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 I was looking at this Unreal 5 engine recreation of City 17 this morning, and it broke my big sweaty nerd heart all over again. What happened to Half-Life 3? What happened to "episode 3" at the very least? It's obvious that there was work going on behind the scenes at least for a time. There were all kinds of cross-references to Portal and Aperture Science and their vessel the Borealis. All signs seemed to be pointing to some kind of crossover and many of us dared to dream that you might find the portal gun on the ship, frozen in ice, and use it to finally repel the Combine. So I can't really wrap my head around the objective truth that Valve seemingly dropped all development and interest in it's once-flagship series instead. We've all had a decade to just deal with it, sure, but can you imagine what would have happened if Bungie had ended Halo 2 with "....sir, finishing this fight" as Master Chief rockets to Earth in the middle of a Covenant invasion... and then there was just never a Halo 3? Would we still be talking about it? Probably. I think many of us would agree that the Half-Life series broke the mold for first person shooters as they once existed, for better and for worse, and the entire genre has swung to both ends of the story-driven spectrum since. So that begs the question: do we even need Half-Life 3 anymore? It might be too late now. It seems like there's very little new ground left to explore in the first person shooter universe. The new DOOM game is lauded for returning to it's pre-Half-Life influences and people seem to be growing weary of experiences like Infinite Warfare.  So what's left to reinvent the genre with? People have argued that the lack of Half-Life 3 is evidence of Valve's overall retreat from game development as it's continued working on Steam and other projects. (Is the steambox with it's wackadoo controller still a thing?) Maybe it will pay off though, because it seems like Valve is getting into the VR craze. That is an extremely interesting trend to see them getting involved with, because I think that if anyone could pull off a groundbreaking narrative experience through VR, it would be Valve. The Half-Life games were all incredible and featured a silent protagonist that served as a stand-in for *you* the player. It's all ready to go, in principle, and making Half-Life 3 a VR experience would mirror the same kind of hardware push that a lot of us had to take the plunge with on Half-Life 2. I upgraded my computer at the time specifically so I could play it. Honestly, I wouldn't even hesitate to do the same if Half-Life 3 was announced. They probably know this. Gabe Newell said Valve's products are, "usually the result of an intersection of technology that we think has traction, a group of people who want to work on that, and one of the game properties that feels like a natural playground for that set of technology and design challenges." So we might have that with VR as the technology gets better. What about the Source 2 engine? Have we seen any of it in action yet or know what it's supposed to be capable of? I'm refusing to throw in the towel. I don't care how long it's been. We might be on the cusp here, guys and gals. We just might be.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHxyZaZlaOs AwkwardKnob fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Feb 14, 2017 |
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Feb 14, 2017 22:47
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I always feel that HL2 has aged rather gracefully, but I'm sure a side-by-side with that top image would suggest otherwise. I do miss Antonov's art design though.
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Feb 14, 2017 23:10
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I really liked the direction that Episode Two's story was heading in. The series so far had made it clear that teleportation was extremely powerful, and whichever faction had the better teleportation tech had a huge advantage over the other. Sticking Portal in the same universe as Half-Life actually seriously affects the plot. Now we have the Combine and the Resistance, whose teleportation methods are respectively prohibitively energy-intensive and unreliable, racing to a cache of technology whose creator somehow had a risk-free, man-portable (and by present day, handheld), instantaneous teleportation device in the 1950s. Even if there isn't a single portal gun on the Borealis, Aperture's tech could probably shift the war in the Resistance's favor. Shame they're never releasing another Half-Life game!
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Feb 14, 2017 23:17
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