The more than two decades since Half-Life 2‘s release have been filled with plenty of rumors and hints about Half-Life 3, ranging from the official–ish to the thin to the downright misleading. As we head into 2025, though, we’re approaching something close to a critical mass of rumors and leaks suggesting that Half-Life 3 is really in the works this time, and could be officially announced in the coming months.
↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica
We should all be skeptical of anything related to Half-Life 3, but there’s no denying something’s buzzing. The one reason why I personally think a Half-Life 3 might be happening is the imminent launch of SteamOS for generic PCs, possibly accompanied by prebuilt SteamOS PCs and consoles and third-party Steam Decks. It makes perfect sense for Valve to have such a launch accompanied by the release of Half-Life 3, similar to how Half-Life 2 was accompanied by the launch of Steam.
We’ll have to wait and see. It will be hard to fulfill all the crazy expectations, though.
Thom Holwerda,
Technologywise so much has improved since HL1-2 series and there’s so much new ground, not only graphics fidelity but physics & gameplay mechanics. I enjoy the old games, but replaying them they seem extremely linear to a fault. It was nice to share a common experience, but I wonder if they could make it a little less linear. Maybe the story progression remains linear but the world inside of the progression is less constrained and more open world. They need to introduce something beyond the 1v1 fights that have been done endlessly. Better AI companions and enemies would be an obvious improvement. To provide a player with more autonomy and authenticity, maybe some battles could take place anywhere in the open world rather than always being in a scripted locations and characters could adapt dynamically. A blend of scripted and unique dynamic experiences.
Old franchises risk getting silly as they try to add ridiculous story & gameplay elements to subvert expectations. For example they could expand into a “multiverse” but that can feel like a cheap way to expand a universe. You might come up with interesting multiverse gameplay but it’s hard to remain grounded after this and it can’t be undone. Alien attacks do setup some cool scenes, but I find this repetitive. Maybe an alien has telekinesis and can manipulate the world and you have to find a way for your team to trick it. A future game will probably uncover more about the g-man’s manipulation of events and how the battles are all being manipulated to some end. Maybe Gorden would even go up against g-man himself?
I know people tire hearing about AI, but I do think there are innovative gameplay mechanics waiting to be unlocked with AI. Like having creatures being much less scripted and legitimately accomplishing objectives autonomously. “Dog” from HL2 is explicitly a robot, but I’m also thinking biological entities that you could train in game to help you and they would learn their behavior from. What they do would depend completely on how you trained them. I don’t know if there’s a cool way to incorporate this into the game without making it feel like your a babysitter, haha.
So, the interesting news here is not the hype about HL3, but rather the rumors about a possible release of SteamOS for PC’s. I’m not a gamer, but from what I understand, SteamOS works very well on its dedicated hardware (Steam Deck handheld, with x86_64 architecture) and has been received very well by the public. Of course, it will not be a easy task to ensure that SteamOS will also work well on every possible PC configuration (or at least on most of them), but the base (an immutable variant of Arch) should be flexible and robust enough. Then, the challenge would be to design the OS so that it can be used by _anyone_, who just want to play some games and to install some desktop applications, without losing time and patience to make the OS work. Should this project ever come to life, it would be very interesting to see if Valve will succeed at expanding the Linux’ user base, which is one of the key factors to get more recognition and support from hardware and software companies, which in turn is a key factor for Linux to start being considered as a true replacement for Windows/MacOS, rather than a niche OS for nerds.
99% of “home” computing is either playing games or using a web browser these days. Also, unless you need specialized software (like Adobe) and can’t live with open source substitutes, there is very little that would lock people into Windows other than habit. When most users encounter a modern Linux desktop, they notice very little difference in how they use their machine. Granted, doing some things can require more effort, but being as Windows is constantly bricking people’s machines with forced updates, I think the pain of moving to Linux is mitigated by the pain of staying on Windows.
Also, you might be surprised at how compatible SteamOS is these days…especially if you have AMD integrated graphics or an AMD graphics card! I could see a LOT of interest in a Steam “console” with something like a Strix Halo APU that sells for under $1k.