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Ex-Valve Writer Reveals What Might Have Been Half-Life 2: Episode 3's Story (eurogamer.net)
New submitter stikves shares a report from Eurogamer: Ex-Valve writer Marc Laidlaw, who worked on Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and its episodic expansions, has published a summary of the series' next chapter on his blog. Titled, "Epistle 3," it details Gordon Freeman's next adventure. Except, likely for copyright issues, the whole story has been genderswapped. So Laidlaw's tale speaks of Gertrude Fremont, Alex instead of Alyx, Elly instead of Eli, and so on. Naturally, Laidlaw's blog is currently down due to traffic, although you can read a backup of the page on Archive.org, or on Pastebin, where the names have been corrected.
Articles on HL3 invariably contain the cop-out comments that "it couldn't live up to the hype" so Valve might as well pass on it. Except that's crap - there's gaps between classic games and movies all the time but that doesn't stand in the way of them getting made. It was 8 years between the release of Deus Ex: Invisible War and Human Revolution, but that didn't stop the sequel from being a critical and financial success. Or when the thing is made, it's used as an excuse for dreck - the problem with Phantom Menace wasn't Jar Jar or Lucas's shitty directing, it's because the fanboys just couldn't be happy with any sequel. /sarcasm
No, what's happened here is that Valve has gotten fat and lazy off of Steam. Why do all the haaaard wooork of actually making something when they can just charge a percentage as a publisher? It's a shame that Valve didn't spin off it's game development into a subsidiary ten years ago, to leave it's Steam team focused on the store and a Game team to focus on Portal 3, Half Life 3, and a Portal Life to wrap up that universe.