Half-Life 3 (or Half-Life 2: Episode 3) is the unicorn of gaming. Some say it exists, some say it doesn't. Valve barely acknowledges it despite announcing a third episode publicly. So where's the truth? Is Half-Life 3 a real thing being made behind closed doors or has Valve quietly given up and walked away from the project? We finally have some answers, albeit not in the most official way.
Andrew Reiner from GameInformer has been working on an article about Half-Life and Valve since 2014. He's gone after dozens of Valve employees in search of answers on what happened to the game but most refused to talk. He eventually put the article on hiatus after hitting a dead end, until he was greeted with a mysterious email with the subject line "Half-Life 3". What follows below is some interesting insight from an anonymous Valve employee regarding Half-Life 3's development and if it even really exists. As mentioned, the employee is unnamed so feel free to take it with a grain of salt, but we firmly believe it is true as GameInformer is a reputable site.
The game never really came close to release, with only teams of less than five people working on the game at a time. The massive gaming giant never even really came up with a plan for the mysterious third episode/game. There were so many different ideas being tossed around, and some people ran with those ideas and failed, Valve couldn't actually agree on a definitive vision for the next entry in Gordon Freeman's story.
Everyone wants Gordon Freeman’s story to continue. People want the series to reach the number three, either as an episode or a full-fledged sequel. How real are those chances?
"There is no such thing as Half-Life 3. Valve has never announced a Half-Life 3. The closest they’ve come is after Half-Life 2, they said there would be three episodes. We only got two of those. That is arguably an unfulfilled promise. Anything else that we might think about as a full game or sequel has never been promised. I only mention that because it’s sometimes frustrating when people sort of assume or have wishful thinking about the future. Because they want to speak about the future, the fantasy starts to become real in their minds, even though they have a completely different form on the developer side."
The amount of creative freedom Valve creators have is fascinating, but how does anything ever get done without people working as a whole?
"I know at various times there have been different groups of people that have started things that they hoped and imagined would be Half-Life 3. I know over the years some of those things have had different degrees of awareness and involvement, whether it’s the inclusion of senior or principle members of Valve, including Gabe Newell. There are also efforts that other people may not have known were going on. All of them are actual, valid things that are happening inside of the walls of Valve. To pick one thing and say, this was absolutely Half-Life 3, or this is Half-Life 3, that’s hard to do given the nature of how Valve works. How that project comes to be or ever manifests is kind of strange.
I remember three distinctly different imaginations of what Half-Life 2 could be, developed sufficiently to where there were storyboards, plotlines, script outlines, concept arts, and each approach was radically different than the others. I think it’s their process to kind of explore to see where things go. I remember having conversations with people at Valve about Half-Life’s story, and where it was going and where it could go beyond Half-Life 2. At that point, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Half-Life 2 would be a story-driven experience along the lines of Half-Life 1, and that there would be another Half-Life game beyond that of the same general construction."
How close do you think Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 has come to release?

"I’ve heard that some teams have had two to three people working on it, and they eventually ran into a wall, and some teams may have gotten up to 30 or 40 people before it was scrapped."
Does Valve owe it to fans to finish what they started? At least wrap up Half-Life 2?
"I don’t think there will be any more. But at any given moment, they make decisions as they come. If some people within Valve make something that they collectively feel is exciting, then it will happen. That’s going to be hard for that to happen now. Every time a Half-Life project gets some gravity and then collapses, it becomes harder for the next one to start up. Because the business changes so much, and there are so many other things to do, it just gets harder and harder. It’s one of those things they’ll always have to accept. People are going to harass them for more Half-Life. The idea of delivering a third episode of Half-Life 2, that’s dead. There’s no universe where that will happen. I think there is a universe where a standalone thing could come together to fill in that hole, but that’s tough.
There are some business connections that could help it, like it being released exclusively on Steam OS. That’s a big thing. People would be like, “Well, I now need to get a Steam Machine.” There would be value in that. Is it enough? If Valve seriously contemplates that, you’d think they would look at bigger things first, like a Steam-native Counter-Strike or Dota 3. Half-Life is big for us who played it, but the game has never really mattered to console customers. The brand really doesn’t have the penetration it deserves"
Valve had some ideas of expanding Half-Life beyond the puzzle, FPS-esque game that it was but some of them were so bizarre that they didn't pan out.
"They were thinking about using the Half-Life characters as a brand for entirely different purposes. Some were bizarre, like turning Half-Life into an RTS, or a live-action, choice-driven game. These things have been contemplated by people, but were never being considered by the whole of Valve as “Yeah, that was the plan.” The nature of Valve is there aren’t plans like that. That’s not how Valve operates. Ideas come from the passion and drive of the individuals within the company’s walls."
We don't want to steal every piece of Andrew Reiner's article, so you can view his full article by clicking right here. Of course, Valve could one day come up with some amazing idea and go off and make the game! But it sounds like that is incredibly unlikely as they seem to have moved on.
Rest in peace Half-Life 3.
