Ten years have passed since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Ten years since Alyx Vance’s hoarse voice ended on a massive cliffhanger fans never received resolution for. Over these long years the wait for another entry in the series has become little more than a meme. Hell, so many years have passed that “Half-Life 3 confirmed” became old, stale, and nowhere to be seen. Many have moved on to the many other great games series out there.
Some of us faithful have held on to increasingly slim hopes Valve would give us more Half-Life despite the loss of much of the development team responsible. With the release of Marc Laidlaw’s Episode 3 “script,” however, the time has likely come to let go. Half-Life 2 and its episodes will never see closure. Alyx’s grief-stricken whispers will remain the last memory of the series.
For those unaware, Marc Laidlaw was a writer and designer for the Half-Life series. He left Valve in January 2016, a clear sign on its own of the chance for further sequels. On August 25, 2017, he posted an entry on his site named “Epistle 3” that was, for all intents and purposes, a story summary for Episode 3. The names were changed, but the subject matter clear.
Since this post was made, Laidlaw has claimed the post was not a leak, but his own version of the continuing story. Whether this version was leak or “fan fic” ultimately does not matter. The fact Laidlaw would release this at all speaks to the ugly truth about Half-Life, or at least Half-Life 2 and its episodes.
This is it. This is all we well get for closure. All that’s left is one question; is this enough?
A common speculation for the delay has always been the iconic, influential status of the series. The original Half-Life was one of the single largest influences behind the rise of story-driven First-Person Shooters. The second game redefined the genre and featured physics-based gameplay of such quality that even modern games struggle to equal it. A common hope for the future of the series was always this history of innovation. We hoped Valve’s delay was out of desire to make another jump forward in gaming such as the first two games accomplished.
However, that’s not what many fans wanted. If the series had ended on the base Half-Life 2 game alone, this outcry wouldn’t exist. While certainly something of a cliffhanger, the game ended in a way that did not demand more. Valve would have been free to take their time and make something entirely different and transformative, much like the sequel was to the original Half-Life. Maybe we even would have gotten more Half-Life by now.
Everything changed with the Episodes. Valve decided to continue the story and left it in a place demanding more. For many years that was all fans wanted; another episode to give us closure on the story. I don’t exaggerate when I say more than a few fans claimed they would accept even this little bit. Of course we wanted to play more of the series, but follow-up to Episode 2’s cliffhanger was just as important as more gameplay.
We won’t get any official closure now, but Laidlaw’s post delivers it in a way. This is the man who wrote the series. At the very least his fan fic was a concept considered for the game. It’s more likely that this really was Episode 3’s story, as much of the leaked models and concept art match it too well to be coincidence. And it’s really freaking good. This summary would have made for an excellent conclusion to the story of Gordon Freeman while also setting up more Half-Life with Alyx Vance as the lead. The setting was tremendous, the description of the Borealis was everything you could have hoped for, and the ending itself a logical twist set up outstandingly throughout Half-Life 2 and both preceding episodes.
So now we know what happens, or at least read an ending worthy of the story written by the series’ writer. This was exactly the “just tell us” moment the fanbase was ready to settle on.
Will we? It’s hard to say.
Look, at this point I’m a veteran of long waits for the things I love. As a Song of Ice and Fire fan I experienced the wait for A Dance with Dragons and I’m currently going through the wait for The Winds of Winter. I wait for new Tool albums. Over a decade has passed since Kingdom Hearts 2 came out, and the third game has yet to arrive. Waiting never really gets easier. The point always arrives where you question whether you’ll get anything new. Whether you know something’s in development or know nothing at all makes little difference. Waiting sucks either way.
While disappointing, there’s a freedom in knowing something expected will never come. With so many amazing shows, games, books, comics, and so forth out there, it can be great to simply move on from something else. And if you can get something like Laidlaw gave Half-Life fans, even better! For all intents and purposes, we know how the series ends. I’ll take a written summary of an ending over nothing at all.
