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Comment by strbean

2 days ago

From interviews with the Alyx devs, it really sounded like the only reason they didn't call it HL3 was fear of not living up to the name.

Given the org structure at Valve, it's going to take someone with massive hubris to say "I can be the one to lead the HL3 project."

That or Gabe getting off his megayacht to lead it (or tell someone their project is worthy of being called HL3).

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strbean

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hamdingers  2 days ago

They decided to make it a prequel for fear of not living up to the name, the decision was made much earlier. If you're at all familiar with the contents of Alyx and the Half-Life franchise it wouldn't have made any sense to call it HL3.

  • johncolanduoni  2 days ago

    In a narrow sense, it did move along the story point at the end of HL2 (I won’t explain how because there’s no way to do so without massive spoilers). But yeah, it would be weird to call in HL3 just because of that.

  • strbean  2 days ago

    Ah, haven't gotten the chance to play it yet. But the same implication - we'll need someone at Valve with a big enough ego to take up the mantle.

    • brain_staple  2 days ago

      I don't think that's how the people at Valve think. These people usually have lifetime dreams to work at Valve well before they do because they admired those early games so much, which if you know the story were held up to very high standards internally and repeatedly. They spent their lives being hyper critical of their own craft and admire Valve because they don't a release subpar product as a rule. So collectively they'll have a LOT of collective ego tied up in whatever that product is, but it's not like "I own this", that would be highly anathema.

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