Half-Life 2: Episode 3 story released by Writer of the series.

[Blastfrog]

A fantasy of mine: someone breaks into Valve again and downloads all materials relating to Episode 3, leaks it, and then a team comes along and finishes the game from whatever state it's in, using Laidlaw's "fanfic" as a reference if necessary. Maybe merge the first two episodes in as one continuous game and make the title screen say "Half-Life 3".

 

If Valve won't finish the game, the fans should.

[Nevander]

1 minute ago, Blastfrog said:

If Valve won't finish the game, the fans should.

Amen to that.

[Master O]

18 minutes ago, Blastfrog said:

A fantasy of mine: someone breaks into Valve again and downloads all materials relating to Episode 3, leaks it, and then a team comes along and finishes the game from whatever state it's in, using Laidlaw's "fanfic" as a reference if necessary. Maybe merge the first two episodes in as one continuous game and make the title screen say "Half-Life 3".

 

If Valve won't finish the game, the fans should.

 

Likely reality: someone breaks in, gets caught after downloading it, and anyone who tries to make a mod from it will be sued into oblivion.

[geo]

I don't think people realize Valve only makes third party games official. They're waiting for a fan game of Half-Life 3 before they can release it. Once Half-Life 3 exists, Half-Life 2 episode 3 will be released probably free to bridge over to Half-Life 3.

Edited August 26, 2017 by geo

[wheresthebeef]

I really hope Crowbar Collective takes a crack at a Half-Life 2 episode. Doesn't need to be Episodes 3 as outlined here, but more closer to the cancelled Episode 4. Just a 2-4 hour self contained story set around Half-Life 2, which completely new assets. Mmmmm

[mrthejoshmon]

I just hope Valve just says "fuck it" and sells their IP to someone or outsources it to a company who actually does shit with it.

 

Like the old Gearbox expansions.

[KVELLER]

This is a very awesome and sad day indeed.

[wheresthebeef]

Hopefully not Gearbox themselves

They've greenlit (no pun intended) a mod or two (Black Mesa instantly comes to mind, as does Prospekt, a middling little game made by one guy about Nova Prospekt) and allowed the creators to sell the mods as standalone on Steam; they use a lot of Half-Life 2 assets so I can see another mod team making something and Valve allowing the license.

[ClumsyCryptid]

38 minutes ago, wheresthebeef said:

Hopefully not Gearbox themselves

They've greenlit (no pun intended) a mod or two (Black Mesa instantly comes to mind, as does Prospekt, a middling little game made by one guy about Nova Prospekt) and allowed the creators to sell the mods as standalone on Steam; they use a lot of Half-Life 2 assets so I can see another mod team making something and Valve allowing the license.

Prospekt was really a really cheaply made slaughterfest Half-life 2 mod that was accepted as the canon sequel to Opposing Force.

[CARRiON]

2 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

I just hope Valve just says "fuck it" and sells their IP to someone

 

Considering almost every Valve product has reference to Half-Life, it's what launched the company, and some games have heavy ties in like Portal, that will never in a million years happen. That would be an incredibly stupid move on their part. Gabe said they're working on a possible movie, and that if anything Half-Life does come out, it will be spin-off games. Just because they completely fucked up on the sequel, doesn't mean they're "done" with the brand.

[Teivman]

A Half-Life 3 fan demake in the Idtech 1 would be cool.

[Jaxxoon R]

47 minutes ago, MrD!zone said:

A Half-Life 3 fan demake in the Idtech 1 Goldsrc would be cool.

 

[Lila Feuer]

16 hours ago, Neurosis said:

But we all know how gamers are, so maybe they feared massive backlash.

Lot of people hate bummer endings and episode 3 sounds like it was gonna end really depressing, but honestly HL2 was depressing, and things were going to get a lot worse before they got better. These were just a select few characters in a grand universe we'd been following since the beginning so naturally we're going to be very attached to them and it's painful to see them go. But such as life. I'd gladly accept spin-offs and prequels as City 17 wasn't just the only place affected by Combine influence. Who knows what else is going on in the world?

