As most of you know, HL3 is pretty much the most popular “vaporware” game out there. Something always rumored and in development, but never heard again after a certain point.
What I don’t understand is why Gabens refusal to expand on the halted development of this game, it would’ve smashed sales absolutely and be the shining example in the modern gaming scene.
It just doesn’t make sense, you’d think a games firm would be smacking it’s lip ready for another full plate of gamers wallets.
Is it because the hype train is dangerous? Does Gaben prefer steam sales more?
What are your thoughts!
Half Life was always about pushing the boundaries of gaming. The first Half Life with their combination of story telling in a 3D shooter environment was absolutely at the sharp end of the field at that time. If you’ve seen the Black Mesa documentary you’ll know why HL2 was such a hit and how it was revolutionary at that time. After that they did some DLC, but Valve wasn’t happy with what they were doing. It wasn’t groundbreaking, it was just creating content for the sake of content. As they didn’t need any more money from creating games, they opted to not create HL3. It wasn’t till VR became more mainstream they again tried to do something at the sharp end of the field, by creating HL Alyx.
I don’t know what would prompt them to ever make a HL3 if such a thing even exists.
Episodic gaming as a format was the groundbreaking feature. It was supposed to be the future of gaming.
It was, devs just realized they don’t have to break the content up into episodes or actually complete the first part they release, and can call it early access instead.
The real problem is that you can’t create content fast enough to reach the cadence that you’d want with episodic content. Even a lot of TV shows have shifted away from predictable scheduling since Valve tried this experiment (and TV, largely, got better since then too).