Valve says it’s probably a bit too optimistic to think that a follow-up Half-Life game after 2020’s Half-Life: Alyx is “hot on its heels”.
The team’s Robin Walker said as much to IGN this weekend after taking home the Game of the Year prize for Alyx at the SXSW Festival. When asked if a follow-up to Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was coming in hot after the release of Alyx, the developer replied: “I think hot on its heels might be a little bit optimistic.”
“I think one of the rewarding things about Alyx was to see that community reaction both to the game itself, which we were super happy with at the end of the game,” Walker continued. “At the point we shipped it we were very happy with what we created and we were really excited for people to get their hands on it.”
Turning to the game’s ending (which we won’t spoil here), the developer said that the team was less confident people would react well to the choices it had made, but ended up pleasantly surprised. “So, yeah, the reaction from people to the story and the narrative choices we made at the end have been really– energizing is probably the right term and so we’re really excited to keep going there,” Walker added.
The question of what Valve does next after Alyx, which set a new bar for VR gaming, has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue. A behind-the-scenes experience chronicling the making of Alyx suggested that some at Valve did want to make Half-Life 3, but it might not be in VR, while the team is also working on a top-secret project. We’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed that the studio is planning more VR content of Alyx’s calibre.
Elsewhere in the interview, Walker noted that he expects to see a bigger variety of VR games in the near future. “I think, if I had to guess, in the next few years we’re going to see a bunch more of other kinds of games come to VR and have that rich content in addition to just the mechanics,” Walker said. “And then in between that I would expect we’re going to start seeing, in the ways that as we did that translation of Half-Life into VR, we’re able to start seeing the ways in which VR could add to Half-Life.”