[40oz]

haha that story sucks. The whole thing is some nebulous sci-fi fantasy nonsense. I honestly had no idea wtf was going on HL2 most of the time, and this is just exponentially worse. I dont know how anyone is supposed to convert this into a playable game. There's no sensory details or anything visually stimulating that would suggest there's any likelihood that an interesting game could come out of it, especially in a first person shooter universe.

 

If this story has any weight in the creative direction of the game, it would come as no surprise to me that the team wasted massive amounts of time and resources creating stuff that had to get scrapped and remade over and over. I cant see this story making sense to anyone but the author himself.

 

In a shooter game, you have to dial the narrative waaaaaay the fuck back and let the story unfold itself. No amount of closed character dialogue events is gonna make any of this pseudo-science make sense to the average player. They should have toasted this plot a long time ago.

[Doom64hunter]

10 minutes ago, 40oz said:

I honestly had no idea wtf was going on HL2 most of the time,

I think that says more about yourself than it does about the game.

[[McD] James]

22 minutes ago, 40oz said:

haha that story sucks. The whole thing is some nebulous sci-fi fantasy nonsense. I honestly had no idea wtf was going on HL2 most of the time, and this is just exponentially worse. I dont know how anyone is supposed to convert this into a playable game. There's no sensory details or anything visually stimulating that would suggest there's any likelihood that an interesting game could come out of it, especially in a first person shooter universe.

 

If this story has any weight in the creative direction of the game, it would come as no surprise to me that the team wasted massive amounts of time and resources creating stuff that had to get scrapped and remade over and over. I cant see this story making sense to anyone but the author himself.

 

In a shooter game, you have to dial the narrative waaaaaay the fuck back and let the story unfold itself. No amount of closed character dialogue events is gonna make any of this pseudo-science make sense to the average player. They should have toasted this plot a long time ago.

 

No.

[40oz]

25 minutes ago, Doom64hunter said:

I think that says more about yourself than it does about the game.

yeah, yeah sure.

 

ive designed many Doom levels before, watched people play and comment on my maps, and have watched people respond to criticism on their levels for years. People play shooters to run around, shoot stuff, solve puzzles and find the exit. When you create a story that's even a third as intricate as that, its completely lost on 95% of the people that play it. Besides the players going out of their way to read up on it on their own time, the only way to communicate any of that in a cohesive way is to strap the player to a chair and spoonfeed it into them. (Which HL2 did many times, and when it wasn't, it was going through a massive identity crisis)

 

By doing that, youre smothering what's most important -- the gameplay. There's no game here. Its a steaming pile of fantasy lore and a game designer's nightmare. I'm sure Valve already knows this by now, but if there was any seriousness into building a game around this, Half Life 3 never had a chance.

Edited August 26, 2017 by 40oz

[Cruduxy Pegg]

In all honesty why the hell is Dota 2 treated like it killed Half-Life and not valve itself? If anything dota 2 target players aren't even fps players (the game needs hundreds of matches to even get average at in a completely different genre). 

 

[[McD] James]

@40oz I'm baffled as to what you're going on about. Half-Life 2's story is very straightforward and orthodox. It's a conventional alien invasion story, that features many of the assemblages you'd expect from a modern-day dystopian thriller. Never was there anything convoluted, pretentious or narratively incoherent about Half-Life 2. Where it shines is not in its setup, but rather in its execution. The atmosphere, intelligent character interplay, and pacing all blend together seamlessly with meticulously polished gameplay and exhilarating set pieces to make for one of the most immersive gaming experiences of all time. Saying that Half-Life 2 is anything less than a masterful work of art confounds me.

[wheresthebeef]

Dota 2 didn't kill HL2, hats did

[Cruduxy Pegg]

So tf2 killed HL 2?

[Mr. Freeze]

42 minutes ago, 40oz said:

yeah, yeah sure.

