@@ElRinconDeLaPapaThat’s the whole point, they didn’t release HL3 because they wanted to innovate and bring an elevated experience with each new game and the technology wasn’t there at the time
>yeah so the reason we never released was because *music ramps up* >mumble mumble story forward >what? I can't hear you >DOTA mumble mumble Half-Life Alyx *music reaches peak volume* >mumble mumble opportunities >so that's why
Game developers seem to have this spectrum that goes from "we won't put out a new game unless we can do something completely groundbreaking and innovative" to "just pump out a sequel every year no matter what", and unfortunately a lot of them seem to land on either extreme. I wish more of them could find a happy medium; we don't want the same tired slop every year, but we don't want to have to wait 20 years to get a new entry in our favorite series.
Yeah well Half Life as a series is greatness, and greatness cannot be forced. Both installations of the franchise were groundbreaking but it relied on the technology as a vehicle. Half Life has always been setting the bar for everyone else; if they want to get even close to living up to the hype, they need that vehicle to bring the franchise to where it belongs, and even with all of the neat tech of today, it isn't enough to justify another Half Life game, at least that's what I think how Valve sees it.
on average thats fine. while you wait for the new half life, you have hundreds of annual sequels. and a lot of indie stuff like half life was back in the day
Yes! You don't have to settle for extremes. Sometimes it's fine to just reintroduce a concept people liked in the past if it's been absent long enough to feel fresh again. Like people at Nintendo asking for a new F-Zero or Punchout game. You don't need to re-invent the wheel every time. If you get stuck due to perfectionisim and a need to overdeliver, you end up with Silksong and the Hollow Knight community. Where people cope for it to release for so long that they grow bitter and all the hype is lost. The longer it takes to come out, the more unreasonably high expectations begin to build up. Since "they're taking such a long time to release this game, surely it must be THAT good?". And now you're not gonna make everybody happy.
I like how he goes from the failure to my PERSONAL failure Hes not blaming anybody his not blaming the fans the staff his not pointing the blame to any others which i really like
@@SkyRied1 He looks so sharp and lean from what i'm used to. Not even sure i like it 😅🫣 Where is my good ol gabe. jokes aside. He looks great. And i believe it's also because his company finally reached what he wanted for it. I think what we are seeing is someone who achieved their goal in life. What a legend 👌
Yeah. Now they have all this baggage and expectations to deal with when they should have had a clean slate. All they needed to do was push out a 6 hour campaign.
well that is ur vision but what matters are artist behind this art... and maybe just ending Combine plotline is not something that should be just small thing in last half life with other problem in the new one... maybe we will never get really rid of a Combine.. We will see with hl3
Depends on when the game comes out. Gabe Newell is still in his early 60's, if he lives as long as the average American citizen then he's still got 10 or so more years in him.
Miyamoto: "...since the first episode [of F-Zero] on SNES many games have been made but the series has evolved very little. I thought people had grown weary of it."
I think you misunderstood what he was trying to say. They're not waiting for a gimmick, they're waiting for a leap. The physics and graphics of Half-Life 2 was not a gimmick, it was a leap forward in technology. They were just waiting for that next leap to justify making a new game. If they didn't do that then we would get something like call of duty. Do we need a new cod game every year? No, the justification for a new game goes beyond continuing the story or because it would make a lot of money. Its the same reason why Valve has plans for a new steam deck, but won't make one until there's a leap to justify a new handheld.
I think a big reason why they didn't just ship it without some mind-blowing new innovation was how much they overpromised. I remember some interview between Geoff Keighley and Gabe where Gabe said something like Episode 3 having an absolutely ground-breaking, mind-blowing new gimmick that will make the Portal Gun and Gravity Gun seem insignificant in comparison. Would have been the most awkward situation to be in if they said that and then just released a regular Half-Life 2 episode.
@@tohopes So many clear broken promises and lies, yet this guy is mostly immune from criticism from many people, like some politicians or religious figures
Look there's got to be a middle ground between "we're going to pump out whatever garbage we want" and "we're not going to release a game unless it changes the industry". Because yeah Half-Life Alyx was incredible, it's the best VR game ever by a wide margin. But we don't want another VR game, we want Half Life 3. And they refuse to make it not because it won't be good, not because it won't make money, but because it MIGHT not be an industry changing masterpiece. They still made artifact though, that's worth their time.
@BronzeAgePepper Ok Counter-Strike 2 is literally just a graphical update for CS:GO. And deadlock is actually friggin amazing. So no that argument doesn't really work.
@@BronzeAgePepper calling Overwatch 2 a MOBA is insulting to the entire MOBA game genre, and i say this as an avid MOBA hater myself. Overwatch 2 is just simply a shooter videogame you play to get pissed off. you either curb stomp the other team, or you're the one getting curb stomped. there's no inbetween.
@@superkill749 hmm? Overwatch is definitely not a MOBA are you completely delusional? Have you played overwatch? Its a hero shooter. Why do you think Deadlock was such a surprise to everyone? Because its a tps-moba which the industry has never seen before - thats literally the first appeal for Deadlock, thats why it made waves, thats why its interesting - its a sub-genre that wasn't ever really considered until Valve, a AAA company, made it. To call Overwatch a MOBA... What are you ON dude? Seriously, have you played *any* MOBA, ever? There are distinct features, gameplay loops and traits common in all MOBA games. Overwatch is *the* definition of a TF2 clone, not follow-up. Valve has always tried to innovate in games. The FPS hero shooter genre can be accredited entirely to Valve with the release of TFC 1999. And so they have tried to innovate in the MOBA genre as well with Deadlock, whether they were successful or not is up to you. But to say Deadlock is garbage, especially *soulless* slop immediately tells me that you haven't even bothered to watch gameplay of it let alone play the game. Deadlock was almost universally praised by the MOBA community, *and its not even released yet* . Clearly you don't play MOBA-s, which is fine, but you have a completely incorrect understanding of how they work, and therefore are judging deadlock based on incorrect parameters, *HINT: DeadLock is not about aiming like an fps/tps*. Take your second-hand opinion back to tiktok, those 'gaming veterans with *true taste*' will agree with you.
I feel a lot of people are missreading what happened. Its not just bc le half life ep 3 wasn't innovative, it was by the time they were working on episode 3 it would have ultimately been a disappointment. I.e "hey this game is only 6 hours long and it took 4 years what the fuck". So they tried making episode 3 into half life 3. One thing. That failed miserably probably due to whats said here, and maybe there not being enough story for just the game. Not saying i agree hell the devs even said THEY REGRETED NOT DOING EPISODE 3 IN 2009
I think another factor is they realized they were writing into the end of the story while leaving so many things unexplained. Im not sure they can even take the series anywhere after the combine. and having the series end on an episode would suck (especially with no innovation)
@Apathy474 i dont mind many mysteries being in the series by the end tbh. I don't want a gman reveal. I want answers that lead to more questions since i think thats why half life has been in my head for so long
This insinuates that they are making the story up as they go, "Lost" style, rather than having a planned arc with an end point, if not an actual beginning, middle, and end. Too many stories in the current era of media are told with an amazing hook at the beginning to draw in an audience, only to completely fumble anything resembling a satisfying ending.
Always took this statement with a gain of salt because episode 3 was not a new game. It was DLC. It was advertised as DLC, yet whenever he talks about it like it's a new game and I wonder if there was something behind the scenes that actually caused the cancellation.
Because it basically was a new game. Episode 2 was over twice as long as Episode 1 and was nearly 2/3s as long as half life 2. Had they kept the same scale ramp up that they had going (and they would have) episode 3 would have been as long if not longer then Half Life 2. And while they arnt building a game or engine from scratch the prospect of spending what would have been the eighth year on more half life 2 was not appealing. A full other HL2 with 2 new weapons and 1 new enemy, more of the same shit theyve been doing. All the meanwhile there were other new titles and IP in the work that were a breath of fresh air for the team, its easy to see why episode 3 withered on the vine.
so, to recap wtf happened with episode 3 it started life as an episode, just more Half Life 2, but Valves desire to innovate took over and it started becoming much more then either episode 1 or 2 so to the era of Half Life 3, Valve had to many ideas to fit into a small episode, but funnily enough, not enough ideas to build a game, and that leads us to where we are now
@@alex3haolin Yes? Ep1 and 2 both introduced a single new enemy each. All they had for Ep3 before it got canned 2 years into development was 1 new enemy the blob. Epsidoe 2 only having 1 new enemy didnt make any shorter by the way, I dont see how in your mind more game length will always equal new enemies.
If I remember correctly, it started as Episode 3 but a few years in Gabe stated it had become bigger than just an episode, and more like a brand new game.
Yup. they pulled a Nintendo and couldn't find a strong enough gimmick so they didnt make the game. I honestly hate that. A game doesn't always need to have something starkly different. People enjoy more of the same from time to time. That's why they can play the same multiplayer game matches repeatedly, and why fromsoft does well too. People love the souls series because that genuinely is more of the same or slight tweaks or twists on the formula. And compared to now, there's gotta be some regret. The AAA games industry does not care enough about innovation when it cant even get the basic starting line correct with good game design or level design. Hell, numerous MMO have people playing where it gets to a point that its too samey and people still play it and buy. This was too idealistic. People wanted Episode 3 for the story and for Valve quality gameplay. Even if it wasnt anything new. It's all so damn disappointing that the series, the writers, the level designers, everyone was forced to rot instead.
@@StormierNik So you mean to say that it's just the IP that makes the game shine, and not how it offers functions and new ways to play the game? dude, its a first person shooter that explores a whole fictional world, it is nowhere near similar to God of war where it's fighting system is very captivating as you are progressing through the story. They probably wanna do something like how they made hl2 and THEN portal, the new flowing ideas a new engine, new ways for players to interact with the environment but the tech isn't up to par with their creativity and vision for the third release yet. so they had to put the game down for the better or for worse. and I understand you, We don't want this to be postponed any longer just because they couldn't find the right way to do the game, when the people know how it should be done- but that's really the problem, if the players are just hyped and amazed by the game just because it was released and not because of what it has to offer then, what's the point? are they just releasing the third installment just for the sake that the people will be happy? As developers, they have very strong values on their own works- that they will not follow any more standards that the industry has put on their shoulders to only stand on their IP. I really believe that they will come back on the game, and finish it. It's just not now... maybe I'm just too early for this world, I really want to play all of the series before I die.
@@StormierNik They weren't looking for a "gimick", the Half-Life series has always been used to _innovate_ on gaming, not just to become complacent within its own realm. He could've pushed the part out, "finished the story", but he couldn't get past the fact that it truly didn't feel like what half life meant.
I was hoping that in HL3 we would see; "Carbon stars with ancient satellites colonized by sentient fungi. Gas giants inhabited by vast meteorological intelligence's. Worlds stretched thin across the membranes where dimensions intersect, ...Impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary."
Leaving it on a cliffhanger was a better choice than moving forward with a bit of uncertainty? Hard to believe they really couldn't have just made a short conclusion and followed up the story later on, or something.
It was way better for them b.c. ppl keep talking about a product that never came. If they would release it or HL3 now, it would be 17y later and ppl would be dissapointed b.c. there was so many time to build up expectations.
He should finished that last episode because he promised it. He left a series unfinished and I think that is worse than not innovating. Which Valve probably has a ton of innovative concepts they're sitting on that would still impressed even if it's half-baked.
I mean, in terms of their company, no. Every major release that they did back in a year, was about technological advancements. That is also the reason, why HL:Alyx is made in VR, because it's the best new technology that is out there to experiment with.
The thing about Valve that me and my friends realized a while back is they’ve set the bar for themselves way too high. They have an addiction to innovation. Which is why I feel like we don’t get game from them like I wish we did.
I don't get why you guys all wanted the story to end so much you would have wanted a worse game. Gabe doesn't agree with this vision, he wanted the best game possible for players.
I can understand the circumstances for why hl3 never came out, but they’ve left a story on a cliffhanger for decades now. You have to acknowledge that if you think stories in games are worth telling, then they’re worth finishing.
'If we ain't doing something new, we won't ship it', I hate that mentality, but I do it all the time too '~' one can only wonder what new next gen mechanics in HL3 while burdening the weight of expectation of a sequel
i think in the last sentence he clearly says that there's no innovation left, that couldn't be shown by someone else in the industry, so for me it seems that they Close HL theme for good, or until Gaben dies and someone else gets rights for the IP :(
I get this attitude if they were talking about why we’ve never got a Half-Life 3, to want to do something completely new and unique to the medium, but imo episodes 1 and 2 didn’t bring anything new to Half-Life 2, and I wish they would have just wrapped up with episode 3.
