There is no studio like Valve. As the owner of Steam, the de facto PC gaming platform, the company has the resources to approach game development as a publicly funded lab rather than a studio that has to worry about monthly payroll or revenue reports. quarterly. On the one hand, it encourages unrestricted freedom. On the other hand, this means that Valve's games are expected to be not just games, but defining moments in media history. No series embodies this philosophy quite like Half-life, a series that we recently learned has had more games canceled than released. Half-life is Valve's champion, with its Ivan Drago representing the pinnacle of intelligence and technology available to the studio, and the game as a whole. First, there was the original Half-life, with its first tram ride through the bowels of Black Mesa giving us an elegantly minimalist yet cinematic experience like no game has given us before. That single moment ushered the first-person shooters from the ultraviolet grime and rugged polygons of Quakes and Unreals into a clean new era of clever storytelling and crisp graphics. Seven years later, Half-life 2 set the game on a course that stretches back to the present day. That's when those little details – frosted glass in an apartment complex, reflective water lapping at the waterways surrounding City 17, heavy believable physique – yielded one of the greatest strides of all time towards video game verisimilitude. The Half-life series exists to revolutionize the industry and propel gaming into a future we could never imagine until Half-life shows it to us. This high standard is why in 2020, after years of silence, Valve created a fundamental VR game that no one expected in Half-life: Alyx. It's also why Half-Life 3, as we imagine, might still be a long way off anyway.
Resonance cascade
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(Image credit: Valve) The idea of Half-life games as "disruptive by design" was echoed by Valve CEO and founder Gabe Newell in an interview with IGN. Speaking of why it took him so long to create another Half-life game until Alyx, his stop-start answer went straight to the heart of what Half-life meant to Valve. Newell said: "The splits are really, maybe we're stupid, but it didn't seem like it was a no-brainer, we're not just putting out the Half-life titles because it helps us do quarterly numbers." Valve was looking for a spark, an opportunity to create a technical breakthrough big enough to justify the next Half-Life. But between 2004 and 2016, this breakthrough didn't materialize. This was, and still is, a time when improvements in video game technology were on the rise. becoming more incremental and granular than the dramatic leaps Half-Life helped usher in at the turn of the millennium. Not that Valve hasn't tried. Geoff Keighley's documentary Final Hours reveals Valve began work on no fewer than five projects of Half-Life, Half-Life 3 among them, which were aborted for various reasons.Valve designer Dario Casali told IGN that part of this was due to Valve's philosophy of making Half-life games were disruptive in one way or another, because "they were looking for the right thing. Have the next big impact."
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Geoff Keighley's documentary Final Hours gives rare insight into why Half-Life games are so rare (Image credit: Geoff Keighley) That opportunity would eventually come with virtual reality, which finally gave Valve the chance to making a brand worthy of the Half-life name while championing legitimately innovative technology. Virtual reality has been, and continues to be, treated cautiously by most major publishers, largely due to its relatively small market that doesn't make it very attractive to grain counters and shareholders. But Valve, being a private company of unimaginably rich wealth, was not constrained by these concerns. You have just found a whole new dimension of gaming to play and pioneer. It's hard to appreciate how Alyx is a perfect continuation of the Half-life legacy unless you put on a helmet and experience it. It overlaps with Valve's trademark technology and storytelling creativity in a way that dwarfs anything the studio could have done on a flat screen. The gravity gloves you wear in the game are not only a worthy successor to Half-life 2's gravity gun, but a marvelous innovation that addresses VR's longstanding problem with finer environmental interaction. Technically and visually, the Source 2 engine not only pushes the boundaries of VR, but is one of the most impressive games out there in any medium. We're at a point in gaming technology where, outside of VR, the most talked about advancement in recent years has been ray tracing (the fact that we're still talking about it is perhaps indicative of the lack of progress). that's what we have to talk about). We see it in the latest generation of consoles, which isn't marketed as much on technological paradigm shifts, but flourishes as backwards compatibility, SSDs, and high frame rates in 4K resolution. At the moment, there just isn't enough of it to sustain a hypothetical Half-Life 3.
Flat screen tray
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(Image credit: Valve) Half-life 3 would almost certainly be a flat-screen game, but if that were to happen in the near future, there would be no chance that this would be the significant advancement on Half-life: Alyx that Valve would like to be. is. Sure, it could still be an all-time great game—indeed, we'd hope it was—but the company just poured years of ideas, canned Half-life projects, and technologies into Alyx. Unless Valve suddenly simply "adds Half-life titles" in direct opposition to what Newell said, it seems extremely unlikely. Half-Life 3 has been something of a ghost at Valve. Half-life: Alyx designer Robin Walker said that "Half-life 3 was a terrifying and intimidating prospect," and virtual reality provided the kinds of freedom and possibility that relieve some of that pressure. Another Valve designer, Phil Co, said in Geoff Keighley's documentary Final Hours Half-life: Alyx that "we're not afraid of Half-life anymore", which reveals what a series has been like. Scarecrow, though Alyx's success has removed some of that apprehension. Of course, with Valve's Source 2 engine now well in place, the series' hiatus now over, and a lot of positivity coming from the studio about the future of Half-life, I can see why Half-life 3 may seem more likely instead. . less likely than ever. But Half-life: Alyx wasn't just a checkpoint on the road to Half-life 3, it was the big Half-life project that Valve had been trying to find a way to do for years, but hadn't. The right technology to do it. In a way, Alyx is Half-life 3: the game changer that is destined to shape the future of its medium. According to Valve's history and philosophy, we won't have Half-Life 3 for the foreseeable future. But that's okay, because in Alyx we already have something that far exceeds what we imagined for a third Half-life game. Now it's just a case of VR becoming a platform accessible enough for anyone to watch.