Half-Life 3
I’ve been a season ticket holder for the Half-Life 3 copium train since I was a kid. I rolled credits on Episode Two when I was only seven years old, and even remember turning to my dad and saying something soul-crushing like, ‘I can’t wait to see what happens next.’ I’m sorry to the Half-Life community, but I might’ve jinxed us.
What came next was an unhealthy obsession spanning decades, as I, like so many others, pored over every single leak, datamine, and interview, hoping for just a crumb. You’d think that after countless false flags and cancelled projects, I’d have learned to temper my expectations. How many Tyler McVicker videos can I get excited about before I start to feel like I’m in Groundhog Day for video game nerds who just won’t grow up? Too many.
However, when the ‘HLVR’ leaks actually panned out and Alyx was revealed, years of waiting lifted, and the timer reset. So, when ‘HLX’ came along and the rumours of Half-Life 3 nearing completion started circulating, I jumped right back on the hype train without hesitation.
Marc Laidlaw shared Epistle 3 on my 17th birthday, which I’m sure was on purpose.
The sequel has never felt closer. We’ve never seen leaks this frequently, or a version of HL3 this far along in development. The other trails always led to dead ends because, internally, those games were cancelled. But HLX has survived the reported Winter playtests and is now in the optimisation phase, going by recent references found in Deadlock and Dota 2 updates. It’s veering dangerously close to hopium, especially considering Mike Shapiro’s (who played G-Man and Barney) cryptic tease of “unexpected” Half-Life surprises in 2025.
But I never thought that Half-Life 3 might launch before GTA 6 or The Elder Scrolls 6, two series I was sure would have -ups by now.
With Lengthy Dev Cycles, The Wait For Half-Life 3 Is Starting To Feel Like The Norm
It used to be that if someone moaned about having to wait four or five years for a sequel, you’d get an ant’s nest of Half-Life fans crawling out of the mud to ask, ‘First time?’. The community has spent longer waiting for a new game than it ever did playing the originals.
But now everyone is waiting. Skyrim came out in 2011, which means that The Elder Scrolls fans have been left on tenterhooks for nearly a decade and a half, fed only with a nondescript CG mountain range and a diet of remasters. GTA 5 came out a couple of years later in 2013, and the wait has been so harsh for the community that they’ve gone full conspiratorial, analysing every frame of every trailer in the hopes of cracking a one-sided enigma. They’ve even been studying moon cycles. Okay, maybe just one — first time?
Development times have skyrocketed, and with studios like Bethesda and Rockstar alternating between different projects, like Starfield and Red Dead, it makes the wait between tentpole IPs like The Elder Scrolls and GTA feel that much longer. There was a 13-year gap between Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Alyx, but already the gap between Skyrim and TES 6 is longer. Our suffering isn’t unique anymore, it’s just the way the industry is.
And now with GTA 6 pushed back another year, the wait between GTA 5 and it is roughly the same time that Half-Life fans waited for a new entry. That crushing hiatus, which was once an industry outlier so bad that ‘Half-Life 3 confirmed’ and ‘Valve can’t count to 3’ became enough of a meme that Gabe actively avoided the number, is now just par for the course. But thankfully, Half-Life looks to be stepping away from that trend.
If it does launch this year, which feels increasingly likely since it’s reportedly playable “from end to end”, and again with what Shapiro teased on Twitter, then we will have only waited five years since Alyx. Sure, it sounds like it’s the end of Gordon’s story — and possibly even of Half-Life — but we’re getting a resolution, and it didn’t take another decade to get there.
I’m not so sure the rest of the industry will match its pace, especially as Bethesda will be busy with Fallout 5 and likely Starfield 2 after TES 6, and Rockstar perhaps a new Red Dead (or Bully!) after GTA 6, stretching the wait between games across generations. At this point, I’m expecting to be in my 50s by the time Grand Theft Auto 7 rolls around.
Thank god for The Elder Scrolls Online, eh?
Half-Life was once the worst-case scenario, but for some of the industry legends, it’s fast becoming a typical case study.
