Half-Life’s story has as much chance of continuing as we have of winning the lottery.

Tyler McVicker is a well-known Valve leaker. He has now spoken about the future of Half-Life in a new video. According to McVicker, Valve has no plans to give the franchise a new instalment, despite hints of Gordon’s storyline in the virtual reality-only Half-Life: Alyx hinted at here and there throughout the adventure. So the curse of the number three is still alive and well: Valve is shying away from it. Half-Life 2: Episode 3, Team Fortress 3, Portal 3, Half-Life 3…

So what the hell is the Gabe Newell-led team doing? McVicker gave us the answer to that: Valve is currently focusing on Steam Deck (which has been delayed from December this year), and it’s not just hardware that’s important to consider, but also the software aspect: the company is now working on making games run well on it… including, for example, the rumoured (co-op, FPS/RTS) project codenamed Citadel. If true, this time, it won’t be the traditional mouse and keyboard pairing at the heart of Valve (it wasn’t for Half-Life: Alyx, so they’ll continue…), but there is a difference. The game running on Steam Deck will work on a PC without VR because the machine is a portable PC!

So a sequel to Half-Life won’t be happening anytime soon; Valve has indeed released new updates for Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 in recent months to give a more stable and correct gaming experience, since they are still 2004, 2006 and 2007 games respectively. So next year will mark fifteen years since the release of the second HL2 episode. Since then, two console generations have gone down the drain, which is incredible to think about.

We’ll end with the obligatory refrain: it’s not official, of course, but given Valve’s mentality, you can believe McVicker because the number three is a taboo subject within the company…

Source: WCCFTech