Recently it was reported that Valve will not be announcing anything new at E3. In an e-mail Gabe Newell basically squashed any rumors about Half Life 3, or any other third sequel they may be working on, being announced at the gaming expo. My question is why does Valve keep delaying? Half Life 2 was released ages ago, in 2007 to be exact, so what's the hold up?
In a recent interview with the Seven Day Cool Down podcast Gabe was asked about "Ricochet 2". Ricochet was a mod for Half Life and some think that Ricochet 2 is a reference to Half Life 3.
In terms of Ricochet 2 we always have this problem that when we talk about things too far in advance we end up changing our minds as we're going through and developing stuff, so as we're thinking through the giant story arc which is Ricochet 2, you might get to a point where you're saying something is surprising us in a positive way and something is surprising us in a negative way, and, you know, we'd like to be super-transparent about the future of Ricochet 2. The problem is, we think that the twists and turns that we're going through would probably drive people more crazy than just being silent about it, until we can be very crisp about what's happening next.
Basically "Ricohcet 2" has been changing for the past five years, or whenever they conceived the game. That seems pretty odd to me since Half Life and Half Life 2 were only separated by six years. Half Life was released in 1998 and Half Life 2 was released in 2004. So why is it taking Valve so long to get a solid story arc for "Ricochet 2"? By the way things are going we probably won't see the game until five years from now.
We'll see what goes on, I should start calling Half Life Kingdom Hearts instead. Square Enix is notorious for making us wait for new information on up and coming Kingdom Hearts games. Hopefully Valve comes up with something solid soon or else they might feel the sting of consumer backlash.
