Half-Life: Alyx

Back to City 17 for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 by another name

- ANDREI PECHALIN

Twelve years after the cliffhanger ending of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the mothballing of the planned Episode 3, and endless rumours of various attempts at a sequel, we got our wish for a new Half-Life. Perhaps it's fitting that the wish would come with unforeseen consequences: in November 2019, seemingly out of nowhere, Valve announced Half-Life: Alyx, a VR-exclusive prequel told from the perspective of Gordon Freeman's companion Alyx Vance rather than the crowbar-wielding theoretical physicist.

For those of us who have been with the series from the beginning, for whom it shaped our tastes — even as it pioneered what game design should look like for the entire industry — it is difficult to put the reaction to the announcement into words. Shock, elation, anxiety, an extreme fear of missing out. And for the developer itself? "Although we were very confident in the decision to make a VR game and in the quality of what we had built," Valve's Kaci Aitchison Boyle says in the in-game commentary, "we still worried that revealing those decisions to the world might cause even our most loyal fans to make their own decision: that we had truly lost our minds."

Yet should we have expected anything less? Half-Life pioneered narrative-driven FPS action in a seamless world. Half-Life 2 revolutionised game physics and animation. Gabe Newell, whose current R&D interests lie in brain-computer interfaces, is on record saying that "Half-Life represents a tool we have and promises made to customers to capitalise on innovation and opportunities to build game experiences that haven't been involved previously". This is, ultimately, the reason we never got Episode 3; he and others "could not figure out why doing