What Would Half-Life 3 Even Look Like After Alyx?

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Half-Life 2: Episode 3 was supposed to launch shortly after Episode 2 in 2007, but Valve’s vague pro🌳mises of ‘coming soon’ led to radio silence which led to the ent🧸ire episodic model being dropped. Not great, but that at least meant Half-Life 3. Hope! The only catch is that we had to wait for Source 2 to release first.

As the years came and went without any news on the new engine, let alone the next Half-Life, fans conceded that all hope was lost. Half-Life died with a crowbar in hand, silently screaming into theꦚ void, abandoned by Gabe-Man at long las✱t.

Split image with both sides showing Jeff the monster from Half-Life: Alyx

🎐 Remembering Jeff, The Most Fascinatin✱g Level From Half-Life Alyx

Facing off against the blind zombie with an "ear li♐ke Mozart" is the tensest moment in the gameꦅ.

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Then came 2015; out of nowhere, Dota 2 was ported to Source 2. The engine ♒was real. Just a year later, references to something called ‘HLVR’ were found in its files, which turned out to be H🌠alf-Life: Alyx, a prequel that launched four years later in 2020.

Only, it’s not really a prequel. Set before Gordon Freeman resurfaced after the Black Mesa incident, it also continues the story of Episode 2 by giving Alyx Vance a way to save her father in the future. Once the credits rolled, we were left waiting for Half-Life 3 again on the same cliffhanger we were 13 years ago. But there are enough differences to radically change the series' future.

A Brief History Of The Many Half-Life 3s

It’s a misconception that Valve has been sitting idly on its thumbs. Several new 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Half-Life games have existed at one point or another, they just never made it to release. Half-Life 3 was in development between 2013 and 2014, but &ld🔯quo;it didn’t get very far” before being cancelled (thanks, ).

Lead writer Marc Laidlaw, who grew so frustrated with Valve that he released a brief version🎉 of Episode 3’s narrative, known cleverly as “Epistle 3”, also worked on a VR game called Borealis. It would have seen us on the interdimensional time-travelling ship that was originally cut from Half-Life 2 but later resurfaced at the end of Episode 2, jumping between the Seven Hour War and a period of time set just after the 2007 game꧃. Unfortunately, it was cancelled and Laidlaw left Valve.

There was also a Half-Life-themed VR shooter which would’ve us🍎ed Half-Life 2 assets and served as a tech demo-style shooter as part of The Lab.

This idea of revisiting the Seven Hour War was also present in a Half-Life game cancelled in 2015. According to Valve leaker Tyler McVicker (as reported by ), it got to such a point that there was 💞a playable opening section, but only ten developers were working on the game. Supposedly, it would have started with Gordon Freeman experiencing dream sequences of the Combine’s invasion before waking up in Aperture Scienceඣ with a robot arm. He could use this to resize objects and change their temperature.

We’d eventually discover upon escaping Aperture Science into a ruined American city that this game was set 20 years after Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and that many of the characters we knew were dead. It was supposedly more open than past games and featured procedurally generated quests. However, none of these details were shared in Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx interactive documentary in which Valve itself divulged cancelled projects, so take it with a grain of salt—it might be the same Half-Life 3 that was in development between 2013 and 2014, but we don't know for certain.

Half-Life 3 In A Post-Alyx World

Picking up a red barrel with the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2.

It’s important to look at what led us to Alyx to predict where 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Project White Sands (or HLX, if they’re the same thing) might take us next. According to McVicker, this newly leaked Half-Life game follows someone in a HEV suit, so it&rsquꦛo;s likely that we’re stepping back into the orange boots of Gordon Freeman for a long overdue sequel. That makes sense given that Alyx ends with Eli Vance, now alive, handing us a crowbar. But what might the story be?

So much of the cancelled Episode 3 and Half-Life 3 that we know of revolves around avenging Eli. Before his original death, he pleaded with us to destroy the Borealis before the Combine could get their hands on it, whereas Dr. Kleiner wanted to use it against the Combine. This would have seen🦋 us venture to the Arctic in the steps of Judith Mossman to find the lost ship, only to discover that the Combine were also on its trail. The race was on.

In Laidlaw’s Epistle 3, Gordon and Alyx fly the Borealis into the heart of the Combine empire in a self-sacrificing ploy to wipe them oღut once and for all, honouring Eli’s memory while simultaneously making a move against their interdimensional overlords. But it barely makes a dent, and neither one of the pair dies. G-Man takes Alyx, the voritguants take Gordon. A failure by all accounts.

The Advisor who kills Eli is revealed by Laidlaw to have been Dr. Breen. He transferred his consciousness at the end of Half-Life 2. We would&rsqu🍌o;ve found him in Episode 3, begging for death—Alyx would demand we leave him to suffer, but you could make a choice to end his pain. As per Half-Life: Alyx’s ending, he’s dead anyway.

That story can’t happen now. At least not in the same way. Alyx has been taken by the G-Man and her father is now alive, and we know that Eli has knowledge of the G-Man that he’s keeping close to his chest. We'll likely still venture to the Arctic in search of the Borealis and clash with the Combine, but what we do with the Borealis will undoubtedly change. Instead of flinging it into the empire and destroying it, perhaps we use it to scour the universe and other dimensions for G-Man and his employers to find where he keeps people like Gordon and Adrian Shepherd in stasis so that we might save Alyx.

Alyx won’t be with us during our trip to the Arctic, either. This is a huge shift because, in Epistle 3, she is the one whoﷺ suggests that we fly the Borealis into the Combine. Without her to make such a rash suggestion, the fate of the Borealis is in flux.

Regardless, we still have a destination in mind, we just have a new goal driving us now. Originally it was to seize this ship before the Combine could, but now it’s to seize the ship and find Alyx. For the first time, G-Man will be the main antagonist. He has tossed Gordon to the wayside and taken Alyx in his place, but Gordon isn’t the kind of person to sit idly by and wait for her to resurface, and Eli is raring to go already. We're going after her.