The abandoned city of Ravenholm, web site of certainly one of Half-Life 2’s creepiest and most iconic ranges, would have featured in a cancelled episode of the sport developed by Warren Spector’s now-defunct Junction Point Studios.
Half-Life routinely makes lists of the best shooters on PC, and ours is not any exception.
The information comes through a batch of recreation recordsdata for the Half-Life 2 episodes, leaked anonymously to the Half-Life fan web site ValveTime.
ValveTime revealed a couple of photos of the Ravenholm map so you may see what would possibly’ve been. The city is beneath heavy snow, and contains “small puzzles, scripted sequences and fights”. Some objects pertaining to those have fields known as ‘magnet’ and ‘magnetisation’, which (together with the initials ‘JPS’ showing within the names of some entities) proves that that is the work of Junction Point Studios.
Why? Because when former boss Warren Spector mentioned that studio’s work for Valve in with Game Informer, he talked about “a thing we elegantly called the magnet gun, which I still wish they would do something with. We came up with so many cool ways to use a magnet gun that were completely different from anything [Valve] had done and was really free-form in its use.”
The prospect of Spector – a legendary designer who helped create such properties as System Shock and Deus Ex, amongst others – engaged on Half-Life is a tantalising one. “We were working on an episode,” he says. “[Valve] was really into episodic content at that point. We were working on an episode that would fill in one of the gaps in the Half-Life story.”
Unfortunately, Spector was additionally in talks with Disney, who acquired Junction Point in July 2007. The Half-Life challenge was then cancelled. “When the deal with Disney really started to bear fruit, I just couldn’t say no to Disney. I’d always wanted to work there, so we never completed the work with Valve.”
Disney closed Junction Point in 2013. The studio had shipped simply two video games: Epic Mickey and its sequel. Spector left Disney and took a educating job on the University of Texas, however is now working on System Shock 3.
As we all know, Valve deliberate three episodic expansions to Half-Life 2, of which it shipped simply two. Junction Point’s challenge was certainly one of at the least two additional episodes that Valve had handed out to 3rd events, the other of which was being made by Arkane and would also have been set in Ravenholm. Seems that creepy city has loads extra tales to inform, although it is vanishingly unlikely at this stage that we’ll ever hear them.
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