A documentary has turned everything on its head that we knew about Gabe Newell and co.
Geoff Keighley (The Game Awards, Summer of Gaming 2020…) released a „multimedia experience” called Half-Life: Alyx – Final Hours, which doesn’t require a VR headset, promising „an unprecedented and unvarnished look at the past decade inside Valve.” It also has Half-Life: Alyx concept artwork, and other interactive features, such as a Valve Time timeline, and a headcrab sound effect mixer.
The cancelled games? Half-Life 3 was planned to run on the Source 2 engine, drawing gameplay inspiration from Left 4 Dead. It would have used procedural generation (an example: the planets in No Man’s Sky) mixed with hand-crafted story moments, which would have resulted in a replayable game. Imagine the game generate a building and an objective (for instance, rescuing a prisoner), For instance, the game would generate a building and an objective, and then create a route through it, plus fill the building with enemies. This section would always be different. Valve even scanned Frank Sheldon (just one word: G-Man…). The problem is that the Source 2 engine wasn’t finished, and the project didn’t get far while it was in development (2013-2014).
Left 4 Dead would have been an open-world game set in Morocco, maybe even having hundreds of zombies at the same time. It didn’t work out. The reason: the Source 2 engine. There was also an RPG project (called RPG), taking inspiration from The Elder Scrolls, Souls, and Monster Hunter series. It was planned to be released in small pieced, but it „never really left the conceptual stage.” It later had experiments to turn it into a single-player RPG, featuring DotA’s Axe, but it also got halted. A.R.T.I. was planned to be a light-hearted, voxel-based game, similar to Minecraft (open-ended destruction and creation). It had a version where Erik Wolpaw, a writer of Half-Life 2 and Portal, voiced a character (King Kevin), who you had to save from prison, using the game’s tools. It was later converted into a VR game, but in favour of Half-Life: Alyx, it got shelved.
SimTrek (VR) was developed by members of the Kerbal Space Program team, which also met the same fate as A.R.T.I. Shooter (another VR game) was a Half-Life themed shooter planned to be a part of Valve’s VR showcase (The Lab), using only Half-Life 2’s assets. It’d have offered short gunfights, with the idea of being more of a theme park ride and not the continuation of the story. However, it wasn’t likely to be ready in time for The Lab, resulting in its cancellation.
Borealis was a Half-Life VR project, which would have been led by Marc Laidlaw, a writer. Its setting was the time-travelling ship, which was mentioned in Half-Life 2. It’d have jumped between Half-Life’s Seven-Hour War and the period after Half-Life 2: Episode 2. No gameplay details were revealed aside from the fact that it had a fishing minigame. Hot Dog was intentionally called as such to hide the fact that it was meant to be a new take on Left 4 Dead.
And finally, Vader… it was Valve’s first internal attempt to create a VR headset. However, since it was designed without compromise, it’d have cost too much for being too ambitious. Valve estimated that it’d have cost 5000 dollars. (Five thousand.) It was planned to launch along with Half-Life: Alyx.
People were doubting what Valve would do now. „This ice has been broken, now we’re hoping to smash through the ice completely. We’re not afraid of Half-Life no more,” said Valve level designer Phil Co. They want to make something for traditional platforms (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X?), but they are afraid that they don’t have enough staff for it. Oh, and they have a „top secret” project now.
Valve seems to be back after a few years of absence.
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