Half-Life 2: Episode 3 is rumored not to be coming in 2010

Gravey wrote:

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

Shoggoth! Run!

http://www.valvetime.net/threads/exc...
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...

These fantastic images have been sent in by an anonymous visitor to the site from an unknown source. Despite that, we have no reason to believe they aren't real.

One could argue that perhaps they are just generic Half-Life 2 concept art of concepts that never made it into the final game. But there's plenty of evidence here to suggest they are post Episode 2.

For example:

Alyx is wearing Eli's jacket
Crashed helicopter in an Arctic location
Art featuring Xen
Combine Advisors in Xen

The images are from circa 2008 and therefore not necessarily representative of the current state of the project, but it's great to see new media, nonetheless.

There are too many talented artists on the internet for me to even begin to take those seriously.

I'd say the character art looks plausible, it's the kind of sketch I've seen elsewhere for them as a step to work out and make the character designs.

I thought about posting those, but it's only a few images that aren't very interesting. Or to me, at least.

f*ck you for bumping this thread. Hopes are dashed for the 825th time.

So... definitely not 2010 then?

Gravey wrote:

So... definitely not 2010 then?

I want to know if it'll be out before the Year of the PS3.

Not to mention, these could have been created 5 years ago. It doesn't mean that there has been any movement on development.

Gravey wrote:

So... definitely not 2010 then?

This thread title must never change, even if it does get a new release date.

IMAGE(http://images.wikia.com/peanuts/images/a/a0/1107charlie_brown_lucy_football.jpg)

NSMike wrote:

There are too many talented artists on the internet for me to even begin to take those seriously.

Pretty much.
Leaked art is usually fake unless it's actually an in-engine thing

Stele wrote:
Gravey wrote:

So... definitely not 2010 then?

This thread title must never change, even if it does get a new release date. :D

Indeed! I laugh ever time this thread pops up.

The Steam forum moderators are pretty adamant that these are real.

Kind of hard to get excited though. It's gonna take a lot more than 4-year-old concept art to shake me of my apathy.

2008 is kind of the right time-frame for such things to be created, a year after the ep2 release.

That leads me back to wondering why ep3 hasn't been seen or heard of since. Since then they've done loads of releases so I can only assume not enough people at Valve want to work on it compared to those other games. I've said before that as much as I love the HL gameplay, if their heart isn't in it I'd prefer to see those other releases, but I think they've got a bit of responsibility to finish the story they started telling, in some form which doesn't necessarily have to be a game as they've done great with comics.

There was an interview with Gabe Newell a few months back (I always try to catch those, fascinating dude) where he strongly implied that the Half-Life team has continued to work on it the whole time. So I don't think it's an issue of not having enough internal enthusiasm or anything.

My impression is that they're just struggling to make the best shootar evarrr!!11! yet a third time. Reading "Raising the Bar" really drove home how much Valve is challenged by Half-Life's reputation.

Gravey wrote:

So... definitely not 2010 then?

I hope when the game does come out that it's set in the year 2010.

My impression is that they're just struggling to make the best shootar evarrr!!11! yet a third time. Reading "Raising the Bar" really drove home how much Valve is challenged by Half-Life's reputation.

That kind of thinking worked out really well for 3D Realms.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
My impression is that they're just struggling to make the best shootar evarrr!!11! yet a third time. Reading "Raising the Bar" really drove home how much Valve is challenged by Half-Life's reputation.

That kind of thinking worked out really well for 3D Realms.

Sure, but 3D Realms didn't have Steam... or hats.

Edit: I really should finish Half-Life 2 one of these days.

Good grief.

ThomasJay wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
My impression is that they're just struggling to make the best shootar evarrr!!11! yet a third time. Reading "Raising the Bar" really drove home how much Valve is challenged by Half-Life's reputation.

That kind of thinking worked out really well for 3D Realms.

Sure, but 3D Realms didn't have Steam... or hats.

Edit: I really should finish Half-Life 2 one of these days.

Or billions of dollars. Or talent.

Such a silly comparison.

