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Half-Life 2: Episode Three is a canceled first-person shooter game developed by Valve. It was planned as the last in a trilogy of episodic games continuing the story of Half-Life 2 (2004). Valve announced Episode Three in May 2006, with a release planned for 2007.
- The story behind one of the greatest cliffhangers in gaming history.
- How Much Does Each Major Retailer Take From a Game's Sale?
By Tom Marks
Updated: Mar 28, 2020 5:56 am
Posted: Mar 23, 2020 5:00 pm
It’s not often that an unanswered cliffhanger in a story becomes echoed so perfectly by one in real life – but the legendary, lingering end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and the real world silence that followed is anything but ordinary. 13 years after release, its heart-wrenching finale is still unresolved, and the once feverish “Half-Life 3 Confirmed!” memes have mostly lost steam. But now, after more than a decade, we’re getting a new Half-Life game – as well as some answers.
Ahead of the release of Half-Life: Alyx, I spoke with level designer Dario Casali – a Valve veteran who has been with the studio since 1996 – about Half-Life 2, its development, and its influence on Valve’s new VR prequel. During that chat, we also discussed why Valve decided to make Episodes instead of a full sequel, and why the now infamous Episode 3 (and a sequel in general) never arrived.
His answer is, frankly, the clearest I’ve heard on the issue yet, but there’s still no single, simple reason it never manifested. It was partly due to Valve’s worry about “scope creep” in what were supposed to be smaller expansions, partly the studio’s desire to begin development on the Source 2 engine, and partly the lack of a creative spark (and unsatisfactory internal experiments) worthy of carrying the Half-Life name.
Flip through the gallery above to see how Steam's cut compares to other stores.
The other reason for the long delay in Half-Life’s return was the creation of Source 2, the follow-up to the Source engine used in Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, CS:GO, and lots of other games (including the Titanfall series). By the end of Episode Two, Valve was already looking towards its next engine, and had already learned the hard lesson not to develop both a Half-Life game and its engine from the ground up at the same time. “We [didn’t] want to make that same Half-Life 2 mistake again,” Casali explains, “of working on Source 2 and the next Half-Life game at the same time, because that created a lot of pain the first time we tried to do that."
To break the timeline down for you, Half-Life 2 was in development for six years, starting just after the first Half-Life’s release in 1998 and ending in 2004. Episode One followed roughly a year and a half later in 2006, followed by Episode Two at the end of 2007. At that point, Valve knew it wanted to make Source 2 and didn’t want to start work on a Half-Life game using it before it was ready – and knew it still wanted that follow-up to make an impact.
Seven years later, Source 2 was made available in Dota 2’s Workshop Tools in 2014 before the entire game was ported to the engine in 2015. Meanwhile, Valve tells me Half-Life: Alyx has been in development for roughly four years, allowing the studio to start working on it around 2016 with a Source 2 engine that Casali says was nearly complete by that point.
“We [didn’t] want to make that same Half-Life 2 mistake again."
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Half-Life 2: EPISODE 3 The Closure - Full Walkthrough. Bolloxed. 307K subscribers. 1.2M views 8 years ago. ...more. Full Playthrough of the Half-Life: Episode 3 The Closure in max...
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Valve explains the reasons behind one of the greatest cliffhangers in gaming history.
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Half-Life 2: Episode Three is a cancelled game that was planned as the final installment in the Half-Life 2 episodic trilogy. Although the game never reached a finished state from which a definite plot summary can be formed, Episode Three would have presumably picked up after Episode Two's...
Nov 14, 2019 · With the ‘Half-Life 3: Confirmed’ meme gaining steam, and more trolls and jokes flooding online, no fresh news on consequence surfaced, and another E3 came and went with no sign of Episode...
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Aug 25, 2017 · Half-Life 2: Episode 3's plot revealed by former writer. For 10 years, Half-Life fans have wondered if a new game would ever come out. Now the former head writer has revealed what...