 

ive designed many Doom levels before, watched people play and comment on my maps, and have watched people respond to criticism on their levels for years. People play shooters to run around, shoot stuff, solve puzzles and find the exit. When you create a story that's even a third as intricate as that, its completely lost on 95% of the people that play it. Besides the players going out of their way to read up on it on their own time, the only way to communicate any of that in a cohesive way is to strap the player to a chair and spoonfeed it into them. (Which HL2 did many times, and when it wasn't, it was going through a massive identity crisis)

 

By doing that, youre smothering what's most important -- the gameplay. There's no game here. Its a steaming pile of fantasy lore and a game designer's nightmare. I'm sure Valve already knows this by now, but if there was any seriousness into building a game around this, Half Life 3 never had a chance.

 

The problem here is you're looking at too many games through a Doom lens. 

[Era Di Cate]

I am looking at 40oz's comment and I see heresy.

 

Half Life 2 IS NOT Doom.

 

Doom IS NOT the ideal shooter game.

 

Half Life 2 had excellent gameplay. Doom also had excellent gameplay. But Half Life 2 bases it's gameplay on creativity and experimentation. Doom is more arcade like. Half Life 2 had the fucking gravity gun. But even if you only used the Zero-Field Energy Manipulator when it was absolutely essential, the rest of the gameplay was great because of solid shooting mechanics, beautifully translated from 1998 into Source.

 

Also, no cutscenes at all. The player was in control of his actions all the time (sans several minutes of all episodes together whenever the player/Gordon Freeman was pinned down by something, rather than just locked into talking with NPCs). Yeah, scripted sequences, the bane of old shooters, I understand that, but if you don't like scripted sequences, get Garry's Mod and fuck with the game as much as you like. And look, there is a Doom source port for GMod as well, called gmDoom, and you can play the entirety of Half Life 2 and episodes with the gameplay of Doom.

 

But you cannot change the essence of Half-Life, and what makes Half-Life; Half-Life. Half-Life has a way of telling stories, too bad they are not demo-compactible nor playable with prboom+, boo hoo. If you have a issue, don't use Half-Life, one of the best FPSes, as a scapegoat.

 

Half-Life is not Doom. Half-Life does not posses the same gameplay as Doom. Half-Life shares a common ground with Doom with both being shooters, but nothing else.

 

If this was a "prank" or a troll attempt, I don't care. This goes for everyone.

[ClumsyCryptid]

If you didn't care you wouldn't of gone off on a defense on Half-Life.

[Era Di Cate]

1 minute ago, ClumsyWizard said:

If you didn't care you wouldn't of gone off on a defense on Half-Life.

I don't care if it is a prank.

 

Rest I care deeply so.

[ClumsyCryptid]

40oz was just being himself.

[snapshot]

Man and I thought I was the only Ignorant person around here.

[Era Di Cate]

And I am myself as well :P

 

I wish I was a superhuman with telekinetic powers but here I am :D

[DoctorGenesis]

This makes me sad, I knew they wouldn't make HL3 anyway, but holy crap. Any new H-L game would be nice, official or semi-official.

[Flesh420]

4 hours ago, 40oz said:

haha that story sucks. The whole thing is some nebulous sci-fi fantasy nonsense. I honestly had no idea wtf was going on HL2 most of the time, and this is just exponentially worse. I dont know how anyone is supposed to convert this into a playable game. There's no sensory details or anything visually stimulating that would suggest there's any likelihood that an interesting game could come out of it, especially in a first person shooter universe.

 

If this story has any weight in the creative direction of the game, it would come as no surprise to me that the team wasted massive amounts of time and resources creating stuff that had to get scrapped and remade over and over. I cant see this story making sense to anyone but the author himself.

 

In a shooter game, you have to dial the narrative waaaaaay the fuck back and let the story unfold itself. No amount of closed character dialogue events is gonna make any of this pseudo-science make sense to the average player. They should have toasted this plot a long time ago.

 

Agreed.  I read all the way to your post wondering why everyone has such a boner for the "story."  It's not even a story, two pages of an outline isn't some grand two-page knuckle jerk.