Bottle wrote:

My impression is that they're just struggling to make the best shootar evarrr!!11! yet a third time. Reading "Raising the Bar" really drove home how much Valve is challenged by gamer's unrealistic expectations.

FTFY.

I wish I could find it right now, but there is a comic of "Why there is no Half-Life 2: Episode 3" where Master Chief and Gordon Freeman are watching from backstage while Shepard is being pelted by rotten vegetables by the fans in the audience.

Do you care to point to some examples of said unrealistic expectations? I see that phrase as one of the generic gaming bogeymen now. I for one would be perfectly happy with something just like ep1/ep2, and from what I guess/know of the story I don't think it needs to be more.

The only way I can see arriving at that conclusion is if you make the massive leap of logic that because it's been 5 years since the last HL release then there's obviously 5 years of work gone into it, with all of Valve - which is nonsense given that they've released 3 full games, 1 small project (alien swarm), a boatload of updates to a load of their games, and are well on their way to two new games coming out this year.

I've seen a lot of people eagerly anticipating a new HL release, but I don't recall any saying anything along the lines of "it's gonna be a new engine, top-to-bottom whole new game, zillion hour campaign", etc.

Also, take a look at the comments here. People who are hard to satisfy are good, they're the people who will buy your stuff, who want to see what a developer is going to put out.

They want more? If only more developers had their problems.

Scratched wrote:

Do you care to point to some examples of said unrealistic expectations? I see that phrase as one of the generic gaming bogeymen now. I for one would be perfectly happy with something just like ep1/ep2, and from what I guess/know of the story I don't think it needs to be more.

Interesting that when I ask people to provide evidence to back up their claims in other threads you make the defense that 'all opinions are valid' and yet here you are questioning mine. But I'll bite:

Mass Effect 3
Prometheus
Star Wars prequels
Duke Nukem Forever

And I'm very curious to see how The Dark Knight Rises will fare later on this summer.

Granted, I don't think it's just a gamer issue, it's much bigger than just games. People get so worked up and attached to something, and when it doesn't live up to those expectations people go apesh*t. And you want to talk about generic gaming boogeymen, I'll direct you to the classic "I wish they took the resources spent on multi-player and made a better single player" argument I see time and time again from people who seem to be willfully ignorant of how game development work.

It's not about a leap of logic, it's about seeing patterns of behavior from people in the nerd/geek niche across a variety of mediums. Looking at ME3, the number of people whose response was "well, Mass Effect was never about true choice it was about the illusion of choice" are in the extreme minority, and the number of people who hung on every bit of marketing and PR put out by BiowarEA seem to make up the core of the demographic who were disappointed with the game and are now swearing off all future output by them.

Valve has a decent track record, so I have confidence in them, but I'm also not expecting it to be some industry changing paradigm either. While I agree that I don't see anyone explicitly stating that they expect HL2Ep3 to be a game changer, they level of fervor that surrounds that topic suggests otherwise to me.

I never finished Ep.2. I cannot, for the life of me, get past that fcukin' tower defense game that they throw at you as the final battle, even on easy difficulty. For that reason, I hope that they keep the innovation to a minimum in the sequel. But, times being what they are, I expect that staying the course will net them a lower meta-critic score with critics praising their work but in the same statement saying the game just isn't up to the levels of Portal or Left 4 Dead. Still, with Doom 3 being rereleased with a new engine, maybe a little nostalgia will calm everyone's demands that the game be different but not mess with "that thing that they like."

I don't know if this is off-topic, but on replays (trying to beat those fcuking striders!) I've come to dislike Alyx. Or rather, how she is written. A beautiful, combat capable and mechanical genius woman of mixed race parentage but wholly subservient to the legend of whoever the hell is playing Gordon Freeman. Maybe if they want to shake things up they could do it by changing the nature of their relationship from star-struck admirer and genius-marksman-badass to something a little more balanced and human.

Hell, how about letting her in on the secret that Gordon was the spearhead in the G-Man's war on Xen. He was the trigger of the Combine invasion. Earth was destroyed because he was too good at shooting giant alien brains.

Valve released this all new screenshot of Half-Life Ep3 head crab zombie.