I love you Gaben, but holding yourself, and other teams (Arkane, which was basically ghosted by Valve despite being VERY enthuesastic about wanting to finish Ravenholm, only for Valve to show up and cancel it despite their ideas and begging) to such astronomically high standards as pushing the industry forward completely with each new half life release is unhealthy. I get that for a third half life game and all, but episode 3 should have been completed, and Arkane allowed to finish what they were working on, in my opinion. Especially when episodes 1 and 2 were completed and didn't do much to push the industry forward except create one of the biggest blueball moments in gaming
And the funny thing is: As much as we all like all the innovations Hl1 and 2 brought to the industry, most of the HL fans only wanted one thing of the sequel: Finish the Hl2 story arc.
The episodes had very small innovations, mainly just graphical improvements with things like HDR and higher model details (mostly noticeable in Episode 2). Episode 3 could've been just that, a new Half-Life 2 episode with 2 or so years of progression in video game graphics, and a few new enemy types and gameplay mechanics. And then if they really wanted to push for innovation later down the line, after finishing the Half-Life's story, they could just do in-universe spinoffs like Half-Life: Alyx. Plus, I really don't get that mindset of "we have to innovate if we want to continue with Gordon's story" when Episode 1 had like, nothing innovative for gaming that wasn't already in Half-Life 2.
Agreed exactly. It is good to want to push the industry forward, but it should not be your singular goal. Fans have been disappointed for nearly twenty years because Valve couldn't just sit down and accept that they aren't always going to make masterpieces and that's a shitty thing to do. Well-intentioned as it may be, the end result is the same as any other company that refused to make a sequel because it wasn't popular enough and that limited demand meant it wouldn't make enough money to suit their shareholders. At the end of the day, all your fans see is that you disappointed them and didn't give them what they really wanted and what they wanted in this case was not out of reach and it was not unreasonable: finish the fucking story you wrote.
I'm glad someone else is bringing this up - It's not like Valve was just holding themselves back but they outright forced the cancellation of another Halflife project by a team who was incredibly motivated and brought great ideas to the table, yet valve just sweeps that under the rug by saying that they couldn't make it work, which is just a lie. It's framed like Arkane couldn't finish the project, when the truth is that Valve would not let them.
the question i think all fans are asking is how could you innovate the gameplay further without straying away from the world that half life is grounded in
It didn't need to be ambitious, it just needed to wrap up the Half-Life 2 storyline so that 'Half-Life 3' could start fresh and be the innovative game. Half-Life 2: Episode 3 should've been just that, the final step in the Half-Life 2 engine. If the "need to innovate" was really the big thing holding Gabe and the team back, then that's just crazy to me.
@@HorrorTactico Yeah, Epistle 3 was gonna be the Last of Us 2 of Half-Life & Mark Laidlaw was gonna be the Neil Druckmann. Good thing Valve isn't spineless like Sony. Well, not in that way anyway. Sure do wish they'd make a game though. And not another one with an incredibly expensive gimmick that radically changes the whole gameplay concept & requires you to set aside a whole room in your house for it.
@@D_YellowMadness Lmao "a whole room in your house", "expensive gimmick" you are just as prepostreous as the things you criticize. HL games were never meant for console peasants or people who think $200 VR displays are expensive. You can fuck off, tourist. Let the fans discuss.
As much as I want to go back and replay Half Life and it's episodes, I hate knowing that it's a big cliffhanger at the end of episode 2 that will never get finished
Valve’s biggest failure will always be to never dare to finish what they started. There is an art to orchestrating the perfect ending for a franchise, and Valve will never push that envelope.
Agreed, The Half Life franchise ended with the worst cliffhanger in gaming history. My personal headcanon at this point is that they all died and the combine won, because that's the situation Valve left us with.
@@DarkElfDiva Say what you will about Mass Effect, at least we got an end to the story. Valve just blew off all the fans that loved the franchise because "boohoo no new tech".
I don't think even a single commenter on this video actually watched the documentary and are only jumping from 2 equally ridiculous extremes that are not what is actually being communicated at all. It's 'Valve refused unless it was the most innovative gimmick game ever' or it's 'Valve didn't make it because they hate the fans are I am entitled to HL3.' Binary brain. They were burnt out by Half Life 2 and struggled to think of anything new or interesting to do. Almost every Half Life chapter introduces something new that will have all sorts of different interactions with other elements of the game. Enemies, weapons, objects, vehicles etc. This is the kind of thing they talk about all the time in the doc. By the time you get to ep3, they've already done so much within Half Life 2. Why rack you brains trying to come up with new ways to spice things up, which Half Life games are ALWAYS DOING when there are exiting new games in development? Once again this is not 'Valve refused to make it unless it was groundbreaking and extremely innovative.' That's just taking it to the most extreme.
Was looking for this comment. Some of the responses are absolutely extreme, as if it were still 2009 and Episode's 3 cancellation was just announced yesterday. Gabe worded the reasoning somewhat confusingly, but I think it really does just boil down to burnout. They didn't want to push a finale because of a concern of mediocrity, and this simply just got worse the longer they dwelled on it-- which is where the notion of Episode 3 not being groundbreaking enough being what Gabe meant. Half Life 2 was already almost 3 years old by the time Episode 2 came out, so I'm sure the age of Source in an era of rapidly advancing gaming made it much harder to commit to that final episode as they thought they had exhausted what they could do with Half Life in Source. While Source was still used for games like Portal and LFD, but as was said in the documentary, Episode 3's development would have taken up the time that would instead be used for LFD.
yeah this video makes it sound like gabe alone killed ep 3. a lot of people just didnt want to do HL anymore or didnt think there was anything really interesting to do with it. and after they had to pause ep 3 to help with left 4 dead, by the time they were done they decided "eh the episode 3 ship has sailed"
I know we're all supposed to love Gaben, but just for a moment think critically here. Episode 1 and 2 didn't push any major boundaries, and we weren't told to expect that. We signed up for three episodes of story and we paid money under the promise of shorter content more often. We got two episodes, massively delayed. This is a shitty excuse followed by "it wouldn't have been that hard".
Valve would never want to discuss openly about how their own internal objectives shifted at the time, especially when Steam began making them so much money that they never needed to ship a game ever again in order to stay afloat. Ironically, with all of the money and time in the world Valve struggled to release anything seriously innovative for the better part of a decade. And yeah, the comment about it 'not being hard' to finish EP3 back in 2008 registered like spit upon the dying flame of my childhood hopes.
In interviews it feels like Gabe is a hostage in it's own company, like you can see he wants to do projects but never could do it and he never say out loud why but again you can see it in his face that he would love to disclose the "why" once and for all.
They explain why in the documentary, they thought that they've tackled all manners of fun and interesting ideas they had for HL2 with Ep 1 and 2 and by Ep 3 they simply got burned out of Half Life 2, having no idea how they could realistically continue Ep 2's ramp-up and figuring out new concepts. When Gabe says that it wouldn't have been hard to finish it, he means that it wouldn't have been hard to finish up the story. But finishing up the story of Half Life 2 was the least of their concerns in a massive list. The unfortunate truth is that Half Life does not exist for the story, had that been the case we'd be on a Half Life 4 by now.
I swore I wouldn't buy another Valve product until we got Episode 3. Honestly never thought it would take them more than a year or two, but here we are 17 years later and I'm still waiting.
The only issue I have with no ep3, or HL3 is that they left these games with cliff hangers. And it seems they knew there might not be a chance they would release the games if they cant find a good reason other than the story. Its kinda shitty if that's their mantra. I dont care its thats their driving motto, I DO care that they developed the games with cliff hangers knowing they may never be resolved. Half life 2 should have fundamentally been planned to have a start , middle and satisfying finish like we see in Half life 1. Its frustrating. Imagine you play halo 1, and Halo 2, then you wake up 20 years later, and Halo 3 never came out and possibly never would. What a fucking shitty way to end something so amazing. Half life 1 wrapped up its story very neatly, so we know they CAN make games that tell a cohesive story and close it out with a correctly satisfying ending. That being said what I think should have is if there wasn't a half life 3 ever, or a portal 3 but given the connections we see with aperture science and black mesa in both games, maybe the sequel to both of those franchises could be told in one single unified halflife-portal game.
Gabe is such a selfish ideologue. He’s overthinking it, put out episode 3 to finish the story and then think about whether there’s enough innovative ideas to justify Half Life 3.
Imagine if George Lucas had said "I knew you all wanted to see what happened after Han got frozen, Luke got his arm chopped off and everything just seemed to go to hell...I just didn't see any technical reason, new cool special effects etc, to justify telling you what happened and give you closure. Fuck your beloved story and characters, every time you play our games you have to repeatedly say goodbye to them at their darkest and most traumatic moments."
Episode 3 didn't need to push anything forward though. We didn't need anything pushed forward, we just wanted closure instead of a cliffhanger. If it was so easy to have shipped it blows my mind that they just decided to stop there and leave it all in such an unsatisfying limbo. Those games and world meant so much to many of us.
You don’t need to have groundbreaking new tech for every new game you release. Just finish the story arc you started two decades ago now, and we’ll all wait for the next game with patience instead of frustration.
What is in mind of Gaben is actually: "There's no any new tech we can use to continue the story. So yeah lets just wait for 20 or 30 years for the next game in case if we ever have a new tech to make a sequel to our players who survived those years while waiting to see how the story will end." Can't believe he's just normalizing that. EP1 and EP2 wasn't that much innovative comparing to HL2. They were just same kind of DLCs to main game. At least just complate the Combine Arc with EP3 and then wait for HL3 until whatever time you want. Even if they ended the story with the HL2 ending and never release the episodes, it could still work for an end to the Combine Arc. Then none would complain this much and they could just release HL3 when the time comes and say "Combine's just left the planet and now we have another alien species to deal with."
Nintendo frequently does something similar where they can't think of a way to make it innovative so they just don't bother, and I wish they'd realize that sometimes it doesn't have to be innovative, It can just be a good plot that ties things up on a story you left unfinished.
You know, Alyx is a great game, but I don't exactly see how solving connect-the-dot puzzles is pushing anything forward either, just because it's in VR. Everything that wasn't a puzzle is great, but 75% of the game is looking around walls for circuits and switches. It seemed scared to really experiment with what's possible in VR, which I thought was the whole point of it being a VR game.
This. Everybody raves about HLA being the greatest thing in VR, when in reality it was the same exact things every other major VR title already did, just with a Half-Life wrapping paper slapped on it. Not one feature of HLA wasn't already present in other popular VR games when it released, yet it got held aloft like the holy grail of VR development. I don't get it.
@@Sigma_Eight Well maybe it's because HLA took those features and combined (no pun intended) them into a coherent 10+ hour story. The visual clarity and smoothness of the game also is quite impressive. I don't know any VR game before HLA that was like this, though I'd be happy to learn about them. I also think that 75% is a little bit overstated unless you for some reason struggled with those tasks. I can agree that when playing the game for a second time the battles felt a bit weak and the difficulty switch is kinda useless as it just chokes you on ammo and turns combine soldiers into bullet sponges.
In other words, HL is the opposite of CoD. It gets an update when Valve have figured out enough worthwhile gameplay and technical innovations to constitute a new game. Not to sell the writers short, but writing doesn't quite have the same challenges as game/engine design. HL does have the dramatic irony of NPCs considering Gordon the One Free Man when everything he does is at the behest of the G Man, but it's not a hugely mind-bending piece of literature like House of Leaves or [insert your fave here]. Several versions of the story were figured out over the years, what's keeping us from getting sequels is all of the stuff on the technical side.
We would have all been very happy to see what happens next. Did Episode 1 or 2 really push anything along in the industry other than episodic delivery? And maybe some dramatic elements in physics (collapsing bridge)? Sure we would have expected to see something new with Borealis. We were fully expecting that. And that would have been enough. I'm pretty sure Half Life 3 would exist if Steam didn't exist. Valve rakes in a mountain of money from that game service. I think a lot of people got the idea that Valve simply shifted from making games and engines to managing their money flow. They're clearly capable - Half Life Alyx proved that, even if that was just a way to push their Index headset.
It sadly shows a lack of integrity with the world building. Had they cared enough they'd have finished what they started, period. Gabe is a great innovator of software, perhaps one of the greatest of our time. But he's proven to not be a very reliable game producer. He should be carrying a bigger weight on his shoulders than what we see in this clip, knowing how many thousands or even millions of people have perished so far while waiting for some kind of closure to their favorite story and beloved characters. A closure to one of the more intense and traumatic cliffhangers in video game history. This is like if Lucas had ended Star Wars right at the very darkest moment at the end of the second movie, before things could finally turn around for the better. These fans all deserved more from Gabe but now they never will. HL3 launching with a cool new mechanic can't ever make up for it.
