

"We sort of became the highest-paid blog post writers of all time," longtime Valve writer Jay Pinkerton admits, while other staffers talk frankly about the studio's reputation for spinning up multiple small projects and then watching them fall apart internally. Keighley's account of Valve's history is blunt about the studio's lack of significant game launches during the '10s and about the issues they had in common-particularly that they all pulled the in-development Source 2 engine in different directions. Shortly before ground was broken on what became Half-Life: Alyx, Valve also had a "mini team" begin prototyping a Left 4 Dead sequel in late 2015, which was also shelved after "months of work." (Its codename was "Hot Dog," if you want to start digging through old Source Engine files for hints of it.) And other sections of the app talk about other canceled Valve games, including Left 4 Dead 3 (not to be confused with "Hot Dog") and new, codenamed games like "A.R.T.I." and "RPG." (Today's report also acknowledges a Half-Life 2: Episode 3 project that stalled when its team members shifted to help ship the first Left 4 Dead game.) “The highest-paid blog post writers” If that sounds familiar, its concept resembles the story Laidlaw eventually posted for fans, which many took to resemble his vision for a " Half-Life 3." He left Valve shortly after the prototype failed to "gain traction," Keighley writes. (This followed the prototyping of a Half-Life arcade shooter, simply titled Shooter, that was made for possible inclusion in Valve's VR toy kit The Lab, only to be canceled we've reported on that one previously.) Advertisementīorealis would have taken place entirely on the boat of the same name while players "ricocheted in time back and forth" between various points in the Half-Life universe, including the series' Seven Hour War.
#Prototype 3 confirmed series
Inspired by Left 4 Dead, this non-VR version of Half-Life would have revolved around combat sequences through procedurally generated towers and buildings, chained together by crafted plot events.Ī more plot-centric Half-Life project emerged within Valve in 2015, led in part by former series scribe Marc Laidlaw: a VR-exclusive game codenamed Borealis. That includes information on Half-Life 3-and it is a much firmer account of Valve's history than what IGN reported earlier this year.Īs described, however, this "H元," which began life in the early '10s, would have been very different from what fans might have expected from a full-fledged Half-Life sequel.

The app's biggest dirt is arguably its confirmation of exactly what started and stopped within Valve on the way to getting Half-Life: Alyx out the door this March.
