Half-Life 3 Surfaces Again After Valve Développeur Accidentally Références It in Public, Renewing Hope

Valve’s first attempt at releasing a Half-Life game with a ‘3’ in its name would have been the ill-fated Half-Life 2: Episode 3, which was abandoned – despite Valve previously announcing it as part of a planned trilogy – sometime around 2009. After that, the studio seemingly had a crack at making a full-blown sequel, with Valve boss Gabe Newell confirming a few years back that Half-Life 3 had been in development around 2013/2014, but was ultimately scrapped because it was built on the unfinished Source 2 engine.

Sometime in 2021, however, dataminers began to notice something interesting: repeated references to a project codenamed “HLX” in Valve-related files. Inevitably, this led to a frenzy of speculation that Valve might finally be reviving its seminal, if long-dormant, first-person shooter franchise. And evidence has seemingly continued to amass over time. In 2024, for instance, Valve insider Tyler McVicker shared some of his datamined findings, claiming what he’d found pointed to a new “fully-fledged Half-Life game” – a claim coinciding with a leak from an actor likely involved in the project.

It all reached something of a crescendo when McVicker released a new video last year suggesting the rumoured Half-Life 3 was now “playable, end-to-end”, and claimed it could even release before 2025 was through. Fans, meanwhile, did some sleuthing and concluded Half-Life 3 would likely launch in either November or December last year. All of this, clearly, did not come to pass, and the Half-Life 3 hype has died down a little since then. And yet here we are again, with the latest twist in the saga being a public reference to the codenamed ‘HLX’ by a Valve developer, albeit seemingly accidentally.

Let us jump to a recent GameSoundCon Q&A panel (promptly clipped and shared by McVicker again), in which Valve’s music designer Mike Morasky spent some time discussing the audio work on the company’s games. “Deadlock has their own version of HDR,” Morasky explained, “HLX has its own version, and so on and so forth.” Midway through the sentence, Morasky seems to taper off, as if immediately realising the error of his ways. Soon after, Valve sound designer David Feise appears to lean over and whisper “nice work”, which some have understandably taken to be sarcasm.

So what does all this tell us? Not a lot, really, beyond the fact it suggests HLX is a thing (which we mostly already knew) and that it’s still being worked on. Morasky’s framing would, however, also suggest that whatever HLX is, it’s a standalone project, and one requiring music at that. So I guess those Half-Life 3 dreams can live on for another day. The only question remaining, which will arrive first: Half-Life 3 or the heat death of the sun?

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Chinese action game Phantom Blade Zero already appears to be outperforming massive games like Gears of War: E-Day and Control Resonant on Steam, despite still being days from release.

That’s according to sales data scrutinised by Alinea Analytics head of market analysis Rhys Elliott, who posted their findings on LinkedIn. Based on Elliott’s estimates, Phantom Blade Zero has already sold 500,000 copies on Steam through pre-orders, bringing in roughly $24m in revenue ahead of its launch next week. Elliott noted the figures meant Phantom Blade Zero was “outperforming” Gears of War: E-Day and Control Resonant on Steam at the time of writing, and that China is currently its top market.

Other interesting tidbits include the fact that Phantom Blade Zero has also generated a lofty 2.5m Steam wishlists. According to Elliott, 41 percent of players who’ve wishlisted the game have also played Black Myth Wukong, while 38 percent of them have played Elden Ring and 28 percent played Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

It’s an impressive start for Phantom Blade Zero on PC, and Elliott goes on to say that “pre-launch signals” point to the game being popular on PS5 too. He even goes as far as to suggest it has the “potential to be one of the year’s breakout single-player hits.”

These figures emerge at a time when China’s games industry is enjoying a boom, and an increasing number of releases from Chinese developers are achieving critical and commercial success worldwide. Phantom Blade Zero shows all the signs of becoming another hit, launching for PS5 and PC on 28 October.

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