I think that the real problem with HL2 episodes being cancelled is the fact that Source engine wasn't really that innovative to allow them to keep that going for more than three years in a row. Source engine was really something back at the 2004 release of HL2 but at the same time was beaten by Id Tech 4 used for Doom 3. HL2 was at that time posing as a sort of midcult with very good graphics but also innovative gameplay and atmosphere. Source was hugely optimised and even slower machines could run it. It sure did blew everybody's mind but seen from todays perspective it was merely improvisation with conditions and sources given. (Source based competitive multiplayer games are of course completely different topic) What is the main reason that got Episode 3 cancelled is by my opinion the switch of hardware generations. Valve did want to follow the scheme of expansion packs as perviously seen in original HL. The reality unfortunately wasn't the same as in 90s or very early 00s. Things became much faster at that time. Back in the days i remember being somehow disappointed with EP1 after its release. It was caused by the fact that for some reason there truly (as Mr. Newell said) wasn't any sense in going forward. With HL2 being released relatively near to the break and switch to next-gen consoles it was very unfortunate position to set visibly outdated technology to compete with then showcased next-gen titles. They couldn't sort of make it profitable in the year 2007. Time passed to quickly for EP3.. I mean HL2 was hyperpolished prev-gen fps. I guess we all could agree on that it was honorable successor to HL1. Taking in mind how much I loved HL2 still I wasn't able to imagine myself playing the same scheme three times over with occasional addons. Sure things might have been great but I think that Valve came to the same rational conclusion somewhere along the way. What wasn't very kind decision for HL fans and soon become adult hardcore gamers became good decision for Valve itself. People have to eat and everything costs money. And I don't deny that Valve became cash and money synonymous to Steam. But that's just how things go these days.. Valve is not even to blame by my opinion. It was just gaming industry going through rapid change. EP3 missed its profitability time window.
Haha true. I feel like if Steam wasn't around, SUDDENLY the blob enemy and the ice gun and whatever else was planned for Ep.3 would be GOOD ENOUGH of an innovation for them to ship their next big hit 😂
@@Rocket_PC read between the lines. had his own standards, and switched to Dota the moment he saw the standards not being met. the gaming community would've overwhelmingly voted for finishing the game, even if it offered absolutely nothing groundbreaking. And he knows it, he just got lazy and tired of HL, wanted to do other things
@@VeganCossack this wasnt just a decision he made himself. if you watched the whole documentary, the devs jumped ship to help push out left 4 dead and that ended up pushing episode 3 behind to the point where its ideas wouldn't have been that novel at the time to be interesting. this whole video is gabe mentioning that his personal failure is him not pushing forward for episode 3's release because Valve's structure at this time was incredibly lax on letting employees work on what they want. Moving to L4D eventually led into a snowball effect where devs just wanted to work on anything that isn't half life. my point is that its not just gabe who wasn't interested in episode 3, it was everyone else at valve that led to that outcome.
On the one hand I very much admire the man. On the other hand his reason for not doing Episode 3 is pure bull sh*t. Yes Gabe, finish the story just to make the fans that made you filthy RICH happy. Do it for that reason...
Right? What’s with this revisionist nonsense that ep3 was supposed to be some revolutionary jump. Ep1 was nothing new. It was a CONTINUATION OF THE STORY and it was fine. Ep2 innovated a bit on the formula and made it better. Ep3 could’ve just iterated on that.
Sorry, but I think it's BS that they are trying to say Episode 3 was cancelled because they weren't pushing boundaries and innovation enough game play wise. No offense, but how did Episodes 1 and 2 push boundaries and innovation beyond the base game? They were extensions of the main story/game with pretty much all the same features.
They talked about it in the documentary. I won't list the reasons here (you can just watch the documentary yourself) but both Episode 1 and 2 posed different design challenges that they wanted to tackle. By the time they got to Episode 3 they had some concepts/levels but they were struggling to find a direction to take the game.
@@kiramaticc Every game's development poses "different design challenges." That doesn't mean they're innovative. E.g. Deus Ex 3&4 DLCs did a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the base game. But that doesn't make them more innovative than the base games.
@@ThePreciseClimber I'd argue that both episodes did push the boundaries forward, of course it looks like not a big deal with all the games today, but at the time HL2 felt light years different from anything else on the market, even if the innovations or challenges seem like not a big deal today, back in the 00's they were pushing the envelope - i mean the 90's and 00's where like the golden age of tech and dev advancements, almost every year we got insane leaps in game quality, whereas now it's diminishing returns. So I completely agree with Valve sentiment that episode 3 should have, in some way, test and deliver something new, but at the same time it boxed them into figuring out this "thing" and forgetting that people would be 100% content with just finishing the plot. There is a leak of the potential script somewhere on the internets of what episode 3 could've been and you can kind of see what they were, at least in theory, trying to test/push forward with and it seems like they tested some parts of it with Portal. I guess if you look at Half Life and Portal as platforms for developing tech and demo it, it makes more sense why they didn't release EP3. Still sad though...
If Gabe really wants to set industry standards these days all the game needs to do is be really good and well optimized at launch and cost less than 70 dollars. Seriously I love Gaben he’s a hero, a legend, the best living meme, but this idea that Valve shouldn’t make a game that isn’t “groundbreaking” is so pretentious and honestly stupid it blows my mind. All we want are GOOD games Mr. Newell! You can make a GOOD game, can’t you? Of course you can! So please do it, we will pay you money and sing your praises till the day we die!
It's not about what you want, it's about what they want as a creators. They want hl3 to be as revolutionary, as the previous ones, but can't make it such. Personally, I think that they understand that revolutionary engine is everything for the franchise, cause the games themselves don't have anything special in them. Typical "earth is oppressed by superior alien race" story, basic shooter mechanics with the most typical weapons any shooter has, very low enemy variety, etc. Even mass effect 1, which came out few years after hl2 is much better, cause it has rpg system, making gameplay something more than just boring repeating shooting of the same enemies, actual story with character interaction and stuff
He was just too afraid to fail us, but he's failing us by not releasing it too. I rather get some closure even if it's bad. Even if they make entire franchise of episodes it wont be bad either, i love the themes, setting and action of this game and i'll never get bored of it.
If ANY other developer made an Episode 1 & Episode 2 and then failed to provide the final episode, gamers would be calling the developer a scammer for not delivering on the triology.
I’m trying to understand the ‘innovation’ angle they took with OG HL. Like, I know HL2 was huge- new bleeding-edge engine, detailed facial movement, physics, and HDR in Lost Coast. Alyx being VR. Portal having incredibly creative mechanics. I get that. but uh… What did HL1 do that was groundbreaking? It had an amazing story and tons of dialog which was pretty new at the time, but no new tech or mechanics to speak of. It was like, Quake with an actual story. So tl;dr, not trolling but what tech did the OG half-life have that was groundbreaking or uniquely innovative?
Truth is, it DIDN'T. HL is not the first of it's kind at all, MANY games before it have done the open map ingame cutscenes interactive world. HL story is literally just Doom, Quake, Aliens, The Mist, but regardless it itself is an amazing fun game and story.
An amazing story with tons of dialogue and scripted sequences was the innovation. Not a single game prior to Half-Life came anywhere close to how real it felt on release, even down to something as simple as shooting a wall and seeing a bullethole. I'm sure this wasn't quite as intentional as their attempts to push tech and storytelling with HL2, but they got that reputation and developed that mindset regardless.
i may not have been alive to see the release of HL2 but i know this game shares a childhood memory/memory with lots of people while i do wish we lived in a world with episode 3 i do understand why they didn't go through with it since games are always evolving and with the limits of source i can see why they would have trouble doing so and the points gaben said in this video. people got to look at games from a video game developer perspective.
I wish people understood this. Without new stuff, episode 3 would be just like every other half life 2 mod. Fun to play through the first time, maybe, but just the same game again. Not a masterpiece.
@@45545videos yea people need to realize that, episode 3 would have been the 3rd episode, just more half life 2, and unlike the first 2 episodes we kind of already knew what would happen in episode 3, we go to the borealis and decide to destroy or use the technology on it, would have been fun to play through, but thats it Half Life 3 is what would be and may eventually be innovative
So basically, it didn't do anything innovative or new like the previous HL games/episodes did, so they said "why bother?" On the one hand, I kind of understand from a technical point of view, as Valve had always been (is?) the old school Lucasfilm of their industry; always "raising the bar" in terms of gameplay, be that linear narrative experiences, physics, HDR lighting and shaders, the L4D AI system, etc. What was Episode 3 going to do that was new? Gabe couldn't figure it out, and didn't want to disappoint fans. On the other hand, as a creative writer myself, I cannot help but be tantalized by the loose threads left hanging by HL2:E2 and now HL:Alyx. I feel like the story begs to be finished, and I think it will be one day, but only if Valve can pair a worthy story with gameplay that pushes boundaries like the previous entries did. Personally, I feel like destructible environments and procedural generation would be the way to go with it. That's a frontier that Valve has never really messed with, AFAIK, and I feel like they could be the ones to innovate it in new, interesting ways.
And with this, any questions I have regarding Episode 3 can be put to rest. It wasn't that they weren't working on it, or that they couldn't, but because Gabe always strives for Half-Life to be the series of innovation at Valve and he knew at that point they had more or less done everything they could with the Source 1 engine. Honestly, that's reason enough to me for why we haven't seen a Half-Life 3 yet. I know about the HLX project and so I'm hoping that with the creation of Source 2 and the success that HLA and CS2 have been, maybe now Valve finally has that drive to revisit their old IP's and start creating sequels again.
a lot of people seem to forget that Half-Life has such an emotional attachment to Gabe and other long serving Valve staff that if it’s NOT something revolutionary, they’re not doing the series or themselves justice. the past is the past, if they don’t think it’s good enough, then it’s not good enough-what do we know? we haven’t made two genre and industry defining video games before lol
What nobody said: "I only like Half-Life when they innovate like with a physics engine and choreo actors" Those things are cool, sure, but they are not what made people fall in love with Half-Life. Everyone likes Half-Life because of it's fundamentals and story that's been there and going since HL1. The expertly crafted narrative storytelling with fun characters and great dialog. The synergy of the environment and the responsive feel of it, the steady tempo, and the tight level design. NONE of those things were new with HL2, they were there in HL1 and could have been built upon in HL3/Episode 3. They don't need to reinvent the wheel every time they do Half-Life, because they never really have. Half-Life has always been a very solid foundation with a few differences here and there. It's kind of absurd that this is probably what has held back HL3/Episode 3 for so long.
What "narrative storytelling with fun characters and great dialog" does Half-Life 1 have? The characters are nameless stock characters. Cardboard cutouts. They have no depth. They mostly exist to unlock doors for you, or to let you blow them up with comedic timing while they are going through their funny voice lines. Sure, the scientists and guards are fun and memorable, but they aren't real characters as such. The story only exists in just the exactly right, tiny amount to drive the action forward. The dialogue is mostly scientists or guards taking at most 30 seconds to explain to you where to go and what button to press next. Half-Life 1 is a completely action-focused game. If someone asked for a recommendation for a game with a great story, no reasonable person would say Half-Life 1. Half-Life 2 definitely made big changes and improvements over the first game. But if they released a new Half-Life game which was basically like Half-Life 2 but with better graphics and physics and so on, but no real new innovations people would be disappointed, and rightly so. Just more of the same Half-Life 2 gameplay would not be a winning formula, especially today. But I agree with your sentiment that they don't necessarily need to make something incredibly revolutionary and mindmelting to release a satisfactory sequel. Valves biggest problem seems to be that they have too high standards for themselves (which might stem from them having a too high opinion of themselves but I digress).
