Bruh did I miss anything ?
Duuuude, have you been living under a rock? HL:Alyx is amazing! It's a prequel for HL2, with some revelations at the end
- I won't spoil much after that.
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something interesting that Newell said in an interview. We simply didn't have the technology available at the time to make the game we wanted Half Life to be.
From some interviews with some current and ex-Valve employees, their "business philosophy" was that each employee chose which project they worked on, and are, somewhat, free to start their own. As you can tell, this has its pros and cons. The initial team of HL2:ep3 development was always changing scopes, projects & interests faded, so lots of man-power was lost at that time to actually finish the game. And since a lot of other original titles were being developed (Portal, TF2, L4D, L4D2, Portal 2, DoTA2), the development simply didn't happen. Eventually a lot of time passed and indepentent teams within Valve started prototyping their own version of the game, but it never actually flourished... Artifact was actually developed with this practice - apparently there are loads of developers there that enjoyed card games at the time.
The focus on VR from Valve's part, and the notion that HL was always developed to show new technologies (HL1 - showcasing FPS narrative, HL2 - showcasing source engine, realism in game & physics, HL:Alyx (and eventually HL3) - showcasing the full potential of a AAA game design for VR), it was the perfect time for them to once again regain a little bit of focus unto the series.
But yeah, I don't think anyone was expecting HL2:ep3 to be a huge revolutionary technology game (that would be expected from HL3, as you're saying), we just wanted the god damn narrative to not end in a cliffhanger
we might actually see a sequel at some point in time.
Hehehehehe, you haven't seen the after credits of HL:Alyx have you?
Won't spoil, but you might be happy