IMAGE(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5977984/head%20crab.jpg)

I was stuck on the defence of the armament part for ages too. I found a lot of it comes down to taking it in stages, learning what's coming and making full use of your time preparing, for example pulling magnussons out of the teleporter ahead of time and finding somewhere to stash them that you can grab them and they don't roll away. Keep in mind it's designed to be a tense and down to the wire fight.

I think people take Alyx a bit too seriously, she's one step above a generic companion and gets a whole load of flak because her writing isn't 20 steps above the norm. (I see this a lot, a game or some aspect of a game is a bit better, and then gets kicked around town for not being Citizen Kane) Not saying that's a defence, but I don't think anyone would care if Barney was tagging along instead. Given the ep2 ending, they've got an opportunity to change the character, and it would probably be weird if they didn't.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I'm not saying that Valve is going to go bankrupt trying to chase down Episode 3, but I wouldn't be surprised to see development drag on and on while they try desperately do top themselves. Something that, to be clear, I don't think they need to do, either for themselves or for the public.

I think that's an important point. I get that Valve feels the need to innovate, or at least a project has to be interesting to them, but to a certain extent I wouldn't mind if ep3 was 'by the numbers'. Sure, I want to be interested and engaged while playing, but I don't want the wheel reinvented.

I'm kind of intrigued that Xen has come up in the art, but also a little worried. There's certain parts of HL2 that are references to parts of HL1, so it's appearance doesn't surprise me, but I worry about feature creep. What I understand as the episodes is Valve filling out the game with what was cut from HL2 before release to finish the story. There's certain parts that match up and some that have been changed, but there was a conclusion that Xen had no part in.

I suppose I can only trust the project is under good stewardship and whatever is going into it is there for good reasons.

Bottle wrote:
ThomasJay wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
My impression is that they're just struggling to make the best shootar evarrr!!11! yet a third time. Reading "Raising the Bar" really drove home how much Valve is challenged by Half-Life's reputation.

That kind of thinking worked out really well for 3D Realms.

Sure, but 3D Realms didn't have Steam... or hats.

Edit: I really should finish Half-Life 2 one of these days.

Or billions of dollars. Or talent.

Such a silly comparison.

3D Realms had plenty of time and money to finish their game. They went bankrupt after over a decade of self-funded development, so it's not like they were strapped for cash. (Leaving aside that time and money alone don't make great games.) They were also talented enough to make the first one, which, if you recall, was considered revolutionary at the time and had a huge impact on the genre.

What I'm saying is that a focus on besting a previous creative work can be absolutely crippling for artists and rarely ends well. If they are, as Bottle said, "struggling to make the best shootar evarrr!!11! yet a third time" then that's a really toxic way of thinking that will exhaust their creative staff. Stepping outside the realm of video games, you see this kind of thing all the time with novelists, movie directors, athletes, painters, and on and on.

I'm not saying that Valve is going to go bankrupt trying to chase down Episode 3, but I wouldn't be surprised to see development drag on and on while they try desperately to top themselves. Something that, to be clear, I don't think they need to do, either for themselves or for the public.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

What I'm saying is that a focus on besting a previous creative work can be absolutely crippling for artists and rarely ends well. If they are, as Bottle said, "struggling to make the best shootar evarrr!!11! yet a third time" then that's a really toxic way of thinking that will exhaust their creative staff. Stepping outside the realm of video games, you see this kind of thing all the time with novelists, movie directors, athletes, painters, and on and on.

I'm not saying that Valve is going to go bankrupt trying to chase down Episode 3, but I wouldn't be surprised to see development drag on and on while they try desperately do top themselves. Something that, to be clear, I don't think they need to do, either for themselves or for the public.

This is what I was getting at with my posts above. Where does the creator trying to best themselves end and the consumer's expectation begin in a situation like this? The amount of reverence given Half-Life must be daunting to Valve. Quite frankly, if it were me, and seeing the way the internet reacts to things I would just say "You know what? f*ck it. I don't need strangers threatening my family. Half-Life is done."

Ironically enough, saying that Half-Life is done would probably get me death threats anyways.