But Gabe. All I wanted to do was play through more fun Half-Life shooter combat in the unique Half-Life mould of heavily-scripted, spectacular but not braindead FPS action. I wanted more of Valve's impeccable environment & level design, more of their thorough playtesting and more of their enemies designed to be fun to fight. I wanted the emotional and (largely) believable storytelling. I wanted to avenge Eli, to get Barney a beer and Gordon some psychiatric help at long last. Half-Life wasn't special because of its graphics. Although both cardinal titles were jaw-dropping at the time, and they've aged gracefully for the most part, they were never the thing people came to the series for. It wasn't special because of its gameplay. HL1 suffered from some weapon bloat, some absolutely bullshit enemies, the tendency to die horribly for no discernible reason and some disappointing levels towards the end. HL2, if anything, was too easy and too vanilla with its weapon & enemy sandbox, and leaned far too heavily on its physics engine in retrospect. Also, the geological loading times and rubbish optimisation of both games' engines didn't help. It wasn't even the story. I like the story and the characters, and I LOVE the setting of HL2 in particular (but also HL1) because it's just so bloody immersive and imaginative, but it never lacks for excitement and is happy to discard the trappings of realism for fun's sake. But it doesn't really stack up to analysis. Why are a few thousand malnourished, environmentally-poisoned, untrained refugees armed with H&K MP7s able to beat legions of enhanced, military-trained transhuman warriors with seemingly-infinite armoured, artillery and air support assets at their disposal? How the hell has the Resistance, which seemed to be 50 guys sat in some dingy sewer in the ruins of Smolensk or whatever, managed to occupy and conceal an entire fortress in the alien-filled wasteland while being constantly hunted by the same legions of all-seeing, technologically-advanced, ruthless, godlike fanatics? How have they managed to arm and train all these people when the average citizen is incapable of defeating a sexually aggressive horseshoe crab? How did all these personnel from Black Mesa survive this harrowing world for over twenty years? They couldn't survive being clipped by a carelessly-pushed crate when I was playing HL1. Yeah, yeah, "it's the G-man", but that's pretty lazy storytelling. Even leaving that aside, the game tries to have its cake and eat it where its tone is concerned. The world of the game itself is unrelentingly grim and horrifying, and yet no-one seems desperately concerned. That's how one can get Alyx being traumatised by Stalkers screaming at her in a train car one minute and then get her coming up with the "Zombine" pun the next. It's not impossible to hit the right tone. I'd say the first two Metro games do a decent job of it. Whinge aside, Half-Life was special because it didn't have a single area at which you could point and say "There's your problem". Every other major shooter franchise seems to have an Achilles' heel of sorts, usually in the story or player agency departments, but it varies. Half-Life had points of weakness, but everything came together so well; it was all under such impeccable direction, verisimilitude, rigorous playtesting and elegant level design that it became a masterpiece. It starts with a fairly generic toolset and uses them to create works of genuine video game art - ones which still stand up to replaying even after twenty years. It didn't NEED to be a leap forward. There's no point using the excuse that HL1 > HL2 was a great leap forward, because it was a new story; Half-Life 1 was done with. The story, the world and the challenge of HL2 were not finished. We wanted you to finish it. That was all. But the biggest failing was the silence. You teased us for years, and then you just let it wither on the vine. People loved these games. Now, all they do is remember them fondly while shaking their fists at Valve HQ. Half-Life used to be a giant in the FPS landscape, and now it's just a footnote. Don't blame your neophilia for that. You could have made it - but you didn't. That's what's most frustrating about Valve - they made these genre-defining tours de force, then they just twiddled their thumbs for years and let every one of their franchises that weren't Counter-Strike or DOTA rust in their back garden until they didn't work anymore. You created one of the single best multiplayer games ever, Team Fortress 2, and even though it was still being played and enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of avid fans, you just let it die. The modern TF2 is a thin shadow of the game I wasted my youth on. You created one of the single best single-player shooters ever, Half-Life, and then you just let it die. You created the single best co-operative survival game ever, Left 4 Dead, and then you released a sequel that completely rendered the original obsolete and then - let me check my notes here - oh, yes, you let it die. If you couldn't come up with a reason to justify putting a new game out between 2007 and 2020, why didn't you just admit it, and release us all from our torment? I remember I used to see Valve differently from the usual scum of the games industry like EA and Ubisoft, but over time, I've realised they're all exactly the same. Ugh. Sometimes, I dream about cheese. Thanks for reading this dissertation and noapte bună.
He doesn't want to do it because he knows the Valve engine is over 20+ years outdated and refuses to complete hl2:ep3 and hl3. While, other gaming and engine softwares have progressed.
Lack of innovation should not have stopped Episode 3 from being made, people wanted to see how the story ends even if it didn't bring any new gameplay ideas. They could've just stopped right after that and nobody would've said anything. But oh well
I mean...the entire thing seems like Gabe's fault. Which don't get me wrong. As an adult now, I can't hate his ideas, but he basically stopped EP3 from existing because he didn't think it "moved" gaming. But we just wanted a conclusion to the primary story.
@@overdev1993 I don't think it was just his fault. I think that he drove Valve to a great spot with that idea, but it was a cost analysis. Without EP3 failing we might not have gotten Portal2. Went from a teen to an adult. I just want Gaben to see a kickass HL3 now. Dude deserves it.
That's your problem, playing Half Life for the story and not the gameplay, a problem many videogames have these days. Maybe the best would have been to just cut down Half Life's plot to a minimum to avoid building such an audience.
@@overdev1993 His REAL failure was not understanding that we played for the story, not the tech demo. Episode 3 never coming out killed the franchise for me - anything after it was just meaningless drivel. I haven't touched a Half Life game since, I'd rather forget they exist altogether.
Valve: We changed HL2's atmosphere and look so we could continue it in to Half-Life 3 despite the original story basically ending the same way! Also Valve: Yeeeeah that's effort...shut up and buy more games. Here, take another anniversary edition of stuff we've broken over the last 10 years and not been arsed to fix (nor will we fix the missing EAX functions).
i watched the full doc before coming to this clip, i wanted to see discussion specifically around this clip. also no when people say gabe pulled a nintendo they arent spreading misinformation, he really did say they just didnt do it because they felt like they needed to innovate for it to be good. remember that valve is the same company that has had employees go on record saying they didnt make portal 3 because 'they didnt know where to take the story after chel was out of the facility'.
@@carsonmiller1359 have her voluntarily go back to retrieve the clone baby GLADOS grew from her cells while she slept. I thought that up in a second after reading your comment...it doesnt have to be shakespeares finest work just to make another video game. Either we accept that or we abandon the idea of video game sequels altogether.
@@LoveProWrestling i thought about this too, it seems like valve ended ona cliffhanger already. if you complete the portal 2 co-op campaign the final cutscene shows a room with people still in stasis, they could just make one of them the protag of a sequel, even if chel is free none of those people are. i would be fine witha portal game where someone besides chel is the main character but i guess valve isnt going to do anything with the implications of that cutscene.
The thing that bugs me about Episode 3's cancellation is that it goes against the entire reason for the episodes' existence. After six years of waiting for Half-Life 2, with all the stuff Valve went through during its development - including a year delay from its September 2003 release date - they both didn't want to experience any of that again, and didn't want to keep their customers waiting for so long for new titles. So, instead of designing a true sequel from the ground up with a new or evolved engine, they decided to create these mini expansions that would take far less time and energy to make. However, I think their big issue is that they focused too much on trying to innovate with Episode 3. Episode 1 didn't really accomplish anything at all, besides being their first proper title to incorporate HDR; otherwise, it was just the third act of Half-Life 2 played in reverse. Episode 2 was really good, and in many ways better designed than Half-Life 2, but it didn't innovate or even alter the core experience either, it just made better use of concepts introduced in the main game. I don't get why Episode 3 had to be this standout, industry-defining entry when it was just wrapping up the story.
I wonder how many releases from Valve got shelved because they didn't meet Gabe's obsessive need to have every release break new ground in pushing the technological limits of what a game can be.
The gravity gun in Half Life 2 was the monumental innovation, decades later no other FPS has showcased a better weapon?!! We're continually teased about Half Life 3, OMG it's a crying shame.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
"Our failure----" "MY PERSONAL FAILURE"
b a s e d
That was big of him 😏
"we could have shipped it, like It wouldn't be that hard"
*words marked*
Yeah, those words stung like venom.
It wouldn't have been hard.
If anything, it would have been *too* easy.
good stuff takes time, i am glad they took time to reflect/ focus on other games and hopefully now we will get a decade defining half life 3
@@ElRinconDeLaPapaThat’s the whole point, they didn’t release HL3 because they wanted to innovate and bring an elevated experience with each new game and the technology wasn’t there at the time
@@MrBigBazinga That blob enemy looked sick! I don't know if the majority of PCs could've handled it back then, but that was amazing technology already
The leaner Gabe gets, the fatter my Steam Deck storage grows.
@ULTRAOutdoorsman👈🏻👈🏻😉
Gabe is transferring his life force into every steam deck so he can be immortal
@@notanaveragedoktah8390 Genius!!!
I'm honestly concerned. I hope it is fitness related, but it is also possible it is a result from a brush with cancer, if not currently.
@@ryanartward Hopefully the lost weight from cancer treatment stays off with continued fitness.
>yeah so the reason we never released was because
*music ramps up*
>mumble mumble story forward
>what? I can't hear you
>DOTA mumble mumble Half-Life Alyx
*music reaches peak volume*
>mumble mumble opportunities
>so that's why
dawg your mixing is so fucked up
Of course you have a Deus Ex pfp.
he's literally right tho you can barely hear anything from this crazy good soundtrack
I'm pretty sure the uploader added that music. I don't think it was in the original documentary
I think your speakers/headphones are just busted or something. I could understand him just fine in this video
Gabe Newell said 3 again for 4th time in his life
HALF LIFE 4 CONFIRMED?!?!?!?
@@ramdonfurry OMG YOU HAVE 5 LIKES, HALF LIFE 5 CONFIRMED??????
@@ShinomiyaK1 YOU USED 6 INTERROGATIONS, HALF LIFE 6 CONFIRMED???
@@KevJ_Name IS THAT 7 WORDS IN YOUR REPLY?!?!? HALF-LIFE 7
@@reginald1th HALF-LIFE HAS 8 LETTERS. HALF LIFE 8 CONFIRMED!!!!!!!!!
Game developers seem to have this spectrum that goes from "we won't put out a new game unless we can do something completely groundbreaking and innovative" to "just pump out a sequel every year no matter what", and unfortunately a lot of them seem to land on either extreme. I wish more of them could find a happy medium; we don't want the same tired slop every year, but we don't want to have to wait 20 years to get a new entry in our favorite series.
Companies that sell out for a dollar aren't the same company 5 years later.
former is passionate dev groups
latter is corpo (pure profit/shareholder motive)
Yeah well Half Life as a series is greatness, and greatness cannot be forced. Both installations of the franchise were groundbreaking but it relied on the technology as a vehicle. Half Life has always been setting the bar for everyone else; if they want to get even close to living up to the hype, they need that vehicle to bring the franchise to where it belongs, and even with all of the neat tech of today, it isn't enough to justify another Half Life game, at least that's what I think how Valve sees it.
on average thats fine. while you wait for the new half life, you have hundreds of annual sequels. and a lot of indie stuff like half life was back in the day
Yes!
You don't have to settle for extremes. Sometimes it's fine to just reintroduce a concept people liked in the past if it's been absent long enough to feel fresh again. Like people at Nintendo asking for a new F-Zero or Punchout game.
You don't need to re-invent the wheel every time. If you get stuck due to perfectionisim and a need to overdeliver, you end up with Silksong and the Hollow Knight community. Where people cope for it to release for so long that they grow bitter and all the hype is lost.
The longer it takes to come out, the more unreasonably high expectations begin to build up. Since "they're taking such a long time to release this game, surely it must be THAT good?". And now you're not gonna make everybody happy.
I like how he goes from the failure to my PERSONAL failure
Hes not blaming anybody his not blaming the fans the staff his not pointing the blame to any others which i really like
Best CEO of this era tbh
That is not gabe though. Gabe does not look this good ???? wtf. That's an AI replacement 😅👍
@@gargoyled_drakeI think it's the lightning and way he's dressed, haircut, makeup. He also looks pretty old. He's 62 years old tho.
shut up redditor
@@SkyRied1 He looks so sharp and lean from what i'm used to. Not even sure i like it 😅🫣 Where is my good ol gabe.
jokes aside. He looks great. And i believe it's also because his company finally reached what he wanted for it. I think what we are seeing is someone who achieved their goal in life. What a legend 👌
Episode 3 should have finished the Combine plotline. Half-Life 3 should have been a whole different story, like How HL2 was to HL1.
Yeah. Now they have all this baggage and expectations to deal with when they should have had a clean slate. All they needed to do was push out a 6 hour campaign.
well that is ur vision but what matters are artist behind this art... and maybe just ending Combine plotline is not something that should be just small thing in last half life with other problem in the new one... maybe we will never get really rid of a Combine.. We will see with hl3
i died in half life 3 and then i ate my computer and passed out and woke up and realized i took over europe
@@Somerandompyromain What the hell are you talking about?!
@@Somerandompyromain Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
its sad to think that when HL3 does eventually drop the last line of the end credits is gonna be "In Loving Memory of Gabe Newell"
😢😢😢
I’m not sure what you mean. Gaben is eternal
I saw a post where he said "i plan on being immortal"
Depends on when the game comes out. Gabe Newell is still in his early 60's, if he lives as long as the average American citizen then he's still got 10 or so more years in him.
@@BonW That's assume if Gabe Newell actually have interest completing Half Life 3.
Gabe with his Nintendo mindset: "We couldn't come up with a unique gimmick for the game, so we decided not to make it."
Miyamoto: "...since the first episode [of F-Zero] on SNES many games have been made but the series has evolved very little. I thought people had grown weary of it."
Nintendo also not releasing their old games causing the problem of there being no games
he isnt as bad as nintendo, valve hasnt done to half life what nintendo did to chibi robo. yet.
