their problems: Valve’s unusual corporate structure causes its problems, report suggests
If you look at the list of games developed by Valve it kinda becomes apparent that the only reason Valve is still around (or operates in such a free-flow manner) is because Steam is so profitable. Their release of notable titles is spotty, at best:
Valve doesn’t need to make games anymore. Their corporate structure allows for it, but relies on people at the company wanting to work on it.
But if they don’t, it’s not really a problem. The company is doing fine.
I think they just lost interest. They got back to it with Alyx because VR was exciting and new territory to explore.
Don’t worry we have Alyx 2 to look forward to
This is the correct answer I think. They’re also not interested in releasing sub-par games, and again like you say they don’t need to release games at all to make money anymore. So if they’re not that interested and haven’t come up with anything conceptually/mechanically that reaches the high bar they’ve set for themselves, it makes more sense to scrap/postpone.
Their reputation is much more important, and they’re just not going to half-ass Half Life 3. It will come out when they feel they have something truly extraordinary, or it won’t come out at all.
They seem to release these games as some sort of tech demo show showcasing what they see is the future of games. One has the set peice structure of game design, two was the physics engine, and Alex was VR. So other then the continuation of the time line, half life Alex pretty much was half life three. Also they know the hype/meme train has been building for so long that nothing will be good enough. Like Duke nukem.
Pretty much this. I’m fairly certain that I read years ago that Gabe just wasn’t interested as well. Which fair enough valve don’t need to develop games now because they have to but because they want to.
Valve these days don’t make things just to make money. They only make things that interest and excite them. HL3 would most likely just end up being more of the same, which isn’t exciting from a designer or developer point of view. They need a hook to get excited about it, and until that happens it’s just not worth the time or effort to do. In the meantime, they’re making plenty of money from Steam sales.
I think HL3 will only happen to push some frontier in gaming, like they did with Alyx and VR. It’s the only safe move with that franchise and all the hype
This is exactly it. Most of their major titles utilize some new tech or groundbreaking feature and whatever they have planned for HL3 is just not ready yet.
Gabe has always said he’ll make HL3, “when the technology is there”.
No idea what it means, but it seems he at least has a vision for what the game should be.
Alyx used PBR a technology already dated compared to Raytracing and it looks better than most games with Raytracing. We’re there, man.
I mean at least Source 1 is still being used to develop games (or at least was before Source 2 code and all was released). Valve made a game engine so tough and versatile you can make it do anything you want.
GMod took that engine, and has done absolutely wild things with it. Hell, even just the modders for Half-Life have done crazy things with it, like make it into an isometric RTS game with Lambda Wars.
Half Life was always about pushing the boundaries of gaming. The first Half Life with their combination of story telling in a 3D shooter environment was absolutely at the sharp end of the field at that time. If you’ve seen the Black Mesa documentary you’ll know why HL2 was such a hit and how it was revolutionary at that time. After that they did some DLC, but Valve wasn’t happy with what they were doing. It wasn’t groundbreaking, it was just creating content for the sake of content. As they didn’t need any more money from creating games, they opted to not create HL3. It wasn’t till VR became more mainstream they again tried to do something at the sharp end of the field, by creating HL Alyx.
I don’t know what would prompt them to ever make a HL3 if such a thing even exists.
Episodic gaming as a format was the groundbreaking feature. It was supposed to be the future of gaming.
It was, devs just realized they don’t have to break the content up into episodes or actually complete the first part they release, and can call it early access instead.
The real problem is that you can’t create content fast enough to reach the cadence that you’d want with episodic content. Even a lot of TV shows have shifted away from predictable scheduling since Valve tried this experiment (and TV, largely, got better since then too).
I have a theory, they are gonna do an orange box kinda thing with it.
All the threes of every game in one. Plus a much newer engine with minimal restrictions.
It’s a tough one as it’s on such a pedestal now
I think at this point, no one can ever live up to the expectations for the game and Valve is too afraid to fuck it up.
I believe Gaben said this specifically at some point
We know the answers to this. First, we got Half-Life: Alyx, which is a phenomenal Half-Life game that happens to be a VR game. Slight spoilers, but to say that Half-Life 3 is promised at the end of that game is an understatement.
Second, if you’ve already played Alyx, Keighley put out The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, which has a full timeline of everything they worked on since Portal 2, including cancelled games. One of those games was Half-Life 3. It would have been a game with procedurally generated levels interspersed with static set pieces, which sounds similar to a single player version of that game The Crossing they were working on. If you ask me, that design makes plenty of sense for putting a bow on a series with a time- and space-hopping protagonist in a series that always ends with cliffhangers. It didn’t come together though, so it got cancelled.
Alyx was put together in part because letting all of their employees dictate their own projects was not getting the same results that it used to, so there was a bit more direction with the project than Valve had had in the years prior.
If Valve can’t do something that will push their business and the whole industry forward, they’ll just do some other thing that will.
Doing sequels after sequels will only stagnate the franchise, making Valve lose time. For that, they rely on publishers like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft among others.
You mean sequel? Valve doesn’t do “sequels”
Valve can’t count to 3
Valve used to make games, now they make money
And that’s why they can afford investing in VR and in games like HL: Alyx. I enjoyed it very, very much.
My theory is that it already has been released on Steam years ago, but not as a Valve title. It has sold millions of copies in a Humble Bundle, but nobody has ever played it.
Valve isn‘t publicly traded (AFAIK) so they don‘t have to squeeze every last penny if they don‘t want to. And Steam revenue alone can fund anything gabeN wants to do. They don‘t have any ideas for HL3 they‘re satisfied with so they don‘t make it. And I respect that a lot TBH.
I think it’s 100% that steam makes so much money on its own. Valve stopped being a game developer once steam really took off and became the behemoth it is. Valve is in the e-commerce business, period.
I loved Alyx too for what it’s worth but my expectations for the future are dim.