It's been four years since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and fans have had a long time to wait for the release of a new addition to the series. Year after year, fans would anticipate its announcement at E3, only to be denied. In the meantime, Valve has remained in near-total silence about its plans for the series.
However just two days ago, a Steam forum user by the name of ryuuk (presumably named after the Death Note character) made a post titled "Half-Life 3 is officially confirmed!" with the following details:
Mike Dussault, a long time programmer at Valve, recently left the company. I didn’t know him until last week. Let me introduce myself. I’m a freelance artist. I do contract work for a studio in Seattle, through the internet. They have a client access system on their site. I came across Dussault’s resume, while browsing the files section. Now, I know you’re all curious about Valve’s in-house development, but I’m only going to talk about the Half-Life series.
According to his resume, Episode Three was put on hold when Valve decided to move away from the episodic model in late 2007, right after Episode Two’s release. He was a techinal advisor on a cancelled Half-Life title, made outside of the company. Dussault’s work on Half-Life 3′s world programming, and the scripting system (between 2008 and 2010) is also mentioned in the resume.
Posts like this are dime a dozen on the forums, but what makes this case different is that ryuuk was permanently banned for making the post, and the thread was not only locked, but also deleted by a moderator.
A look into his claims would show that Mike Dussault, a former employee at Valve, had in fact worked at the studio for over 10 years. He left the company last September and had begun working with Dreamfly, a non-profit organization. Unless ryuuk intention was to troll the Half-Life playerbase, his claims match up perfectly with the sequence of real events.
The 'cancelled Half-Life title' may well be referring to a cancelled spinoff to the series, which was rumored to be in development at EA.
It remains to be seen whether ryuuk was telling the truth, but the smart money suggests that Valve's plans with the Half-Life series are far from over.
via lambdageneration
