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?
What are your thoughts!
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.
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.
I can’t think of a game that Valve has released just to make money except for Artifact which totally flopped.
From what I understand, Valve has a non-hierarchical internal personnel structure and projects are started because someone has an idea that other people at the company like and want to work on.
Half-Life 3 won’t get traction inside Valve unless it has something to push the envelope like the other main-line games had. Half-Life had unrivaled first person storytelling. Half-Life 2 has unrivaled physics to play with. Half-Life Alyx had an interactive environment unlike anything else that exists even still. My money says if Valve can’t think of something gameplay-wise that’s as enticing right now as any of the previous games had when they were released, they don’t care that the story is still on a cliffhanger.
Like Gaben has also said, if they did release it it probably wouldn’t live up to all the impossible expectations.
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
… 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:
- CS 2, 2023
- HL:Alyx, 2020
- DOTA: Underlords 2020
- Artifact (RIP) 2018
- DOTA 2 2013
If Valve does ever make HL3, it’s going to have to be ground breaking. Every Half Life game redefines what gaming is capable of. Eg HL: Alyx was an insane demonstration of what VR can do. I do think it’ll happen eventually, and may even partially be in development right now. But I don’t think we’ll hear anything about it for a very long time.
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.
