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Rumors and facts about the content of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 and why it’s never finished have been circulating for years, but a new documentary released for Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary is particularly revealing and gives us a glimpse of unfinished Episode 3 weapons. and enemies – including an ice beam that was “kind of like a Silver Surfer mode” – and getting a few developers to explain why it was never finished.
I couldn’t figure out why episode 3 helped anything.
Gabe Newell
For the uninitiated, Half-Life 2 was famously followed by two episodic expansions that would form a trilogy, but after Episode 2 Valve abandoned the Half-Life story for 13 years and only picked it up again in 2020 with a VR game . Half-life: Alyx. Since then, speculating about Episode 3, or the legendary Half-Life 3, has become a favorite pastime on the PC gaming forum.
What happened with Episode 3 isn’t a huge surprise: the gist is that they didn’t know how to push the game design forward enough to make it feel worthwhile to them. That ice cannon apparently didn’t meet Valve’s innovation standards, and neither did the blob enemies that use Portal technology. In the documentary, Half-Life 2 level designer David Riller says they experienced “element fatigue” and had to “go bigger or do something different.”
“I think we really explored a lot of what made sense in the Half-Life universe and the setting,” Riller said. Writer Marc Laidlaw echoed that sentiment, noting that even Arkane struggled to do new things in the canceled Ravenholm spinoff.
When Left 4 Dead needed shipping help, the Episode 3 team paused work on the next Half-Life campaign to get involved, and like a hobby woodworking project that gets put down for a while and collects dust for decades, that was the ultimate downfall.
Engineer David Speyrer says it was “tragic and almost comical” that after Left 4 Dead was out the door, they felt like they’d missed their chance to finish Episode 3 and had to create a new engine if they wanted to continue. the series.
“That seems so wrong in retrospect,” Speyrer said. “We definitely could have gone back and spent two years making Episode 3.”
But it doesn’t seem like there’s complete agreement at Valve on whether they should have just finished Episode 3 to wrap up the story or not. When discussing the topic, Valve founder Gabe Newell said that completing Episode 3 just to finish the story would have been cheating.
“You can’t get lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving the story forward,’” Newell said. “That’s fulfilling your duty to gamers. Yes, of course they love the story. They love a lot of aspects of it. But when you say your reason for doing it is because people want to know what happens next, you know – we it could have been sent, it wouldn’t have been that hard, my personal failure was astounding.
The documentary ends on the positive: after not finishing Episode 3, Valve did a lot of other things, like releasing Dota 2 and the Steam Deck. But for the Half-Life fans who aren’t satisfied with that takeaway, there’s an extremely thin tease (classic Valve) at the end about the future of Half-Life: Only Newell says there’s definitely potential for more Half-Life to do Life things.
You can watch the Half-Life 2 anniversary documentary on YouTube, and Valve has also released a major patch for the game itself that adds in-game commentary.