HL2: Episode 3 Created 7 years ago2017-08-25 04:13:02 UTC by Archie

So there we have it.
Laidlaw has published a first person summary of the events of Ep3 as he distances himself from Valve.

Massive spoilers ahead, obviously. Discuss.

The circumstances surrounding the post:
https://youtu.be/urza2sbU68Q

The post with proper nouns corrected:
https://github.com/Jackathan/MarcLaidlaw-Epistle3/blob/master/Epistle3_Corrected.md

You just ninja'd me. I was rushing to TWHL to post the same links before I even started reading.

[EDIT] Read it. Although I can't explain, I kind of understand why Valve didn't pursue the release anymore. The whole thing feels... depressing. It barely leaves a note of hope.
Adding to that, non-linear time events described in the story would make players confused, and game designers even more confused as to how to transpose this into gameplay.

The story also screams a lot the Philadelphia Experiment. Not a bad thing, but I guess they focused too much on that Borealis ship and in the end it probably didn't offer a good enough climax for the series.

But I bet this story will be picked up by the community, and what Valve didn't want to do, the community will.

yeah someone will probably make a mod out of this, maybe. If only source sdk wasnt so broke

Not sure if it's the right place to say it (and sorry for saying it again), but I was never fond of the story of Half-Life starting from Half-Life 2.
Come on, the good human rebels completely united against an oppressive alien regime which invaded the earth, that doesn't sound very original to me. Not to mention Alyx Vance which is just the pretty tomboy, Dr. Kleiner, the eccentric scientist and Barney Calhoun, the funny, good-looking and courageous male hero… Just the standard characters you find in so many average / bad movies, including Star Wars 7 (COMPILATION_ERROR: TOO MANY ERROR TROLLS).

I know Laidlaw deliberately obfuscated the names of the characters so he could claim "fanfic tho, what they do with it is out of my realm". Gotta admit, a ghastlyhaunt is an amazing name for an enemy, and the Disparate would've been a cool name for the combine proper. Sad to see the story wrapped up, but happy to see that someone's actually gone and stopped the speculation.

Well, it's still better than nothing.

I'd much rather prefer if HL2 was more Ravenholm-esque post apocalyptic survival on Earth swarming with Xen aliens, HECU and soldiers still trying to fight them off, and Shepard coming back to kick Gordon's ass to space.

On the one hand, a massive weight has been lifted.

On the other... I'd really like to play this.

I wonder if Crowbar Collective could pick this up after they release Xen.

I kind of doubt CC would want to, on the whole they're probably pretty eager to move on to non-HL projects after over a decade of Black Mesa.

It'd be nice to have a playable version of this, but I'll settle for the closure of knowing how it might have played out. Reading this gave me a feeling I've not had for years - knowing a game's plot as a hazy structure, from having read it on a wiki as the ability to play it isn't present. There was a time when HL2 and the episodes were like that, back when I didn't have a good enough connection to actually get the games off the steam server and onto my HDD.

It's nostalgic.

Guerilla marketing.
I'm going to wait and see how things go.

Adrian isn't back 0/11

Marketing or not, my hype died long ago. There's no way in nine hells i would fork out 60 for a Valve pre-order nowadays. First gameplay footage and some reviews, later we can talk.

That being said, if left like this without episode 3, the HL series would make for one of my top AAA games with worst possible ending.

I'm not reading that because you never know what the future has in store for us and I don't want it spoiled for me by reading it.

There are no spoilers. It's a preview like for any game or movie just creatively written out and addressed from Gordon Freeman. It's weakly encrypted because if such a letter was written by Gordon to someone, it would have to be in order to keep certain details secure if the letter was intercepted.

Also consider the date. End of August is when most stuff starts popping up, which actually coincides with a fall release, with is not only great for the holidays, but the award shows in December. Most things are nominated based on the fact that it's the most recent awesome thing, involving its residual amazingness to propel the vote.

Look at the dates around the Halo games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Halo_media

Making a good game isn't enough anymore, it takes an ocean of social media momentum and advertisement. They know they have something amazing, and shrouding it infamy will give it a bigger boost through the Internet grapevine for more effectively than any paid conventional ad source that their competitors may be doing.

The fact that it came from Laidlaw is the dead giveaway. He's a writer, and this isn't outside his realm of expertise. His departure from Valve was far too parachuted for him to be barred by a severance contract NDA. He is still perfectly within his right to do exactly what he did. His retirement from Valve isn't even two years old yet, and by the time he departed, his job could've easily been concluded with Ep3.

I think we'll see a release at some point this fall.

Yeah, I wouldn't expect a release ever at this point. I'm pretty sure the reason that Marc Laidlaw and basically all the other writers at Valve have left is because there isn't active development happening on Half-Life or any other story-based franchise - there just wasn't anything for them to do anymore.

Valve is gonna release Artifact, maybe some new skins for DOTA2 to go with that, and then we won't see anything new from them for another decade or more. That's just how they do things these days. They aren't really a developer anymore, they're a storefront, and as far as the evidence points, they have no desire to be anything else.

@Rimrook:
What do you mean there are no spoilers? We're told how the series would conclude up until that point, pretty much what happens to Gordon and Alyx to the very end.