I think you misunderstood what he was trying to say. They're not waiting for a gimmick, they're waiting for a leap. The physics and graphics of Half-Life 2 was not a gimmick, it was a leap forward in technology. They were just waiting for that next leap to justify making a new game. If they didn't do that then we would get something like call of duty. Do we need a new cod game every year? No, the justification for a new game goes beyond continuing the story or because it would make a lot of money. Its the same reason why Valve has plans for a new steam deck, but won't make one until there's a leap to justify a new handheld.
But Gabe will ship out cs 2. Which is just cs with new textures.
Could you make music louder!! I almost can hear Gabe
It's almost like they forgot to turn it back down after the pauses and b roll footage
Lmao
Yeah dude what the fuck is this i'm here to listen to music not hear what he has to say smh
👍
WHAT! I CANT HEAR YOU THE MUSIC IS YO LOUD! WHAT FID YOU SAY!!
He's looking leaner and fitter than ever before !
He’s always going to look like Santa Claus with that beard of his though
Good on him. He probably wants to live longer
That's just the Half Life beta content leaving his body.
because he has a terminal illness
@@ПётрПавловский-щ1х nah he probably got sad seeing that clip where his belly flops out of his shirt and used it as a drive to work out
I think a big reason why they didn't just ship it without some mind-blowing new innovation was how much they overpromised. I remember some interview between Geoff Keighley and Gabe where Gabe said something like Episode 3 having an absolutely ground-breaking, mind-blowing new gimmick that will make the Portal Gun and Gravity Gun seem insignificant in comparison. Would have been the most awkward situation to be in if they said that and then just released a regular Half-Life 2 episode.
"the gimmick.. was you!" 💲💵🤑
Geoff Keighley is a horrid industry plant.
those guns were always so overrated anyways
@@tohopes So many clear broken promises and lies, yet this guy is mostly immune from criticism from many people, like some politicians or religious figures
@@adonisds umm idc lol i don't really follow or know much about Gaben i'm just here because RUclips recommended this to me
Look there's got to be a middle ground between "we're going to pump out whatever garbage we want" and "we're not going to release a game unless it changes the industry". Because yeah Half-Life Alyx was incredible, it's the best VR game ever by a wide margin. But we don't want another VR game, we want Half Life 3. And they refuse to make it not because it won't be good, not because it won't make money, but because it MIGHT not be an industry changing masterpiece. They still made artifact though, that's worth their time.
then they pulled an Overwatch 2 on Counter-Strike and did a new game that's more bland MOBA-like hero shooter crap like Overwatch but in third person.
@BronzeAgePepper Ok Counter-Strike 2 is literally just a graphical update for CS:GO. And deadlock is actually friggin amazing. So no that argument doesn't really work.
@@BronzeAgePepper calling Overwatch 2 a MOBA is insulting to the entire MOBA game genre, and i say this as an avid MOBA hater myself. Overwatch 2 is just simply a shooter videogame you play to get pissed off. you either curb stomp the other team, or you're the one getting curb stomped. there's no inbetween.
Well they're making HLX now
@@superkill749 hmm? Overwatch is definitely not a MOBA are you completely delusional? Have you played overwatch? Its a hero shooter. Why do you think Deadlock was such a surprise to everyone? Because its a tps-moba which the industry has never seen before - thats literally the first appeal for Deadlock, thats why it made waves, thats why its interesting - its a sub-genre that wasn't ever really considered until Valve, a AAA company, made it.
To call Overwatch a MOBA... What are you ON dude? Seriously, have you played *any* MOBA, ever? There are distinct features, gameplay loops and traits common in all MOBA games.
Overwatch is *the* definition of a TF2 clone, not follow-up. Valve has always tried to innovate in games. The FPS hero shooter genre can be accredited entirely to Valve with the release of TFC 1999. And so they have tried to innovate in the MOBA genre as well with Deadlock, whether they were successful or not is up to you.
But to say Deadlock is garbage, especially *soulless* slop immediately tells me that you haven't even bothered to watch gameplay of it let alone play the game. Deadlock was almost universally praised by the MOBA community, *and its not even released yet* . Clearly you don't play MOBA-s, which is fine, but you have a completely incorrect understanding of how they work, and therefore are judging deadlock based on incorrect parameters, *HINT: DeadLock is not about aiming like an fps/tps*. Take your second-hand opinion back to tiktok, those 'gaming veterans with *true taste*' will agree with you.
he said it so casually, "we could have shipped it" many are hurt by this. my pc couldnt run episode 2 very well but i still needed more
I feel a lot of people are missreading what happened. Its not just bc le half life ep 3 wasn't innovative, it was by the time they were working on episode 3 it would have ultimately been a disappointment. I.e "hey this game is only 6 hours long and it took 4 years what the fuck". So they tried making episode 3 into half life 3. One thing. That failed miserably probably due to whats said here, and maybe there not being enough story for just the game. Not saying i agree hell the devs even said THEY REGRETED NOT DOING EPISODE 3 IN 2009
I think another factor is they realized they were writing into the end of the story while leaving so many things unexplained. Im not sure they can even take the series anywhere after the combine. and having the series end on an episode would suck (especially with no innovation)
@Apathy474 i dont mind many mysteries being in the series by the end tbh. I don't want a gman reveal. I want answers that lead to more questions since i think thats why half life has been in my head for so long
Now we have Half Life Alyx that completely changes the canon timeline. I'm looking forward to what Valve cooks this time
Literally none of that was said here lol.
Edit: except the very last part.
This insinuates that they are making the story up as they go, "Lost" style, rather than having a planned arc with an end point, if not an actual beginning, middle, and end.
Too many stories in the current era of media are told with an amazing hook at the beginning to draw in an audience, only to completely fumble anything resembling a satisfying ending.
Always took this statement with a gain of salt because episode 3 was not a new game. It was DLC. It was advertised as DLC, yet whenever he talks about it like it's a new game and I wonder if there was something behind the scenes that actually caused the cancellation.
Because it basically was a new game. Episode 2 was over twice as long as Episode 1 and was nearly 2/3s as long as half life 2. Had they kept the same scale ramp up that they had going (and they would have) episode 3 would have been as long if not longer then Half Life 2. And while they arnt building a game or engine from scratch the prospect of spending what would have been the eighth year on more half life 2 was not appealing. A full other HL2 with 2 new weapons and 1 new enemy, more of the same shit theyve been doing. All the meanwhile there were other new titles and IP in the work that were a breath of fresh air for the team, its easy to see why episode 3 withered on the vine.
so, to recap wtf happened with episode 3
it started life as an episode, just more Half Life 2, but Valves desire to innovate took over and it started becoming much more then either episode 1 or 2
so to the era of Half Life 3, Valve had to many ideas to fit into a small episode, but funnily enough, not enough ideas to build a game, and that leads us to where we are now
@@Scrum_Master_Revolutionso you think ep3 would've been as long as whole hl2 but at the same time believe it to only have 1 new enemy? Lol
@@alex3haolin Yes? Ep1 and 2 both introduced a single new enemy each. All they had for Ep3 before it got canned 2 years into development was 1 new enemy the blob. Epsidoe 2 only having 1 new enemy didnt make any shorter by the way, I dont see how in your mind more game length will always equal new enemies.
If I remember correctly, it started as Episode 3 but a few years in Gabe stated it had become bigger than just an episode, and more like a brand new game.
wait, they went all in on a 3 episode idea and just pulled a Miyamoto-ism when it came time "finish the game"?
fuck.
Yup. they pulled a Nintendo and couldn't find a strong enough gimmick so they didnt make the game. I honestly hate that. A game doesn't always need to have something starkly different. People enjoy more of the same from time to time. That's why they can play the same multiplayer game matches repeatedly, and why fromsoft does well too. People love the souls series because that genuinely is more of the same or slight tweaks or twists on the formula.
And compared to now, there's gotta be some regret. The AAA games industry does not care enough about innovation when it cant even get the basic starting line correct with good game design or level design. Hell, numerous MMO have people playing where it gets to a point that its too samey and people still play it and buy. This was too idealistic. People wanted Episode 3 for the story and for Valve quality gameplay. Even if it wasnt anything new. It's all so damn disappointing that the series, the writers, the level designers, everyone was forced to rot instead.
@@StormierNik So you mean to say that it's just the IP that makes the game shine, and not how it offers functions and new ways to play the game? dude, its a first person shooter that explores a whole fictional world, it is nowhere near similar to God of war where it's fighting system is very captivating as you are progressing through the story.
They probably wanna do something like how they made hl2 and THEN portal, the new flowing ideas a new engine, new ways for players to interact with the environment but the tech isn't up to par with their creativity and vision for the third release yet. so they had to put the game down for the better or for worse.
and I understand you, We don't want this to be postponed any longer just because they couldn't find the right way to do the game, when the people know how it should be done- but that's really the problem, if the players are just hyped and amazed by the game just because it was released and not because of what it has to offer then, what's the point? are they just releasing the third installment just for the sake that the people will be happy? As developers, they have very strong values on their own works- that they will not follow any more standards that the industry has put on their shoulders to only stand on their IP.
I really believe that they will come back on the game, and finish it. It's just not now... maybe I'm just too early for this world, I really want to play all of the series before I die.
@@kerpjosales1615 yap yap yap
the ice gun was a cool concept. Gabe is just bullshitting. what was the need to push the envelope all of a sudden. a HL3 could very well do that.
@@StormierNik They weren't looking for a "gimick", the Half-Life series has always been used to _innovate_ on gaming, not just to become complacent within its own realm. He could've pushed the part out, "finished the story", but he couldn't get past the fact that it truly didn't feel like what half life meant.
I was hoping that in HL3 we would see; "Carbon stars with ancient satellites colonized by sentient fungi. Gas giants inhabited by vast meteorological intelligence's. Worlds stretched thin across the membranes where dimensions intersect, ...Impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary."
I mean that third one is just Xen
he still wants the real time moss growth
@@carsonmiller1359 Nooooo! Just make a game!
16 times the detail
and thats why we never got it. expectations were just growing and growing
Leaving it on a cliffhanger was a better choice than moving forward with a bit of uncertainty?
Hard to believe they really couldn't have just made a short conclusion and followed up the story later on, or something.
It was way better for them b.c. ppl keep talking about a product that never came. If they would release it or HL3 now, it would be 17y later and ppl would be dissapointed b.c. there was so many time to build up expectations.
essentially half life has always been a tech demo to valve, if there is nothing new to show they just don't do it.
The whole reason they got into gaming in the first place was for its tech
They want to build the matrix.
He should finished that last episode because he promised it. He left a series unfinished and I think that is worse than not innovating. Which Valve probably has a ton of innovative concepts they're sitting on that would still impressed even if it's half-baked.
I mean, in terms of their company, no.
Every major release that they did back in a year, was about technological advancements.
That is also the reason, why HL:Alyx is made in VR, because it's the best new technology that is out there to experiment with.
Quote where he or any of the Valve staff explicitly "promises" episode 3.
theyre still makinfg it though, we've been seeing HLX popping up in the code for a while now, HL3 is the time to innovate not EP3
The innovated the concept of leaving us hanging, twice!!
@@LuiDeca dude. in EP2 developer commentary they explicitly state the story will conclude with ep 3.
The thing about Valve that me and my friends realized a while back is they’ve set the bar for themselves way too high. They have an addiction to innovation. Which is why I feel like we don’t get game from them like I wish we did.
It’s like not finishing your bands album, because you want new different instruments to be invented first.
Its a video game. And if you watched the doc you would understand what they actually meant. It wasn't just up to Gabe lol
@ I did watch it 💁🏻♂️
@@ML8443 well that's embarrassing because your understanding of it is evidently very poor
@@senorbob2909 great sentence mr Bob 😆
@senorbob2909 How embarrassing that you can’t understand a simple comparison dude
0:52 "a tool, a promise to customers, capitalize on innovation, opportunities to build game experiences"? is this guy a CEO or something
Well... yes?
Gabe was always a business-man first.
Was he ever a gamer?
I don't get why you guys all wanted the story to end so much you would have wanted a worse game. Gabe doesn't agree with this vision, he wanted the best game possible for players.
@@thechugg4372 But Half life 1 is the best game in the series
@ckorp666 Gabe didn't start a game company because, "That's where thr money was." He literally almost went bankrupt making half life 2.
when the bar is already above stratosphere its merely impossible to jump over again ..
I can understand the circumstances for why hl3 never came out, but they’ve left a story on a cliffhanger for decades now. You have to acknowledge that if you think stories in games are worth telling, then they’re worth finishing.
'If we ain't doing something new, we won't ship it', I hate that mentality, but I do it all the time too '~'
one can only wonder what new next gen mechanics in HL3 while burdening the weight of expectation of a sequel
brain interface
You don’t always have to do something new for it to be enjoyable.
