The project codenamed HLX, which may or may not include Half-Life 3, is said to be in a fairly advanced stage considering the testing phases.

In the video below, Gabefollower talks about what he’s heard about HLX, which Valve, a dwarfed company compared to the big tech companies, is working on but still making huge financial gains. Valve continues to hire AAA developers (both newbies and veterans) from all over the industry. Those who previously worked on Half-Life 2, Portal or Left 4 Dead are back after years of absence.

The video talks about a sample project from one of the recently hired artists, as well as more data-mined code for gravity modification, thermodynamic simulation, etc. There are also references to Nvidia’s CUDA cores, and one can assume that these will be used for either ray tracing or physics calculations. Most importantly, Valve has extended the internal development team’s playtesting to Family&Friends.

For context, these are the major playtests that caused Deadlock to completely scrap the old Neon Prime setup in late 2023. This is why Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton returned to Valve to rewrite Half-Life: Alyx in 2018/2019, after the previous iteration of the story left playtesters wanting a little more. Plus, both writers are still at Valve and not writing for Deadlock, so they’re surely working on something else at the company besides the recently completed Team Fortress 2 comic. That could be HLX. If this big playtest goes as smoothly as it seems, it’s possible that HLX could be announced as early as 2025.

So Valve will continue to be present in the game industry, even if it’s not exactly a BioWare or a Larian in terms of the number of game developers, but it will be interesting to see what a small, agile team can come up with. All of this is far from official, though, and let’s not forget that.

Source: Reddit