Even if there is any work done at this point on an episode 3 (which i very much doubt), i'd say it's much more likely to be scrapped now.

You're all wrong. There will never be a Half-Life 3 nor a Half-Life 2 Episode 3. Because duh. Everybody knows if anything gets released it's going to be called Half-Life 2 Episode 2 Part 2.

steam is the best MMO in the industry, why would you make a little single player game that wont last more than a couple hours

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxTsaEbqcvo

This is my old video (Very bad English) that shows HL 2 commentary scripts which points to EP3.

I've been out of the loop for a long time... can someone please explain why HL2: Episode 3 never happened?

The story sounds fascinating, and I like the bleak ending but I wonder how the scenes on the Borealis would have played out, it reads like the gameplay would have been simple defence with cool stuff happening out the window.

From my understanding, between the slipped initial release date, the massive ammount of hype leading to pressure, and the fact that F2P multiplayer games were a lot more profitable, all of Valve's devs just lost interest in it. And since Valve has a (technically) flat hierarchy, there was nobody to say "No, we still have to finish this game"

So they didn't.

So, apathy killed Half-Life? That's sad. I was imagining something a bit more substantial - lawsuits, or some sort of infighting at Valve about the direction the series was going, that sort of thing.

The fact that it came from Laidlaw is the dead giveaway. He's a writer, and this isn't outside his realm of expertise. His departure from Valve was far too parachuted for him to be barred by a severance contract NDA. He is still perfectly within his right to do exactly what he did. His retirement from Valve isn't even two years old yet, and by the time he departed, his job could've easily been concluded with Ep3.

I think we'll see a release at some point this fall.

As much as I'd like to believe it, I believe it less and less. It feels like everything Marc Laidlaw has had to say recently has been full of thinly veiled resentment (Epistle 3 being no exception).
Or maybe on October 10th 2017 the three games that Valve is working on will get released in some sort of sequel to The Orange Box, which will include a new Half-Life game. Actually the more I think about, maybe this was an intentional leak because Marc didn't like what the next Half-Life has become, and he knows it's due soon.
I guess we'll see wash-up in the coming weeks and months.

Anyway, the story itself seemed just fine to me - it has some finality to it.

And here we are. I spoke of my return to this shore. It has been a circuitous path to lands I once knew, and surprising to see how much the terrain has changed. Enough time has passed that few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we hoped to accomplish. At this point, the resistance will have failed or succeeded, no thanks to me. Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Expect no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final epistle.

It's this paragraph that makes me think that development of the Half-Life series is perhaps being actively suppressed by Gabe and the other senior staff at Valve. I know they say that developers work on what they want and there is no hierarchy, which is a nice idea, but I think it's utter bullshit. There are definitely Project Leads that distribute work. There are people that handle the company accounts, that advise which projects prove more profitable (the likes of DOTA2 and CSGO). There has to be an individual who handles the hiring and firing of each individual working for the company, and that person will no doubt have a position of seniority, taking on people with skills that are relevant to the company's goals.

And here we are. I spoke of my return to this shore. It has been a circuitous path to lands I once knew, and surprising to see how much the terrain has changed.

I believe this is Marc saying that it has been a long time since he wrote anything for Valve, specifically for the Half-Life series, continuing on to say that the overall focus of the company as a whole has changed.

Enough time has passed that few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we hoped to accomplish.

Marc hasn't had any creative input within Valve for a long time, possibly even years before he finally retired. This is confirmed by his next sentence, where he states it would be "no thanks to me."

At this point, the resistance will have failed or succeeded, no thanks to me.

The 'resistance' I think refers to Valve.

Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognize most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists

Old friends being silenced or falling by the wayside? This is why I think that Valve was actively dismissing ideas or pitches regarding Episode 3. The company has changed, people have come and gone, but there are a handful of people who want to work on the kinds of games that once made Valve great.

I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Expect no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final epistle

To Gabe: You've clearly made your decision about how Valve should operate from here on. Marc hasn't written anything for the company in a long time, and should they return to form and work on story driven adventures again, he wants no part of it. He is done.

Bottom line, Valve has changed significantly, and has become a company where writers are no longer important.

At this point, I only care about CS:GO when it will be ported to Source 2.

I didn't lost hope for EP3/HL3, but I don't feel excited or hyped anymore. I will probably become hyped again when Valve itself will say something relevant about it (90% of the stuff about EP3/HL3 over the years has been trolls or speculations about the story).

Valve CAN count to 3. They just don't want to, apparently.

hmm i wonder how much employs work at Valve now ?
Since updates for Dota 2 or CS:GO don't really need a huge amount of people to be involved, the core dev team i mean (not mentioning TF2 or L4D).

Just curious how big is the work force and how are they assigned.

This is a weird thing. Just read it today. I feel like it... sort of suggests there's still hope for a HL2Ep2+, but not in a hold-your-breath kind of way? I dunno what to make of it.

Valve is now in the business of making money rather than games.
By now the "flat" hierarchy has inherently turned back to a normal upside-down tree with developers that stuck to teams for their specific games (CS, DOTA, TF2 apparently is still a thing) nobody wants to or can move around that freely anymore. This is speculation though.

Anyway the fact of the matter is selling a few skins it takes a day to make is much more worth it than selling a game that takes years (decades) to make.