1 week Ago By [email protected] (Christopher Livingston)
To celebrate Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, Valve dropped a few surprises in our lap on Friday afternoon, like putting together the original dev team to record in-game commentary for the legendary FPS, which is free for the weekend on Steam . Awesome! Valve also posted a two-hour documentary on the making of Half-Life 2 on YouTube. Also awesome—unless you had something else to watch tonight like a ridiculous boxing match.
Personally, I'm less interested in the development of a 20-year-old game I know like the back of my hand as I am in some hints about what might come next for Half-Life. So, I did the thing you do when you just can't wait to find out who done it in a whodunnit: I skipped to the end. Is there confirmation of Half-Life 3 in the Half-Life 2 documentary? Or confirmation of Half-Life: Alyx 2? Or confirmation of anything specific at all? No.
But in the closing minutes of the documentary, there are some hints that the Half-Life saga isn't over. "It was easy to think about VR being a vehicle for Half-Life because that was a big technological innovation and kind of a core reason for that product's existence," said Valve engineer Brian Jacobson. "And I think one of the things we have internally tended to attach to the Half-Life IP is innovation.
Gameplay innovation is often enabled by technological innovation. Clearly there was a ton in Half-Life 1 and 2. "It's an interesting challenge moving forward to think about what that means for future Half-Life stuff, for sure," Jacobson added.
Future Half-Life stuff confirmed? I mean, sorta, though Jacobson is implying that more Half-Life won't happen until more technological innovation is done. Over to you, Gabe Newell: The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. "The ending of Half-Life: Alyx is somewhat a self-critical realization," said Gabe.
"I think that Half-Life represents a tool we have and promises made to customers to capitalize on innovation and opportunities to build game experiences that haven't been involved previously. And I think there are no shortage of those opportunities facing us as an industry right now." Look, I know GabeN is a beloved industry figure but at times he talks like a business cyborg.
What does that word salad mean? At the end of Half-Life: Alyx we briefly get to inhabit the boots of Gordon Freeman again for a few seconds, and a portion of the history of Half-Life is changed due to a bit of spacetime G-Man magic. I'm not sure how that adds up to a self-critical realization, honestly. But it does seem like Gabe is saying something along the same lines as Jacobson did: Half-Life and technological innovations go hand in hand, and you won't get one without the other.
What those innovations might be, I'm not sure: more advanced VR? More powerful GPUs? A Steam Deck you control with a neural implant? Whatever breakthrough needs to happen, I hope it happens soon. Otherwise, see you at the Half-Life 2 25th anniversary party for some more speculation..
