Valve Plans For More Half-Life Beyond Episode 3

Ars Technica notes, via an interview at the StuffWeLike site, comments from Valve's Doug Lombardi indicating that the company has plans to continue the Half-Life series beyond Half-Life 2 Episode 3 . "While most sites are taking this as a confirmation of Half-Life 3, the quote is not a definitive on anything other than the continuation of the series. And, of course, there hasn't ever been so much as a rumor hinting at Half-Life's demise. As what is arguably the biggest franchise on the PC platform, there is no reason for Valve to stop producing the crowbar-swingin' good times."

Comments

Queue half-life jokes

[192939495969798999]

And now for all the jokes relating the number of half-life sequels to some periodic radioactive decay!

(crickets)

Re:Queue half-life jokes

[hidannik]

So if you're a PC player, buy Team Fortress and Portal individually. Through Steam, you can.

If you're a 360 player, yeah you're stuck with the Orange Box. But since the only game included in the Orange Box that appeared on consoles previously is Half-Life 2, and a markedly inferior version at that, it shouldn't be so painful.

Anyway, I think you're looking at this the wrong way; the value of Ep2 + Portal + TF2 is at least that of a full game. They threw in HL2 and Ep1 for free. I suspect that's why they cancelled the Black Box; they would have been charging the same for it as the Orange Box, while delivering less.

Hans

Valve will give up on HL franchise....

[robinsonne]

...about the same time Blizzard gives up on WoW.

Re:Half-Life 2 Ep 3 Gameplay

[Chyeld]

Valve has a love for games on rails. They do everything they can possible to ensure that you see what they want you to see, when they want you to see it, without being aware of the rails. Listen to the dev commentary in Ep 2 and Portal and it becomes immediately obvious that the perfect game experience in Valve's mind would be to give the illusion of GTA while ensuring you never actually stray from the path.

This is not a horrible thing. The reason most people are down on games that are on rails is that most developers suck at story telling and cinematic experiences while simultaneously thinking they rock at the same. Therefore most games on rails feel more like a Disney ride than an epic adventure. Both in the fact that you are consitantly reminded that you are on rails and that the various "props" are obviously only expected to be seen from the "ride-side" of the game. Valve actually puts the effort in to cover up the rails, to polish the props and to make it look as if the fact that you just happen to be going down the path is because YOU choose to go that way, not because every other way was closed.

Take for instance, the 'other' episodic game that was released around the time of Episode 1. SiN Episodes: Emergence.

In SiN, you were shown this huge city, many of the locations in game were huge, the modern day equivalents of the Tower of Babel. And yet, there was always a fence, a door, or a window between you and the rest of the world. There were very strict paths you were forced to take, and even though you would often be assulted by people coming from the inaccessible areas, you never were given the chance to get to them yourself. It was very obvious that your goals were "get A to pass B so you can push C and open D".

This is exactly the same scenario that the Half-Life games provide, but with them it is far, far easier to forget that you are being herded along a path. Take dodging the Antlion guard in the mines/hive. Most people, the first time around, probably almost shat themselves when they finially fell down that final shaft with the guard seemingly just a millisecond behind them. However if you play the game through again, you realize that this spot was actually scripted to come off exactly that way. You might be able to mess around and actually die there, but you will never get so far ahead of the guard that they won't be a millisecond behind you at the final shaft.

Valve specializes in cinematic magic. A sandbox free-will game is their anti-thesis.

What will be in Episode 3? We know some of it.

[Hackie_Chan]

Gabe Newell seems to show a lot of fancy towards the episodic method of distributing games. Put that in mind when he remarked to Eurogamer a while back that Episode 1 to Episode 3 "essentially" was Half Life 3. Smaller teams with less to lose permits them to take more risks in game design. Does this mean the real Half Life 3 (not episode 1-3!) will be distributed the same way?

However, on what we know about Episode 3: First of all, Portal takes place in the Half Life universe in the laboratories of Aperture Science. This had to be for an obvious reason since it essentially is a storyline shoe-horn in to a puzzle game. They didn't need to do it, but they did it anyway. Episode 2 spills the info that Aperture Science has a vessel called the Borealis. It "vanished" (i.e. teleportation) but has now been found. Obviously Gordon will have to go there and find the ship and obtain the gadgets and gizmos. This means Gordon will have to travel to the arctic, so Episode 3 will most likely feature snowy areas. And then there is this Gabe Newell quote on Portal (After you launch the player, play the video called "X-Play Review: Portal". Gabe's quote is a little over the halfway mark):
"The character that you play is a character who has importance in the overall half-life universe, and will eventually have a fairly significant relationship with other characters that we're already familiar with".

The way Portal works as an introductory game to educate the players on how to use the Portal gun to interact with the environment is a really clever method to set things up on how it will potentially be used in Episode 3. But I'm actually not so sure however whether Chell will give Gordon the gun, cause he doesn't have the surgically inserted heel springs to prevent injury from falling the large distances. Oh, and GLaDOS will probably be involved somehow...she's "still alive" you know.