@@Ty-wf6mg im sure u are fan of every ubisoft game
Just for the leaks
We can see that hlx is gonna have some VERY interesting innovations
i think in the last sentence he clearly says that there's no innovation left, that couldn't be shown by someone else in the industry, so for me it seems that they Close HL theme for good, or until Gaben dies and someone else gets rights for the IP :(
Live a happy, healthy life, Gabe.
And when the time comes, send us another godsend CEO like you
I get this attitude if they were talking about why we’ve never got a Half-Life 3, to want to do something completely new and unique to the medium, but imo episodes 1 and 2 didn’t bring anything new to Half-Life 2, and I wish they would have just wrapped up with episode 3.
That’s one of the reasons I never accepted the excuse for Episode 3.
I love you Gaben, but holding yourself, and other teams (Arkane, which was basically ghosted by Valve despite being VERY enthuesastic about wanting to finish Ravenholm, only for Valve to show up and cancel it despite their ideas and begging) to such astronomically high standards as pushing the industry forward completely with each new half life release is unhealthy.
I get that for a third half life game and all, but episode 3 should have been completed, and Arkane allowed to finish what they were working on, in my opinion. Especially when episodes 1 and 2 were completed and didn't do much to push the industry forward except create one of the biggest blueball moments in gaming
And the funny thing is: As much as we all like all the innovations Hl1 and 2 brought to the industry, most of the HL fans only wanted one thing of the sequel: Finish the Hl2 story arc.
The episodes had very small innovations, mainly just graphical improvements with things like HDR and higher model details (mostly noticeable in Episode 2).
Episode 3 could've been just that, a new Half-Life 2 episode with 2 or so years of progression in video game graphics, and a few new enemy types and gameplay mechanics.
And then if they really wanted to push for innovation later down the line, after finishing the Half-Life's story, they could just do in-universe spinoffs like Half-Life: Alyx.
Plus, I really don't get that mindset of "we have to innovate if we want to continue with Gordon's story" when Episode 1 had like, nothing innovative for gaming that wasn't already in Half-Life 2.
@@ckorp666 If you really think about it, Steam was another attempt at a gimmick that just happened to work.
Agreed exactly. It is good to want to push the industry forward, but it should not be your singular goal. Fans have been disappointed for nearly twenty years because Valve couldn't just sit down and accept that they aren't always going to make masterpieces and that's a shitty thing to do.
Well-intentioned as it may be, the end result is the same as any other company that refused to make a sequel because it wasn't popular enough and that limited demand meant it wouldn't make enough money to suit their shareholders. At the end of the day, all your fans see is that you disappointed them and didn't give them what they really wanted and what they wanted in this case was not out of reach and it was not unreasonable: finish the fucking story you wrote.
I'm glad someone else is bringing this up - It's not like Valve was just holding themselves back but they outright forced the cancellation of another Halflife project by a team who was incredibly motivated and brought great ideas to the table, yet valve just sweeps that under the rug by saying that they couldn't make it work, which is just a lie. It's framed like Arkane couldn't finish the project, when the truth is that Valve would not let them.
the question i think all fans are asking is how could you innovate the gameplay further without straying away from the world that half life is grounded in
0:27 did he just...
?
THREE @@Paschendaele
HE SAID IT
HE CAN SAY THE NUMBER 3
The curse has been broken! *Half life 3 confirmed*
Half life for Gabe has always been a tech demo. Storyline for him is just a requirement. Hos focus is innovation.
It didn't need to be ambitious, it just needed to wrap up the Half-Life 2 storyline so that 'Half-Life 3' could start fresh and be the innovative game. Half-Life 2: Episode 3 should've been just that, the final step in the Half-Life 2 engine. If the "need to innovate" was really the big thing holding Gabe and the team back, then that's just crazy to me.
it's not "copping out" to move the story forward. That's all gamers ever wanted.
Not that story, not that ending, Epistle 3 is garbage.
They know they can do better and they will.
@@HorrorTactico ESL spotted
@@HorrorTactico Yeah, Epistle 3 was gonna be the Last of Us 2 of Half-Life & Mark Laidlaw was gonna be the Neil Druckmann. Good thing Valve isn't spineless like Sony. Well, not in that way anyway. Sure do wish they'd make a game though. And not another one with an incredibly expensive gimmick that radically changes the whole gameplay concept & requires you to set aside a whole room in your house for it.
@@D_YellowMadness Lmao "a whole room in your house", "expensive gimmick" you are just as prepostreous as the things you criticize. HL games were never meant for console peasants or people who think $200 VR displays are expensive. You can fuck off, tourist. Let the fans discuss.
@@D_YellowMadness Bullshit!
As much as I want to go back and replay Half Life and it's episodes, I hate knowing that it's a big cliffhanger at the end of episode 2 that will never get finished
True, I haven't been able to touch a Half Life game since Episode 2. I'd rather forget the franchise ever existed.
Valve’s biggest failure will always be to never dare to finish what they started. There is an art to orchestrating the perfect ending for a franchise, and Valve will never push that envelope.
Agreed, The Half Life franchise ended with the worst cliffhanger in gaming history.
My personal headcanon at this point is that they all died and the combine won, because that's the situation Valve left us with.
I think Mass Effect proved that sometimes crossing the finish line can be a bad thing.
@@DarkElfDiva Say what you will about Mass Effect, at least we got an end to the story.
Valve just blew off all the fans that loved the franchise because "boohoo no new tech".
Portal 2.
@@Skeletons_Riding_OstrichesAt least that feels like a ending lol.
I don't think even a single commenter on this video actually watched the documentary and are only jumping from 2 equally ridiculous extremes that are not what is actually being communicated at all. It's 'Valve refused unless it was the most innovative gimmick game ever' or it's 'Valve didn't make it because they hate the fans are I am entitled to HL3.' Binary brain.
They were burnt out by Half Life 2 and struggled to think of anything new or interesting to do. Almost every Half Life chapter introduces something new that will have all sorts of different interactions with other elements of the game. Enemies, weapons, objects, vehicles etc. This is the kind of thing they talk about all the time in the doc. By the time you get to ep3, they've already done so much within Half Life 2. Why rack you brains trying to come up with new ways to spice things up, which Half Life games are ALWAYS DOING when there are exiting new games in development? Once again this is not 'Valve refused to make it unless it was groundbreaking and extremely innovative.' That's just taking it to the most extreme.
True, i watched it until the end. It's not just gabe but also the other dev member
Was looking for this comment. Some of the responses are absolutely extreme, as if it were still 2009 and Episode's 3 cancellation was just announced yesterday.
Gabe worded the reasoning somewhat confusingly, but I think it really does just boil down to burnout. They didn't want to push a finale because of a concern of mediocrity, and this simply just got worse the longer they dwelled on it-- which is where the notion of Episode 3 not being groundbreaking enough being what Gabe meant. Half Life 2 was already almost 3 years old by the time Episode 2 came out, so I'm sure the age of Source in an era of rapidly advancing gaming made it much harder to commit to that final episode as they thought they had exhausted what they could do with Half Life in Source.
While Source was still used for games like Portal and LFD, but as was said in the documentary, Episode 3's development would have taken up the time that would instead be used for LFD.
yeah this video makes it sound like gabe alone killed ep 3. a lot of people just didnt want to do HL anymore or didnt think there was anything really interesting to do with it. and after they had to pause ep 3 to help with left 4 dead, by the time they were done they decided "eh the episode 3 ship has sailed"
literally
I know we're all supposed to love Gaben, but just for a moment think critically here.
Episode 1 and 2 didn't push any major boundaries, and we weren't told to expect that. We signed up for three episodes of story and we paid money under the promise of shorter content more often.
We got two episodes, massively delayed.
This is a shitty excuse followed by "it wouldn't have been that hard".
Valve would never want to discuss openly about how their own internal objectives shifted at the time, especially when Steam began making them so much money that they never needed to ship a game ever again in order to stay afloat. Ironically, with all of the money and time in the world Valve struggled to release anything seriously innovative for the better part of a decade. And yeah, the comment about it 'not being hard' to finish EP3 back in 2008 registered like spit upon the dying flame of my childhood hopes.
In interviews it feels like Gabe is a hostage in it's own company, like you can see he wants to do projects but never could do it and he never say out loud why but again you can see it in his face that he would love to disclose the "why" once and for all.
They explain why in the documentary, they thought that they've tackled all manners of fun and interesting ideas they had for HL2 with Ep 1 and 2 and by Ep 3 they simply got burned out of Half Life 2, having no idea how they could realistically continue Ep 2's ramp-up and figuring out new concepts.
When Gabe says that it wouldn't have been hard to finish it, he means that it wouldn't have been hard to finish up the story. But finishing up the story of Half Life 2 was the least of their concerns in a massive list.
The unfortunate truth is that Half Life does not exist for the story, had that been the case we'd be on a Half Life 4 by now.
I swore I wouldn't buy another Valve product until we got Episode 3. Honestly never thought it would take them more than a year or two, but here we are 17 years later and I'm still waiting.
Will you buy Hunt Down The Freeman, though????
The only issue I have with no ep3, or HL3 is that they left these games with cliff hangers. And it seems they knew there might not be a chance they would release the games if they cant find a good reason other than the story. Its kinda shitty if that's their mantra. I dont care its thats their driving motto, I DO care that they developed the games with cliff hangers knowing they may never be resolved. Half life 2 should have fundamentally been planned to have a start , middle and satisfying finish like we see in Half life 1. Its frustrating. Imagine you play halo 1, and Halo 2, then you wake up 20 years later, and Halo 3 never came out and possibly never would. What a fucking shitty way to end something so amazing. Half life 1 wrapped up its story very neatly, so we know they CAN make games that tell a cohesive story and close it out with a correctly satisfying ending.
That being said what I think should have is if there wasn't a half life 3 ever, or a portal 3 but given the connections we see with aperture science and black mesa in both games, maybe the sequel to both of those franchises could be told in one single unified halflife-portal game.
Gabe is such a selfish ideologue. He’s overthinking it, put out episode 3 to finish the story and then think about whether there’s enough innovative ideas to justify Half Life 3.
Imagine if George Lucas had said "I knew you all wanted to see what happened after Han got frozen, Luke got his arm chopped off and everything just seemed to go to hell...I just didn't see any technical reason, new cool special effects etc, to justify telling you what happened and give you closure. Fuck your beloved story and characters, every time you play our games you have to repeatedly say goodbye to them at their darkest and most traumatic moments."
Episode 3 didn't need to push anything forward though. We didn't need anything pushed forward, we just wanted closure instead of a cliffhanger. If it was so easy to have shipped it blows my mind that they just decided to stop there and leave it all in such an unsatisfying limbo. Those games and world meant so much to many of us.
You don’t need to have groundbreaking new tech for every new game you release. Just finish the story arc you started two decades ago now, and we’ll all wait for the next game with patience instead of frustration.
Gabe Newell for President. World War 3 will never happen.
Ha!
What about 7 hour war?
That is true leadership. Taking full ownership of your own personal failures to make yourself better.
What is in mind of Gaben is actually: "There's no any new tech we can use to continue the story. So yeah lets just wait for 20 or 30 years for the next game in case if we ever have a new tech to make a sequel to our players who survived those years while waiting to see how the story will end." Can't believe he's just normalizing that. EP1 and EP2 wasn't that much innovative comparing to HL2. They were just same kind of DLCs to main game. At least just complate the Combine Arc with EP3 and then wait for HL3 until whatever time you want. Even if they ended the story with the HL2 ending and never release the episodes, it could still work for an end to the Combine Arc. Then none would complain this much and they could just release HL3 when the time comes and say "Combine's just left the planet and now we have another alien species to deal with."
Nintendo frequently does something similar where they can't think of a way to make it innovative so they just don't bother, and I wish they'd realize that sometimes it doesn't have to be innovative, It can just be a good plot that ties things up on a story you left unfinished.
You know, Alyx is a great game, but I don't exactly see how solving connect-the-dot puzzles is pushing anything forward either, just because it's in VR. Everything that wasn't a puzzle is great, but 75% of the game is looking around walls for circuits and switches. It seemed scared to really experiment with what's possible in VR, which I thought was the whole point of it being a VR game.
This. Everybody raves about HLA being the greatest thing in VR, when in reality it was the same exact things every other major VR title already did, just with a Half-Life wrapping paper slapped on it. Not one feature of HLA wasn't already present in other popular VR games when it released, yet it got held aloft like the holy grail of VR development. I don't get it.
@@Sigma_EightDid you play it?
@@Sigma_Eight Well maybe it's because HLA took those features and combined (no pun intended) them into a coherent 10+ hour story. The visual clarity and smoothness of the game also is quite impressive. I don't know any VR game before HLA that was like this, though I'd be happy to learn about them. I also think that 75% is a little bit overstated unless you for some reason struggled with those tasks.
