A well-known leaker has revealed evidence that a new Half-Life game is coming.
One day, I dug out my orange box in search of a little nostalgia, and a friend reminded me of the funny line on the cover that read: “The most complete Half-Life 2 collection yet.” Then—let’s just rightly add—we assumed that additional collections would arrive over time, or at least additional episodes. We couldn’t have been more wrong.
As you all know by now, developers have been experimenting with many Half-Life prototypes and ideas over the past twenty years, but none of them came to fruition until the concept of Alyx VR caught the attention of decision makers at Valve. Then Alyx came along, and got the praise it deserved, but since then there has been no news of a sequel.
Gabe the follower has changed this unsustainable state of affairs, collecting all the evidence of Half-Life 3's arrival in a new video. He was the one who previously pulled the cover off Project Deadlock, and this time he specifically found references from the files of the new Valve game.
If all of this is true, the next Half-Life game will be called Half-Life Xen and could serve as a direct sequel to Alyx. It will pick up where the VR episode left off and will largely take place in the multidimensional world of Xen. According to the report, we’ll be able to roam around as a semi-open location, where “intelligent NPCs” will talk to us. In HLX, days and nights will alternate, and a special climate system will keep the world cool.
References to this were found in Deadlock data by Gabe Follower, who even mined the HLX bug reporting window from Deadlock's configuration files. At the time, Counter-Strike 2 was also leaked this way, and its bug window was found by Dota 2 miners.
Valve is clearly trying something out, but we don't necessarily know who will release this game at all.
