Yesterday, Valve announced three (3) hardware products: a Steam Machine console, an accompanying Steam Controller and the long-rumored Steam Frame VR headset. This hardware, along with the excellent Steam Deck, gives Valve a pretty comprehensive way to get people playing games wherever they want, on any sort of screen. And, of course, the games are what this is all about. Steam’s catalog is impossibly vast, encompassing every genre you can imagine — but there’s still one crucial title missing from the thousands of games available.
I am, of course, talking about Half-Life 3.
I swore back in 2017 that I’d stop beating this dead horse, but Valve sucked me back in with the utterly unexpected, excellent, VR-only Half-Life: Alyx prequel. At the very least, it was a sign that the Half-Life universe wasn’t dead and buried in Valve’s mind, despite the fact that it had lain dormant with an unresolved cliffhanger for more than a dozen years.
At the time, Valve indicated it was interested in moving forward with more games in the series, though I wouldn’t have been surprised if the company just dropped things again. But, a big push into hardware that is significantly more powerful than the Steam Deck feels like another perfect opportunity to make Half-Life 3 happen.
And there have actually been a few more concrete bread crumbs to follow over the last year or so indicating Valve might finally be returning to the Half-Life story. It started with the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, when Valve dropped a major update for the game. “Every map in Half-Life 2 has been looked over by Valve level designers to fix longstanding bugs, restore content and features lost to time, and improve the quality of a few things like lightmap resolution and fog,” the developer wrote. Along with some developer commentary, a documentary and the inclusion of the two episodic follow-up games, this was a pretty substantial update for such an old game.
At the end of last year, YouTuber Gabe Follower dropped some details on a potential Half-Life 3 coming soon. Follower had previously called the release of Counter-Strike 2, lending some credibility to his findings. To make a long story short, Follower claimed a Valve project internally titled “HLX” had reached the play-testing stage. That didn’t necessarily mean a launch was imminent, but at the very least the game was advancing in development.
Another less consequential but fun tidbit dropped around the same time: actor Michael Shapiro (who voiced the infamous G-Man in the Half-Life series) posted a New Years’ message where he spoke in the G-Man’s strange accent and said he’d see viewers in the year to come. Not coincidentally, he also did this in 2020 prior to the Half-Life: Alyx launch. The game had already been announced when he posted that message, but it’s still an intriguing tease.
The timing couldn’t be better, either. The Game Awards are less than a month away, and that extravaganza is about the biggest platform you could ask for if you’re announcing a big new title. Not that Valve really needs the stage — they could just drop a trailer on YouTube and the gaming world would take care of the rest.
But as a companion piece to the company’s renewed hardware ambitions? The synergy would be too good to pass up. After all, the Valve Index VR headset launched just a short time before Half-Life: Alyx was announced, and anyone who had purchased it got the game for free. A theoretical Half-Life 3 isn’t quite the same, as there’s no chance the game will require the official Steam Machine. But it would still make a heck of a launch title to help drive interest in the company’s new devices.
As for me, I’m not letting myself get too excited here. I remember in 2013, when Valve introduced the first Steam Machines initiative and its first attempt at a controller, I assumed it would be a perfect time to announce Half-Life 3. That clearly did not happen. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit hopeful this time around. There’s enough smoke to make me think that the fire is real; it’s hopefully time to wake up and smell the ashes.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/valves-trio-of-hardware-announcements-revived-my-half-life-3-fever-dream-170000561.html?src=rss