I can agree that when playing the game for a second time the battles felt a bit weak and the difficulty switch is kinda useless as it just chokes you on ammo and turns combine soldiers into bullet sponges.
Mr. Gabe: I was so busy counting all the money from Steam that I simply forgot about Episode 3.
yup.
The only answer.
“People wouldn’t like the game if it doesn’t do anything to innovate gameplay”
Isn’t this the same company that’s seen TF2 live for 17 years straight?
In other words, HL is the opposite of CoD. It gets an update when Valve have figured out enough worthwhile gameplay and technical innovations to constitute a new game. Not to sell the writers short, but writing doesn't quite have the same challenges as game/engine design. HL does have the dramatic irony of NPCs considering Gordon the One Free Man when everything he does is at the behest of the G Man, but it's not a hugely mind-bending piece of literature like House of Leaves or [insert your fave here]. Several versions of the story were figured out over the years, what's keeping us from getting sequels is all of the stuff on the technical side.
We would have all been very happy to see what happens next. Did Episode 1 or 2 really push anything along in the industry other than episodic delivery? And maybe some dramatic elements in physics (collapsing bridge)?
Sure we would have expected to see something new with Borealis. We were fully expecting that. And that would have been enough.
I'm pretty sure Half Life 3 would exist if Steam didn't exist. Valve rakes in a mountain of money from that game service.
I think a lot of people got the idea that Valve simply shifted from making games and engines to managing their money flow.
They're clearly capable - Half Life Alyx proved that, even if that was just a way to push their Index headset.
It sadly shows a lack of integrity with the world building. Had they cared enough they'd have finished what they started, period.
Gabe is a great innovator of software, perhaps one of the greatest of our time. But he's proven to not be a very reliable game producer.
He should be carrying a bigger weight on his shoulders than what we see in this clip, knowing how many thousands or even millions of people have perished so far while waiting for some kind of closure to their favorite story and beloved characters. A closure to one of the more intense and traumatic cliffhangers in video game history. This is like if Lucas had ended Star Wars right at the very darkest moment at the end of the second movie, before things could finally turn around for the better. These fans all deserved more from Gabe but now they never will. HL3 launching with a cool new mechanic can't ever make up for it.
I think that the real problem with HL2 episodes being cancelled is the fact that Source engine wasn't really that innovative to allow them to keep that going for more than three years in a row. Source engine was really something back at the 2004 release of HL2 but at the same time was beaten by Id Tech 4 used for Doom 3. HL2 was at that time posing as a sort of midcult with very good graphics but also innovative gameplay and atmosphere. Source was hugely optimised and even slower machines could run it. It sure did blew everybody's mind but seen from todays perspective it was merely improvisation with conditions and sources given.
(Source based competitive multiplayer games are of course completely different topic)
What is the main reason that got Episode 3 cancelled is by my opinion the switch of hardware generations. Valve did want to follow the scheme of expansion packs as perviously seen in original HL. The reality unfortunately wasn't the same as in 90s or very early 00s. Things became much faster at that time. Back in the days i remember being somehow disappointed with EP1 after its release. It was caused by the fact that for some reason there truly (as Mr. Newell said) wasn't any sense in going forward. With HL2 being released relatively near to the break and switch to next-gen consoles it was very unfortunate position to set visibly outdated technology to compete with then showcased next-gen titles. They couldn't sort of make it profitable in the year 2007. Time passed to quickly for EP3..
I mean HL2 was hyperpolished prev-gen fps. I guess we all could agree on that it was honorable successor to HL1. Taking in mind how much I loved HL2 still I wasn't able to imagine myself playing the same scheme three times over with occasional addons. Sure things might have been great but I think that Valve came to the same rational conclusion somewhere along the way. What wasn't very kind decision for HL fans and soon become adult hardcore gamers became good decision for Valve itself. People have to eat and everything costs money.
And I don't deny that Valve became cash and money synonymous to Steam. But that's just how things go these days..
Valve is not even to blame by my opinion. It was just gaming industry going through rapid change. EP3 missed its profitability time window.
really nice that you added loud music over the video you neanderthal excellent work
Fact is, Valve got complacent when their steam money farm went into full swing in the late 00s
Haha true. I feel like if Steam wasn't around, SUDDENLY the blob enemy and the ice gun and whatever else was planned for Ep.3 would be GOOD ENOUGH of an innovation for them to ship their next big hit 😂
in other words: he just wasn't interested enough, didn't care what fans wanted
He straight up did not say that lol
@@Rocket_PC read between the lines.
had his own standards, and switched to Dota the moment he saw the standards not being met.
the gaming community would've overwhelmingly voted for finishing the game, even if it offered absolutely nothing groundbreaking. And he knows it, he just got lazy and tired of HL, wanted to do other things
@@VeganCossack this wasnt just a decision he made himself. if you watched the whole documentary, the devs jumped ship to help push out left 4 dead and that ended up pushing episode 3 behind to the point where its ideas wouldn't have been that novel at the time to be interesting.
this whole video is gabe mentioning that his personal failure is him not pushing forward for episode 3's release because Valve's structure at this time was incredibly lax on letting employees work on what they want. Moving to L4D eventually led into a snowball effect where devs just wanted to work on anything that isn't half life.
my point is that its not just gabe who wasn't interested in episode 3, it was everyone else at valve that led to that outcome.
@@VeganCossack He also mentions abandoning Half life gave him opportunity to develop other games. Not all games needs a third series.
@@EuroSpecJDMIt literally ended on a cliffhanger. There should absolutely be a game to wrap it all up
Damn you can see Gaben is on one of his yachts during his scenes since the windows are bobbing up and down
So basically Gabe Newell is the George Broussard (the personified "forever" in Duke Nukem Forever) of Valve, only in the meantime they put out Steam.
On the one hand I very much admire the man. On the other hand his reason for not doing Episode 3 is pure bull sh*t. Yes Gabe, finish the story just to make the fans that made you filthy RICH happy. Do it for that reason...
Right? What’s with this revisionist nonsense that ep3 was supposed to be some revolutionary jump. Ep1 was nothing new. It was a CONTINUATION OF THE STORY and it was fine. Ep2 innovated a bit on the formula and made it better. Ep3 could’ve just iterated on that.
@@Greenday5494 They didn't have to do anything fancy. Just wrap it up with an ending. But nooo...
@@Mr.SharkTooth-zc8rmbut that's not what half life is, every half life is supposed to be innovative, if it isn't what's the point?
@@EL1TEHD1 what innovations did we have with episode 1 and 2?
@@СергейДементьев-ы9р those are not games those are expansions.
Sorry, but I think it's BS that they are trying to say Episode 3 was cancelled because they weren't pushing boundaries and innovation enough game play wise. No offense, but how did Episodes 1 and 2 push boundaries and innovation beyond the base game? They were extensions of the main story/game with pretty much all the same features.
They talked about it in the documentary. I won't list the reasons here (you can just watch the documentary yourself) but both Episode 1 and 2 posed different design challenges that they wanted to tackle. By the time they got to Episode 3 they had some concepts/levels but they were struggling to find a direction to take the game.
@@kiramaticc Every game's development poses "different design challenges." That doesn't mean they're innovative. E.g. Deus Ex 3&4 DLCs did a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the base game. But that doesn't make them more innovative than the base games.
@@ThePreciseClimber I'd argue that both episodes did push the boundaries forward, of course it looks like not a big deal with all the games today, but at the time HL2 felt light years different from anything else on the market, even if the innovations or challenges seem like not a big deal today, back in the 00's they were pushing the envelope - i mean the 90's and 00's where like the golden age of tech and dev advancements, almost every year we got insane leaps in game quality, whereas now it's diminishing returns. So I completely agree with Valve sentiment that episode 3 should have, in some way, test and deliver something new, but at the same time it boxed them into figuring out this "thing" and forgetting that people would be 100% content with just finishing the plot. There is a leak of the potential script somewhere on the internets of what episode 3 could've been and you can kind of see what they were, at least in theory, trying to test/push forward with and it seems like they tested some parts of it with Portal.
I guess if you look at Half Life and Portal as platforms for developing tech and demo it, it makes more sense why they didn't release EP3. Still sad though...
If Gabe really wants to set industry standards these days all the game needs to do is be really good and well optimized at launch and cost less than 70 dollars.
Seriously I love Gaben he’s a hero, a legend, the best living meme, but this idea that Valve shouldn’t make a game that isn’t “groundbreaking” is so pretentious and honestly stupid it blows my mind. All we want are GOOD games Mr. Newell! You can make a GOOD game, can’t you? Of course you can! So please do it, we will pay you money and sing your praises till the day we die!
It's not about what you want, it's about what they want as a creators. They want hl3 to be as revolutionary, as the previous ones, but can't make it such.
Personally, I think that they understand that revolutionary engine is everything for the franchise, cause the games themselves don't have anything special in them. Typical "earth is oppressed by superior alien race" story, basic shooter mechanics with the most typical weapons any shooter has, very low enemy variety, etc. Even mass effect 1, which came out few years after hl2 is much better, cause it has rpg system, making gameplay something more than just boring repeating shooting of the same enemies, actual story with character interaction and stuff
He was just too afraid to fail us, but he's failing us by not releasing it too. I rather get some closure even if it's bad. Even if they make entire franchise of episodes it wont be bad either, i love the themes, setting and action of this game and i'll never get bored of it.
I hope that Gaben Claus gives me an 1TB OLED Steam Deck for Christmas.
If ANY other developer made an Episode 1 & Episode 2 and then failed to provide the final episode, gamers would be calling the developer a scammer for not delivering on the triology.
And they probably were but u forget it's been 20 years lol
I’m trying to understand the ‘innovation’ angle they took with OG HL. Like, I know HL2 was huge- new bleeding-edge engine, detailed facial movement, physics, and HDR in Lost Coast. Alyx being VR. Portal having incredibly creative mechanics. I get that. but uh…
What did HL1 do that was groundbreaking? It had an amazing story and tons of dialog which was pretty new at the time, but no new tech or mechanics to speak of. It was like, Quake with an actual story.
So tl;dr, not trolling but what tech did the OG half-life have that was groundbreaking or uniquely innovative?
Truth is, it DIDN'T. HL is not the first of it's kind at all, MANY games before it have done the open map ingame cutscenes interactive world. HL story is literally just Doom, Quake, Aliens, The Mist, but regardless it itself is an amazing fun game and story.
An amazing story with tons of dialogue and scripted sequences was the innovation. Not a single game prior to Half-Life came anywhere close to how real it felt on release, even down to something as simple as shooting a wall and seeing a bullethole. I'm sure this wasn't quite as intentional as their attempts to push tech and storytelling with HL2, but they got that reputation and developed that mindset regardless.
A moment of silence for everyone who has literally died waiting for Episode 3 or HL3 to come out.
F
thanks for putting the music LOUDLY over everything he said. 10/10 editing
Looks like Gaben is actually working as a scientist at Black Mesa. The real Half-Life 3 confirmed.
i may not have been alive to see the release of HL2 but i know this game shares a childhood memory/memory with lots of people
while i do wish we lived in a world with episode 3 i do understand why they didn't go through with it since games are always evolving and with the limits of source i can see why they would have trouble doing so and the points gaben said in this video.
people got to look at games from a video game developer perspective.
Aww you're just a lil guy
Damn, I feel old after reading this haha.
Episode 3 WAS an obligation, people invested in episodes 1 and 2 expecting a series
But I get it
money. more money.. dota 2
I didn’t grow up with the games, but the hearing about it definitely makes me feel the pain.
In a nutshell: "I was kinda sick of half-life" (not what he said but what he meant)
I wish people understood this. Without new stuff, episode 3 would be just like every other half life 2 mod. Fun to play through the first time, maybe, but just the same game again. Not a masterpiece.
@@45545videos yea people need to realize that, episode 3 would have been the 3rd episode, just more half life 2, and unlike the first 2 episodes we kind of already knew what would happen in episode 3, we go to the borealis and decide to destroy or use the technology on it, would have been fun to play through, but thats it
Half Life 3 is what would be and may eventually be innovative
I kind of get it. Burn-out is real.
@@flamingscar5263 technology has significantly advanced since the time of ep 2 release, the innnovation is overdue
I think its because he knew it would just be more of the same and it would leave people dissatisfied.
idk why the thumbnail looked like Gabe had corn rows in his hair lmao
😂
Gabe in 2004: fat John Lennon
Gabe in 2024: president of Hells Angels
So basically, it didn't do anything innovative or new like the previous HL games/episodes did, so they said "why bother?"
On the one hand, I kind of understand from a technical point of view, as Valve had always been (is?) the old school Lucasfilm of their industry; always "raising the bar" in terms of gameplay, be that linear narrative experiences, physics, HDR lighting and shaders, the L4D AI system, etc. What was Episode 3 going to do that was new? Gabe couldn't figure it out, and didn't want to disappoint fans.
