For those who aren't up on their Half-Life history, here's a very brief lesson: years ago, there was going to be something called Half-Life 2: Episode 4/Return to Ravenholm. It was to be a collaborative effort between Valve and Arkane Studios, best known for Dishonored.
The episode was to take place some time after Episode 2 and saw Gordon Freeman returing to the zombie-infested town of Ravenholm. Over the years, various bits and pieces from the cancelled game have made the rounds, and just the other day, a few new screenshots have managed to surface.
They can be seen in the following video, which has been combined with animation tests that surfaced some time ago, from an Arkane Studios employee's portfolio:
GamesRadar has the following from Valve's Marc Laidlaw, who explains why Return to Ravenholm never came to be:
"We are big fans of Arkane and wanted to come up with a project we could work on together… We threw ideas around, they built some cool stuff, but we eventually decided that it didn’t make sense to pursue it at the time. As I recall, we felt like a lot of the staples of Ravenholm–headcrabs and zombies!–were pretty much played out, and the fact that it would have to take place sometime before the end of Episode 2 (so as not to advance beyond where Valve had pushed the story) was a creative constraint that would hamper the project…and Arkane."
