Half-Life 3 is back in the news again as Valve developer accidentally sort-of references it in public, reigniting hope once more

It’s been 19 years since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and yet the ceaseless clamour for a Valve game with a number ‘3’ in its title continues. And following a swell of reports suggesting Half-Life 3 isn’t just real, its development is well underway, a Valve developer has gone and sent the internet a-chatter all over again by publicly, albeit accidentally, referencing its codename during a livestream.

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?