On the other hand, as a creative writer myself, I cannot help but be tantalized by the loose threads left hanging by HL2:E2 and now HL:Alyx. I feel like the story begs to be finished, and I think it will be one day, but only if Valve can pair a worthy story with gameplay that pushes boundaries like the previous entries did.
Personally, I feel like destructible environments and procedural generation would be the way to go with it. That's a frontier that Valve has never really messed with, AFAIK, and I feel like they could be the ones to innovate it in new, interesting ways.
Gabe looks like Sergio Leone now
So I guess Episode 3 is like Leone's Stalingrad movie we never got.
And with this, any questions I have regarding Episode 3 can be put to rest. It wasn't that they weren't working on it, or that they couldn't, but because Gabe always strives for Half-Life to be the series of innovation at Valve and he knew at that point they had more or less done everything they could with the Source 1 engine.
Honestly, that's reason enough to me for why we haven't seen a Half-Life 3 yet. I know about the HLX project and so I'm hoping that with the creation of Source 2 and the success that HLA and CS2 have been, maybe now Valve finally has that drive to revisit their old IP's and start creating sequels again.
0:39 Most attention Team Fortress ever got from Valve in recent times
a lot of people seem to forget that Half-Life has such an emotional attachment to Gabe and other long serving Valve staff that if it’s NOT something revolutionary, they’re not doing the series or themselves justice. the past is the past, if they don’t think it’s good enough, then it’s not good enough-what do we know? we haven’t made two genre and industry defining video games before lol
What nobody said: "I only like Half-Life when they innovate like with a physics engine and choreo actors" Those things are cool, sure, but they are not what made people fall in love with Half-Life.
Everyone likes Half-Life because of it's fundamentals and story that's been there and going since HL1. The expertly crafted narrative storytelling with fun characters and great dialog. The synergy of the environment and the responsive feel of it, the steady tempo, and the tight level design. NONE of those things were new with HL2, they were there in HL1 and could have been built upon in HL3/Episode 3. They don't need to reinvent the wheel every time they do Half-Life, because they never really have. Half-Life has always been a very solid foundation with a few differences here and there. It's kind of absurd that this is probably what has held back HL3/Episode 3 for so long.
no but the physics (which also is a huge part of the gameplay), facial animations, graphics in general made the people interested in it
@@ckorp666 i think it's great
@@ckorp666that is not what a techdemo is…
@overdev1993 because people look at npcs faces for too long?
What "narrative storytelling with fun characters and great dialog" does Half-Life 1 have? The characters are nameless stock characters. Cardboard cutouts. They have no depth. They mostly exist to unlock doors for you, or to let you blow them up with comedic timing while they are going through their funny voice lines. Sure, the scientists and guards are fun and memorable, but they aren't real characters as such. The story only exists in just the exactly right, tiny amount to drive the action forward. The dialogue is mostly scientists or guards taking at most 30 seconds to explain to you where to go and what button to press next. Half-Life 1 is a completely action-focused game. If someone asked for a recommendation for a game with a great story, no reasonable person would say Half-Life 1.
Half-Life 2 definitely made big changes and improvements over the first game. But if they released a new Half-Life game which was basically like Half-Life 2 but with better graphics and physics and so on, but no real new innovations people would be disappointed, and rightly so. Just more of the same Half-Life 2 gameplay would not be a winning formula, especially today. But I agree with your sentiment that they don't necessarily need to make something incredibly revolutionary and mindmelting to release a satisfactory sequel. Valves biggest problem seems to be that they have too high standards for themselves (which might stem from them having a too high opinion of themselves but I digress).
I think you mistyped the title, it's supposed to be "CP Violation why Half-Life 2 Episode 3 was never released"
But Gabe. All I wanted to do was play through more fun Half-Life shooter combat in the unique Half-Life mould of heavily-scripted, spectacular but not braindead FPS action. I wanted more of Valve's impeccable environment & level design, more of their thorough playtesting and more of their enemies designed to be fun to fight. I wanted the emotional and (largely) believable storytelling. I wanted to avenge Eli, to get Barney a beer and Gordon some psychiatric help at long last.
Half-Life wasn't special because of its graphics. Although both cardinal titles were jaw-dropping at the time, and they've aged gracefully for the most part, they were never the thing people came to the series for.
It wasn't special because of its gameplay. HL1 suffered from some weapon bloat, some absolutely bullshit enemies, the tendency to die horribly for no discernible reason and some disappointing levels towards the end. HL2, if anything, was too easy and too vanilla with its weapon & enemy sandbox, and leaned far too heavily on its physics engine in retrospect. Also, the geological loading times and rubbish optimisation of both games' engines didn't help.
It wasn't even the story. I like the story and the characters, and I LOVE the setting of HL2 in particular (but also HL1) because it's just so bloody immersive and imaginative, but it never lacks for excitement and is happy to discard the trappings of realism for fun's sake. But it doesn't really stack up to analysis. Why are a few thousand malnourished, environmentally-poisoned, untrained refugees armed with H&K MP7s able to beat legions of enhanced, military-trained transhuman warriors with seemingly-infinite armoured, artillery and air support assets at their disposal? How the hell has the Resistance, which seemed to be 50 guys sat in some dingy sewer in the ruins of Smolensk or whatever, managed to occupy and conceal an entire fortress in the alien-filled wasteland while being constantly hunted by the same legions of all-seeing, technologically-advanced, ruthless, godlike fanatics? How have they managed to arm and train all these people when the average citizen is incapable of defeating a sexually aggressive horseshoe crab? How did all these personnel from Black Mesa survive this harrowing world for over twenty years? They couldn't survive being clipped by a carelessly-pushed crate when I was playing HL1.
Yeah, yeah, "it's the G-man", but that's pretty lazy storytelling. Even leaving that aside, the game tries to have its cake and eat it where its tone is concerned. The world of the game itself is unrelentingly grim and horrifying, and yet no-one seems desperately concerned. That's how one can get Alyx being traumatised by Stalkers screaming at her in a train car one minute and then get her coming up with the "Zombine" pun the next. It's not impossible to hit the right tone. I'd say the first two Metro games do a decent job of it.
Whinge aside, Half-Life was special because it didn't have a single area at which you could point and say "There's your problem". Every other major shooter franchise seems to have an Achilles' heel of sorts, usually in the story or player agency departments, but it varies. Half-Life had points of weakness, but everything came together so well; it was all under such impeccable direction, verisimilitude, rigorous playtesting and elegant level design that it became a masterpiece. It starts with a fairly generic toolset and uses them to create works of genuine video game art - ones which still stand up to replaying even after twenty years. It didn't NEED to be a leap forward. There's no point using the excuse that HL1 > HL2 was a great leap forward, because it was a new story; Half-Life 1 was done with. The story, the world and the challenge of HL2 were not finished. We wanted you to finish it. That was all.
But the biggest failing was the silence. You teased us for years, and then you just let it wither on the vine. People loved these games. Now, all they do is remember them fondly while shaking their fists at Valve HQ. Half-Life used to be a giant in the FPS landscape, and now it's just a footnote. Don't blame your neophilia for that. You could have made it - but you didn't. That's what's most frustrating about Valve - they made these genre-defining tours de force, then they just twiddled their thumbs for years and let every one of their franchises that weren't Counter-Strike or DOTA rust in their back garden until they didn't work anymore. You created one of the single best multiplayer games ever, Team Fortress 2, and even though it was still being played and enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of avid fans, you just let it die. The modern TF2 is a thin shadow of the game I wasted my youth on. You created one of the single best single-player shooters ever, Half-Life, and then you just let it die. You created the single best co-operative survival game ever, Left 4 Dead, and then you released a sequel that completely rendered the original obsolete and then - let me check my notes here - oh, yes, you let it die. If you couldn't come up with a reason to justify putting a new game out between 2007 and 2020, why didn't you just admit it, and release us all from our torment?
I remember I used to see Valve differently from the usual scum of the games industry like EA and Ubisoft, but over time, I've realised they're all exactly the same. Ugh. Sometimes, I dream about cheese. Thanks for reading this dissertation and noapte bună.
My guy has more yachts than main HL games. I bet it had nothing to do with priorities🙄
Handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, humble... Gabe is such an amazing man.
Gabe looking healthier than ever
Could whoever edited this perhaps have made the music any louder to make sure we can't hear a word Gabe is saying?
The real answer is because they could make money without making games. If there was no Steam and DOTA 2, there would sure as hell be HL2-EP3.
He doesn't want to do it because he knows the Valve engine is over 20+ years outdated and refuses to complete hl2:ep3 and hl3. While, other gaming and engine softwares have progressed.
I feel like we're gonna get HL3 after his passing or something. Cementing him as the man with the most aura.
Lack of innovation should not have stopped Episode 3 from being made, people wanted to see how the story ends even if it didn't bring any new gameplay ideas. They could've just stopped right after that and nobody would've said anything. But oh well
i kinda want that glass fish behind him
I mean...the entire thing seems like Gabe's fault. Which don't get me wrong. As an adult now, I can't hate his ideas, but he basically stopped EP3 from existing because he didn't think it "moved" gaming. But we just wanted a conclusion to the primary story.
like he said it was his personal failure
@@overdev1993 I don't think it was just his fault. I think that he drove Valve to a great spot with that idea, but it was a cost analysis. Without EP3 failing we might not have gotten Portal2.
Went from a teen to an adult. I just want Gaben to see a kickass HL3 now.
Dude deserves it.
That's your problem, playing Half Life for the story and not the gameplay, a problem many videogames have these days.
Maybe the best would have been to just cut down Half Life's plot to a minimum to avoid building such an audience.
@@davidstinger1134”No. it’s the entire fans of the series who are wrong.”
@@overdev1993 His REAL failure was not understanding that we played for the story, not the tech demo.
Episode 3 never coming out killed the franchise for me - anything after it was just meaningless drivel.
I haven't touched a Half Life game since, I'd rather forget they exist altogether.
Valve: We changed HL2's atmosphere and look so we could continue it in to Half-Life 3 despite the original story basically ending the same way!
Also Valve: Yeeeeah that's effort...shut up and buy more games. Here, take another anniversary edition of stuff we've broken over the last 10 years and not been arsed to fix (nor will we fix the missing EAX functions).
We’ll know more when it’s the 20th anniversary of half life 3 while we’re in the hospital bed and our grandkids have to tell us about it
‘There would be no dota’ 😂
Literally existed years before it was recreated at valve
Bro why didnt you post the whole clip about episode three, you got the whole comment section malding about misinformation
yep, and the fact nobody here actually watched the HL2 doc
i watched the full doc before coming to this clip, i wanted to see discussion specifically around this clip. also no when people say gabe pulled a nintendo they arent spreading misinformation, he really did say they just didnt do it because they felt like they needed to innovate for it to be good. remember that valve is the same company that has had employees go on record saying they didnt make portal 3 because 'they didnt know where to take the story after chel was out of the facility'.
@@carsonmiller1359 have her voluntarily go back to retrieve the clone baby GLADOS grew from her cells while she slept. I thought that up in a second after reading your comment...it doesnt have to be shakespeares finest work just to make another video game. Either we accept that or we abandon the idea of video game sequels altogether.
@@LoveProWrestling i thought about this too, it seems like valve ended ona cliffhanger already. if you complete the portal 2 co-op campaign the final cutscene shows a room with people still in stasis, they could just make one of them the protag of a sequel, even if chel is free none of those people are. i would be fine witha portal game where someone besides chel is the main character but i guess valve isnt going to do anything with the implications of that cutscene.
The thing that bugs me about Episode 3's cancellation is that it goes against the entire reason for the episodes' existence. After six years of waiting for Half-Life 2, with all the stuff Valve went through during its development - including a year delay from its September 2003 release date - they both didn't want to experience any of that again, and didn't want to keep their customers waiting for so long for new titles. So, instead of designing a true sequel from the ground up with a new or evolved engine, they decided to create these mini expansions that would take far less time and energy to make.
However, I think their big issue is that they focused too much on trying to innovate with Episode 3. Episode 1 didn't really accomplish anything at all, besides being their first proper title to incorporate HDR; otherwise, it was just the third act of Half-Life 2 played in reverse. Episode 2 was really good, and in many ways better designed than Half-Life 2, but it didn't innovate or even alter the core experience either, it just made better use of concepts introduced in the main game. I don't get why Episode 3 had to be this standout, industry-defining entry when it was just wrapping up the story.
I wonder how many releases from Valve got shelved because they didn't meet Gabe's obsessive need to have every release break new ground in pushing the technological limits of what a game can be.
The gravity gun in Half Life 2 was the monumental innovation, decades later no other FPS has showcased a better weapon?!! We're continually teased about Half Life 3, OMG it's a crying shame.