In a new two-hour documentary from Valve, current and former members of the company talk openly about the making of Half-life 2 and finally spill the beans about what happened Episode 3, and even gameplay from early prototypes of the canceled game.
On November 15, Valve released a major update for Half-life 2 to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary. The update includes new commentary, quality of life features, Steam Workshop support, and more. But perhaps the most exciting thing to come from this Half-life 2 Celebration is a new two-hour documentary from Valve that details the development of the famous first-person shooter and its sequels. And yes, they talk about that Halflife 2, episode 3the game that never came to be despite millions of players begging Valve to create it.
Here’s the documentary if you haven’t seen it yet:
At the end of the document, after we talked about it EpisodeS 1 And 2countless people who worked on it Half-life 2 and the episodes then started talking about Episode 3. Valve was apparently working on an ice cannon which allowed players to create icy structures, pathways and barricades during battle. Valve was also working on a blob-like monster that could split into multiple parts and pass through vents and fences. This was all very early stuff, though HL2 engineer David Speyrer suggested that they had only been in development for about six months before plans changed.
“Even in Episode 3I still don’t know what that would have been if we had built it, because it wasn’t built,” says series writer Marc Laidlaw.
“That was the feeling of excitement. There’s something I can’t even imagine happening with this team. I wasn’t imposing from the top down, ‘This is what we need to do to tell our very important story,’ you know? It’s like, ‘Oh, we have new features, how can we use them [them]? What kind of story can we do with this now?’”
According to Speyer it is Episode 3 was set in the Arctic – something previously released concept art had confirmed – and he explained that the episode would focus on the missing Borealis ship referenced in both films. Portal And Half-life franchises.
Episode 3 was discontinued after six months of development
After six months of development, Speyrer says so Episode 3 was still a “collection of playable levels in any order” and some story beats. He theorized that after another six months they would have reached a “critical mass of mechanics” and that at that point they could really start putting the game together for release in about a year or two, depending on “how ambitious” it became a team.
Of course that didn’t happen. In the documentary, Half-life Two developers explain that they ran out of things to do with the tools and features they had developed. At one point they referenced the canceled Ravenholm episode of Arkane, and how the team struggled to do new and fun things with the Half-life 2 toolbox and motorbike.
“Arkane was building the Ravenholm game and even they were having trouble making cool new stuff with this toolset, and if those guys can’t come up with a bunch of cool stuff related to this, I think we’re running out of fuel have more, Laidlaw said.
So everyone at Valve focused on finishing Left 4 dead and put Half-life episode 3 on the rear burner. And then they felt like they had waited too long to come back and finish it.
“Left 4 dead came out great,” Speyrer said. “But it lasted long enough — and this is the tragic and almost comical part of it — it lasted long enough that, by the time we considered going back to Episode 3, the argument was made as, ‘Well, we missed it.’ . . It’s too late now, you know’ and ‘We really need to make a new engine to keep going Half-life series’ and all that.”
Now Valve feels like that was a mistake, with Speyrer adding: “In retrospect [it was] wrong. You know, we definitely could have gone back and spent two years on it Episode 3.”
Towards the end of the documentary, Valve boss Gabe Newell says so Half-life AlyxThe ending of the film was a somewhat “self-critical realization” that they needed to move forward with the story.
“I think so Half-life represents a tool we have and commitments to customers to take advantage of innovation and opportunities to build gaming experiences that haven’t been [seen] rather, and I think there is no shortage of opportunities that we as an industry are currently facing,” is the final message in Newell’s document.
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