Valve’s Robin Walker said Half-Life fans might be excited about the new possibilities. Walker, who told the series about the ‘possibility’ of a new game, still didn’t say anything about Game 3. The anxious wait continues. “Doubts about Valve working on a new Half Life were also very vivid within the company,” he says.
Valve’s Robin Walker on “possibilities” for Half-Life
Robin Walker, one of the company’s most senior developers, previously played a key role in all games such as Team Fortress, Half-Life, Dota 2. He recently joked to TheGamerabout the company’s Alyx and future projects.
“In the first few years of development (Half Life: Alyx), many people in the company were skeptical about whether we would develop and release a new Half-Life product. This suspicion within the company was as vivid as it was outside. After a while, we started to give in to the idea that we could never do this.”
Robin Walker says“Fear is a good motivation” – “it’s a good motivation.” Referring to Alyx’s emergence as a virtual reality experience, he said, “The worst thing we can do is offer a bad Half-Life game. However, if we make a game worthy of its name, people will be able to experience it over time.”
The most interesting aspect of the interview was the topic of story uncertainty that fans complained about after the HL2 episodes. By the end of Alyx, this “narrative uncertainty” had been replaced by an open-ended ending. When Walker discusses the end of the game (no spoilers), he says:
“We know this is important. The story isn’t something you can go on with (probably talking about games) after that. We also knew that Half-Life fans were trapped in some kind of narrative uncertainty. So we wanted that to change.”
Again, by avoiding spoilers, Alyx ended up open-ended, creating the feeling that something might come next. “We wanted to get a little excited about the new possibilities,” Walker says. “We sent you a game where you knew how to end with a completely reasonable ending, and then we reversed it, which were really important elements. It required a lot of iteration, and in the end the right pieces came together.”
We can still get excited about Half-Life 3, which has now become an internet deer, given Gabe Newell’s recent announcements that it will focus on single-player experiences for Valve. Let’s see what time has to show us.
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