Hearing that Gabe Newell is finally going to make the game we’ve been waiting for for almost two decades… but it probably won’t have the number three in the title.

Gabe Follower shared the latest news about the game, known by its codename HLX, which has been revealed in updates to other Valve games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, in a new video (embedded below), detailing a host of other recent revelations, such as the discovery of hlx, hlxaudio and hlxartists groups in Valve’s internal systems, the introduction of console commands for optimizing and tuning NPC behavior in code, dynamic navigation meshes, deformable props, an improved dynamic hair system, and more.

All of these things suggest not only that HLX development is nearing completion, but also that it will be a game complex enough to make people believe that this may indeed be the long-awaited conclusion to Gordon Freeman’s story. Remember, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was cancelled in the fall of 2007 (it was one of the big hits of The Orange Box; Portal and Team Fortress 2 were also part of the package), and it’s been over 17 years since Valve first cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and then plans for Half-Life 3 may have similarly fallen through…

Valve has stated several times in the past that they are not working on Half-Life 3, it’s not so sure that the project codenamed HLX is actually Half-Life 3, and so it’s worth being cautious with the rumors (because that’s all we have to go on at the moment). It could be that there will be another spin-off like Half-Life Alyx five years ago. And it took a while for that to become playable without a VR headset thanks to mods.

In the meantime, we’re not without Half-Life, as the RTX demo of Half-Life 2 has been released.

Source: WCCFTech