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Half-Life 2 artwork of Gordon Freeman and Alyx

Half-Life 2 – news just in, there’s still no new Half-Life game (Valve)

On its 20th anniversary, Valve has released a documentary explaining their handling of the franchise and why Episode Three was cancelled.

Back in 2004, Half-Life 2 was the most celebrated video game of its time. But thanks to being primarily a PC-only title, and still having no proper sequel, its fame has faded over the years.

Developer Valve did make an effort to celebrate its 20th anniversary on Saturday, November 16 though, with a two hour long documentary exploring the making of the game, its impact, and the reason why its plans for episodic content stopped suddenly after Half-Life 2: Episode Two in 2007.

It seems it was all Valve co-founder Gabe Newell’s fault, as he was worried that there was no point in making the new episode if it was only moving the story along and not introducing any new gameplay.

‘You can’t get lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving the story forward’,’ says Newell in the documentary. ‘That’s copping out of your obligation to gamers. Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next, you know… we could’ve shipped it, it wouldn’t have been that hard. The failure, my personal failure was being stumped. I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode Three was pushing anything forward.’

The documentary features new, never before seen footage from the partially completed Episode Three, including an ice gun that allowed you to create barriers and ice ramps for you to run along, ‘like a Silver Surfer mode.’ Although we think they meant to say Iceman and other ice-based superheroes who use similar techniques.

There also a ‘hoppy blob’ enemy that would’ve used the gel tech from Portal 2 to suck up smaller enemies and move them through grates.

Half-Life 2: Episode Two was the last non-VR entry in the series (Valve)

It sounds like there were plenty of new gameplay ideas but at the end of the day it just doesn’t seem like Valve had any enthusiasm for another episode and the real reason it never happened is simply that everyone went on to work on Left 4 Dead and its sequel instead.

‘It was worth it. I mean, Left 4 Dead came out great. But it took long enough, and this is the tragic and almost comical thing about it… it took long enough that by the time we considered going back to Episode Three, the argument was made like, well, we missed it. It’s too late now,’ says Half-Life developer David Speyre.

‘We really need to make a new engine to continue the Half-Life series. Now, in hindsight, that seems so wrong. We could have definitely gone back and spent two years to make Episode Three.’

At the time, many wondered why Valve were releasing episodic content at all, rather than just working on a normal sequel. The concept of episodic releases was only very …read more

Source:: Metro

      

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