Valve might be re-awakening the Half-Life series with Half-Life: Alyx (and possibly some other titles) on the way, but it looks like the prospect of a Half-Life 3 is still a pretty scary one for Valve. That’s according to Valve designer Robin Walker, who has called Half-Life 3 “a terrifyingly daunting prospect”
In an interview with journalist Geoff Keighley (which you can check out below), Walker is asked why the upcoming Half-Life: Alyx, a full-length VR prequel to Half-Life 2, isn’t Half-Life 3. Valve dev Robin Walker replies: “In all honesty, back in 2016 when we started this, Half-Life was just terrifying. Half-Life 3 [was] a terrifyingly daunting prospect, and I think to some extent, VR was a way we could fool ourselves into believing we had a way to do this.
“By starting with VR and then trying to think about Half-Life and how that worked with it, and playtesting those, you’re immediately in a space where we have something we understand well: Half-Life’s core gameplay, and a new platform with new prospects and new possibilities, and we can do that translation, and then we can watch people play it,” Walker continued.
“It was really easy to not try and think about the big picture of like, ‘are we making Half-Life 3?’, and just focus on, let’s figure out what people enjoy in this and let’s make forward progress.” Walker explains that in some respects VR acted in a similar way to Half-Life 2’s gravity gun – that is, like a “tentpole” they could “wrap so much around.” But with “Half-Life 3, if it’s like, ‘hey, tomorrow you’re working on Half-Life 3,’ you’re like, ‘Oh god.’ Terrifying!”
Despite it seeming “daunting” for its devs, Valve has said that it would “love to continue pushing forward” with Half-Life games, so perhaps we will see a full Half-Life 3 arrive one day.
In the meantime the Half-Life: Alyx release date is set for March 2020, so it won’t be too long before fans can jump back into Gordon Freeman’s universe once again.