Gabe Newell – Valve founder and tease extraordinaire – just dropped a massive hint that there’s a new game coming, set in the Half-Life/Portal universe.
This revelation came during a recent Reddit AMA with Gaben. One user asked if Valve was working on ‘any fully-fledged single-player games’.
Gaben responded with a simple ‘yes’, at which point I imagine half the internet assumed Half-Life 3 was finally on the way.
Not so, unfortunately. Seeking clarification, another user asked the (brilliantly specific) question: ‘Any chance of a new IP that takes place in the Half-Life/Portal universe?’.
Again, Gaben replied with a hearty ‘yep’. Obviously, if this new mystery project is a new IP, it can’t very well be Half-Life 3. Of course, there’s every chance that Valve is working on more than one single-player game…
Details on what this mystery game (or hopefully games) could be are virtually nonexistent, but our boy Gaben couldn’t resist getting at least a few teases in as to what we could potentially expect.
For starters, he revealed that Valve considers VR a ‘pretty important’ tool for interesting games, implying that the new project will run on the Vive.
Valve’s HTC Vive demo The Lab was set in the Portal universe, and that was a pretty cool VR experience, so it’d be cool to see what the team can do in VR with a full game.
Gaben also added that Source 2 is still the studio’s universal engine for software development:
We are continuing to use Source 2 as our primary game development environment. Aside from moving Dota 2 to the engine recently, we are are using it as the foundation of some unannounced products. We would like to have everyone working on games here at Valve to eventually be using the same engine.
There you have it. Half-Life 3 confirmed. Somehow. I don’t know how, that’s for the boffins to sort out.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.