However, it’s worth adding right away that anything with the number three in the title that has to do with Valve shouldn’t be taken too seriously…

Half-Life 2 recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and Tyler McVicker of the Valve News Network talks about what Valve is working on in the video embedded below. This might be the most ambitious project Gabe Newell’s team has ever worked on. The project is reportedly called Half-Life X, and it’s going to have a lot of innovative new features. Valve wants to revolutionize the gameplay, not the graphics.

The game will have a voxel-based destruction engine, and Valve is taking this from a canceled project, Arty. So we’re in for some pretty intense destructibility. It would make 2001’s Red Faction look like child’s play! Then there’s the map design: linear design with more expansive areas. That’s what Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End did. The focus will be on storytelling and immersion, so Valve doesn’t want to make a completely open world experience.

Artificial intelligence will also improve: we can expect more advanced behavior. This will include standoff mechanics and more realistic motion animations that will make NPC interactions more dynamic. In addition, the game will reportedly use “shared environments” to create seamless level transitions without traditional loading screens. McVicker says it’s not an immersive simulator (like BioShock), but he suspects the system of NPCs giving missions and procedural generation in the design of certain side quests is very much in that vein. NPCs will react differently depending on what other NPCs are in the environment.

So where does the Steam Deck come in? Well, Valve is reportedly developing this game with the next generation Steam Deck model in mind. Of course, the game will also support the current handheld PC, so Valve is essentially preparing for the future in addition to making it work on current hardware.

None of this is official yet!

Source: The Game Post