There’s also a very good chance that early Half-Life2: Episode 3 builds are in there, but at the time of writing, nobody has found anything related to the legendary sequel that never came. There’s 12 TB after all, so it’s going to take a long time for the community to sift through all the data and work out what it all means.
In other words, this headline is pure speculative click bait.
But it is a reasonable possibility. More plausible than most predictions. Valve employees have stated that Episode 3 was in some stage of development when it was cancelled, and that several unsuccessful attempts had been made to continue the series. Laidlaw was also still employed at Valve during that period. There’s a very good chance that related material is in the leaked data, even if it isn’t the next mainline game.
Valve never even started HL3. They’ve said so themselves in multiple interviews. I’m not even sure where the rumors about it started unless somehow HL2:Ep3 was just called “HL3” by someone once and it caught on, since the episodic DLC was supposed to be a trilogy but they only ever released 1 and 2.
Half-Life 3 was in development between 2013 and 2014, but dropped because Source 2 wasn’t production-ready, according to Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life: Alyx. It sounds like it never got further than an early gameplay concept, but saying that it was never even started is incorrect.
Hasn’t the source engine been quite considerably updated since Half-Life 2, so it’s not going to contain anything Half-Life 3 related because 2013 is too early for the new engine.
In other words, this headline is pure speculative click bait.
But it is a reasonable possibility. More plausible than most predictions. Valve employees have stated that Episode 3 was in some stage of development when it was cancelled, and that several unsuccessful attempts had been made to continue the series. Laidlaw was also still employed at Valve during that period. There’s a very good chance that related material is in the leaked data, even if it isn’t the next mainline game.
Valve never even started HL3. They’ve said so themselves in multiple interviews. I’m not even sure where the rumors about it started unless somehow HL2:Ep3 was just called “HL3” by someone once and it caught on, since the episodic DLC was supposed to be a trilogy but they only ever released 1 and 2.
Half-Life 3 was in development between 2013 and 2014, but dropped because Source 2 wasn’t production-ready, according to Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life: Alyx. It sounds like it never got further than an early gameplay concept, but saying that it was never even started is incorrect.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200713154054/https://www.ign.com/articles/half-life-3-left-4-dead-3-details-cancelled-valve
Both the headline and the comment you replied to only mentioned episode 3.
…Which they did do a lot of work on, then abandoned to work on HL3. HL3 was very specifically a thing and a different thing
But the context here is EPISODE 3 which had a fair bit of development.
Hasn’t the source engine been quite considerably updated since Half-Life 2, so it’s not going to contain anything Half-Life 3 related because 2013 is too early for the new engine.
Ooo, 2013 episode 3? So half life alyx early builds?