I won’t deny this is a bitter pill to swallow, though. Yes, we’re not “owed” anything. No one is a bitch to the fans. That doesn’t change the expectation inherent to the creation of an ongoing story like Half-Life 2 and the episodes. When you create a property with the promise of future content succeeding the current release, how can you possibly blame fans for struggling to accept never receiving the next chapter? Of course we’re going to have a hard time with it. Even knowing how Episode 3 likely would have gone, and as happy as I am to read it, I can’t help but feel anger I will never play through the time-twisting, space-bending confines of the Borealis as described by Laidlaw.
Neither does it help that the Half-Life 2 episodes were created specifically to avoid this scenario. Valve President Gabe Newell claimed the episodes were thought up to avoid another wait like the six years spent waiting for the sequel to the original Half-Life. We were meant to see more consistent releases for the series so fans could play more Half-Life. Instead, well…here we are. Ten years later and almost certain to never see Episode 3.
Making all this even worse is the decline of Valve in general. While we can’t be sure, there’s a logical progression of events explaining Valve’s inability to put out another Half-Life game. Plain and simple, Steam happened. The PC distribution giant has become a crucial part of any PC gamer’s life and a money-printing machine for Valve. They make millions more off Steam than they ever would from making any game and without half the effort or risk. For fans of Grand Theft Auto 5, it’s the same reason they scrapped whatever plans they had for single-player expansions. Why put in the intense work and cost for profit dwarfing what easy online content pays?
Us fans are left to suffer for this decision.
It’s an easy correlation between Steam’s rise and Valve’s disappearance from game development. They haven’t released a major single-player title since Portal 2 in 2011. They haven’t released a major title since Dota 2 in 2013. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem ready to change anytime soon. Newell has bluntly said Half-Life 3 isn’t a thing. Valve has no current intention of giving us the ending they all but promised when they released Half-Life 2 all those years ago.
Fans of A Song of Ice and Fire can understand and sympathize with George R.R. Martin taking a long time to write Winds of Winter, because we know he is at least trying. Fans can’t forgive simply giving up the way Valve has. Time has dulled the once sharp sourness of gamers towards Valve, but the company will never again manage the nearly untarnished respect and trust they once had. Whatever Valve does moving forward, gamers will hold it against them for not completing Half-Life 2.
Now every fan has to choose whether to move on or not. This is how one of the greatest videogame series of all time ends, with an anticlimactic post by a former employee in place of another game. Perhaps it’s for the best. Any Half-Life game Valve released at this point would probably end up a bitter, half-hearted attempt satisfying no one. Even an amazing game would face unfair criticism just because of the wait. I suppose it’s always possible inspiration will strike Valve one day. They may decide to just move forward in the series with an entirely fresh idea revitalizing the series.
The story of Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance’s fight against the Combine, though, has passed. Their time has come and gone. For many gamers like myself, this is more than just the end of another videogame series. Half-Life carried prestige very few series in gaming history can claim. It revolutionized and inspired an entire genre. It went a long way in putting the largest PC distribution network on the map.
If you were a gamer in the late-1990s to mid-2000s, you know Half-Life’s name. If you own a PC, you’ve probably played it at some point. And now it’s over.
Speaking only for myself, I’m ready to move on. Laidlaw’s post has freed me. Within a day of reading it I installed each part of the Half-Life 2 series and beat them all within two weeks. For the first time I was able to listen to Alyx’s hoarsely whispered grief and not feel like I tortured myself yet again with Episode 2’s cliffhanger. I know what happens next. I love what happens next and feel closure.
Does some bitterness still linger? Definitely. I’m no different from all the others who feel Valve betrayed the trust of their fans. That betrayal won’t ever fully vanish unless they stun us all and release an Episode 3 on par with the first two. However, I’m ready to move on from the series.
Others won’t be able to let go. The Laidlaw post will probably make moving on harder for some fans. Now we know exactly what we missed out on. Knowing it did exist at one point, that combined with leaked concepts we know Episode 3 was in development, it makes it harder to accept nothing coming out over the past ten years, and nothing ever coming out. Some fans will continue to hold out hope, thinking these various elements mean Valve plans to do something at some point. Others will feel increased anger that nothing was done with those elements.
It’s a crying shame this is what became of the series. However, there’s no denying the truth staring us in the face at this point. Half-Life has completed its decay, and now every fan is left to decide whether they can leave it behind.
