Canceled Half-Life 3 and Left 4 Dead 3 details officially revealed

Today, The Game Awards creator Geoff Keighley released his new project, The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx. The multi-media project (available for $9.99 on Steam) covers the last decade inside Valve and gives an in-depth look at the development of a lot of different projects but notably Alyx.

Of course, you can’t do something like this without addressing the elephants in the room. In the Final Hours, Keighley sheds new light on games like Half-Life 3 and Left 4 Dead 3. He even notes that 5 different Half-Life games have been in development since Episode 2 but doesn’t talk about all of them.

For Half-Life 3, it was in development for a year between 2013 and 2014. It was being developed as a game with procedural generation to create replayability. This included random objectives such as rescuing people, creating new environments and placing enemies differently, and so on. It was being developed on Source Engine 2 but was dropped pretty quickly due to the engine being unfinished.

A similar thing happened on Left 4 Dead 3 which would’ve been open world. It would’ve been set in Morocco and featured hundreds of zombies on screen at once but Source Engine 2’s unfinished nature made it impossible. Another Left 4 Dead game, codenamed Hot Dog so it wouldn’t be discovered by the internet, was also in development but no details were shared.

Valve veterans are more than aware of the Borealis, the time-traveling ship. The ship mentioned in Half-Life also appeared in Portal 2 and would’ve had its own VR game written by Marc Laidlaw. The game would’ve taken place in various different time periods including the Seven Hour War and after Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It would’ve also included a fishing mini-game.

Valve has also been working on a secret project since 2018. If we had to guess, it’s Half-Life 3 for real given the ending of Alyx heavily leads into a new Half-Life game.