Half-Life: Alyx is out at present and, as you’d hoped, it’s good. Graham-certified good, in RPS’s Half-Life Alyx review. For all its goodness, Alyx shouldn’t be formally Half-Life 3, which Valve nonetheless haven’t made. There are just a few major causes that the fabled “3” hasn’t made an look, Valve have now defined. Chief amongst them, they simply weren’t proud of what they got here up with.
Valve veteran and degree designer Dario Casali told IGN at present {that a} mixture of “scope creep”, cautious tech improvement, and concepts that simply weren’t adequate have stored the official third sequel from ever materializing. So far, anyway.
Casali recounts how lengthy it took Valve to develop Half-Life 2 alongside the Source engine. You shouldn’t construct on shifting sand and, as Valve realized all through six years of HL2 improvement, you shouldn’t construct a game concurrently its engine.
After lastly getting HL2 out the door and feeling as if that they had a deal with on the Source engine, Valve determined to launch new episodes for the game. They’d hoped to launch an episode every year, however they acquired caught on the quantity 2 once more. Episode Three by no means arrived.
“We found ourselves creeping ever forward towards, ‘Well, let’s just keeping putting more and more, and more, and more stuff in this game because we want to make it as good as we can,’” Casali says, “and then we realized these episodes are turning more into sequels.”
By the time HL2 Episode 2 shipped, Valve had been already wanting in the direction of improvement of Source 2 and knew they couldn’t repeat the identical mistake once more “because that created a lot of pain the first time we tried to do that.”
More than simply technical issues and a historical past of concepts that ballooned past feasibility, Casali says “we were never really that happy with what we came up with” for Half-Life 3. As a member of the corporate since 1996, Casali vouches that Valve don’t push out tasks that don’t hit the mark. “Our judge and jury is always the playtesting,” he says. “No matter what it is that we’re doing, we get validated by that playtesting process, and we stick to that religiously.”
In an earlier interview with Game Informer, Valve’s Robin Walker stated that the studio “absolutely see Half-Life: Alyx as our return to this world, not the end of it.” However lengthy it finally ends up taking Valve to conceive of and create Half-Life 3, it feels like they’re decided that will probably be well worth the wait.
It might not be Half-Life 3, however Half-Life: Alyx is out at present. On Steam, naturally.
