“Valve has always seen Half-Life as a way to show off and impress the industry with new technology, but the community doesn’t care about that as much as an ending to a story they’ve been following now for 20 years.” “Regardless of the trends and technical feats it inspired, it created one of the most diehard fanbases in the gaming industry, and that’s because of its subtle, yet engaging, story,” the team argues. First and foremost in its mind is the story unfulfilled. It’s not so much the Half-Life series’ Hollywood facial animation or early physics wizardry that the Borealis team is attempting to follow up, then. “As such we don’t feel like we need to stray from how the game felt in Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and fans don’t want us to – they want this game to feel like a natural progression from the last episode they played, so we’re not planning to diverge from that.”įat chance: Here’s everything we know about the Half-Life 3 release date (no, really) “Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were both games way ahead of their time, so unlike many games released in 1998 or 2004 they still feel great to play today,” the team reasons.
Yet there are few design elements the team feels the need to update for modern sensibilities. Half-Life 2 predated aim-down-sights, didn’t so much have a weapon wheel as a gun catalogue, and featured a default run speed that would make a Siege player throw up. “We decided on Unreal because we felt like it provided us with the best tools and workflow for making a game today.” “We’re confident we can recreate the feel and look of Half-Life 2,” the team says. Fittingly for a series that always pushed technology forward, the game will use not Source but the far fresher Unreal Engine 4. In August 2017, Laidlaw posted a piece of name-swapped fan fiction – step forward Gertie Fremont, the One Free Woman – that very quickly revealed itself to be the plot of Episode 3, following directly on from Valve’s 2007 cliffhanger.Ī 2,000 word blog post seems like a sad end to Half-Life Not just any Valve staffer, but Half-Life lead writer Marc Laidlaw. “The reason that we let them know we’re still alive is because they’ve had so long wondering if this game would ever get made,” the Borealis team says.Īll this feverish community activity, after a decade of malaise and disappointment, can be traced back to a single blog post from a former Valve staffer. These are people who can’t stomach any more silence. Yet through the constant change, the team has scrupulously updated the Half-Life community on its progress. The 80-odd strong development team of Project Borealis is a complicated beast, its many heads swapping frequently as a volunteer workforce does what it can for the fan-made Half-Life sequel before handing off art and code to other, equally driven Freeman devotees.
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