This article was originally published on the Accounts Department blog in 2017.
It’s a break from tradition for this month’s entry, because some gaming history happened (or didn’t happen, rather.) Marc Laidlaw, the former lead writer of the Half-Life games, revealed the planned plot for Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Of course, the names were switched around and he’s dodging questions on Twitter, but the implications are clear. He knows the game isn’t going to happen, and he’s protecting himself from Valve. This is it. This is all we’ve got left, and all we’ll ever have of the continuation of the Half-Life series that will never come.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a little emotional, but most of all, I feel like this is the closure me and most of the other fans have needed. Valve is no longer a games company, they’ve just been running Steam and making CS:GO and Dota updates, and that’s working out all fine and good for them. They have clearly discovered they can pump out an extremely small amount of content with an absolutely huge return. A few years after the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, it clearly wasn’t worth it from a business standpoint to make a high-budget singleplayer game that would most certainly have not lived up to expectations.
But Valve wasn’t always about what made sense from a business standpoint. They were the darlings of the industry, once upon a time, largely because they didn’t have that attitude about things. Things have changed, now, and Valve’s reputation is much closer to a company like Ubisoft than it is to, say, CD Projekt Red. Not quite as bad, but definitely on the path to getting there.
There’s merit to the argument that a lot of Half-Life’s legendary status is due to its technological innovations rather than its game design, and that’s true to a point. That said, it was a series that meant quite a bit to quite a lot of people, and even as a fan that only got into it in the last few years, it meant a lot to me too. The series quickly made an incredible impression on me, sitting among Metroid and Deus Ex in the august halls of my favorites ever. It has profoundly influenced my writing style and my approach to stories, and it was the first series that really got me thinking critically about game design. More importantly, it was the first series that made me really love game design. I loved its story, its world, its music, and I loved how all of those things came together in such interesting and dynamic ways to create some of the most memorable moments I’ve ever had with a videogame. And Laidlaw knew there were millions of people who felt the same way.
I do get pangs of frustration reading the whole thing. From the moments described, Episode 3 would have been one hell of a game. I can think of the masterfully executed moments on the Borealis, with gunfights based upon phasing in and out of time and space while having to gun down Combine Soldiers. I could think of the shock I would have felt at Alyx shooting mossman, I could think of the surprise I would have felt when G-Man took Alyx away instead of Gordon.
But upon reaching the end I finally understood that Laidlaw, and likely most of the rest of the original HL team are probably more frustrated than I am by several orders of magnitude. To see the thing you put so much love and effort into fizzle away and die slowly without reaching the end must be incredibly painful. Most of Valve’s soul - that is to say, the people who made Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 - are gone, and the ones that remain are dissipating by the day. It seems their golden age really is over, and that they’ll never be able to achieve their heights again, and Laidlaw and the others likely recognized that.
At the end of the writeup, Gordon (Laidlaw) speaks of the spirit of rebellion being still alive. He’s more than likely not talking about the characters in the story, but he’s talking about the fans of the series. He’s talking about the thousands who were enchanted, entranced, and inspired by what HL had to offer. And those people will go on to forge their own legends in its image, and that same spirit HL crafted will live on.
God willing, I hope it will. It’s been a wild ride.