It can't be too hard for the average joe to pick up that I'm actually pretty into video games. I quite enjoy playing them, and I also tend to enjoy following games media.
For those of you who don't know, Half-Life is a first person shooter game created by the company Valve that, according to the word of mouth, was a really good, genre redefining title. It's sequel was also apparently really good, it got two more episodic sequel... expansion... things. No one's really clear on it. Most people call them additions bolted on to Half-Life 2, but apparently there are those at Valve who saw them as the first two pieces of Half-Life 3. If that's the case, they really shouldn't have put "Half-Life 2" in the title. I mean seriously, it just confuses people like me.
And lo have we stumbled upon the point of this article. The last time the Half-Life series was heard from was in the year 2007, when Valve released Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (Which is apparently the fourth video game to bear the name "Half-Life." It's as pointlessly confusing as it sounds). Thing is though, I didn't really get into gaming until 2011. I have never played a Half-Life game in my life, and what with modern graphics technology making the look jarringly outdated, I'm not sure I could get into it even if I tried now. So I do not, and will never get, why Half-Life is such a big deal.
That's always put me in a bit of a weird position, since the more long standing members of the gaming community (that's my nice way of saying the old people) seem to hail it as the greatest thing ever to be forged by man. To make matters worse, the last installment of the series left things on a cliffhanger, leaving the internet forever full of mewling Valve fans crying out for another installment. It's been eight years, and they're still mewling, despite the fact that Valve very obviously just doesn't do game development anymore.
Imagine that cocaine suddenly vanished from the world, and there was only one person on planet earth who possessed the knowledge, equipment, and legal copyright to produce it. All the addicts would gather outside that person's house demand day in and day out for something to sate their addiction, but it's never going to come because that guy's given up drug dealing for a much more lucrative and low effort money laundering scheme. That's where the internet and Valve are at right now. And I'm someone looking at all the addicts going, "Seriously guys, just find something else to do with your life. He's not going to make any more."
I'm not the first person to point this out. There have been numerous other articles and videos pointing out, and often satirizing, the fact that Valve does not make video games anymore. So why are people still waiting for Half-Life 3?
Actually, don't bother finding me an answer to that, because I don't care. That sounds callous, and that's probably because it is. I'm just sick of people willfully ignoring the obvious neon writing in the sand that's also been conveniently written in the sky in thirteen different languages.
I made that cocaine analogy earlier because that's also literally the only explanation I can think of for why people are also still treating Valve with any degree of pedigree. Sure, they've made some undoubtedly solid games, but that's in the past, and you should always care more about who a person is now as opposed to who they used to be. Speaking as someone who's actually never played any game by Valve, my interactions of them have been exclusively spent trying to navigate their over saturated storefront, rebuying games said storefront has deleted from my library, and watching the studio continue to coyly ignore the outcries and expectations of fans that I frankly don't think they deserve.
The point I'm trying to make is, I have zero interest and investment in Half-Life as a series. I don't care if it's cliffhanger never gets resolved, because it was before my time. And the more years go by, the more people like me there will be in the world. Someday soon there will be seasoned gamers who not only have never touched Half-Life, but have never heard of it.
Half-Life 3 will never be release. Actually, that's a lie. If Valve ever goes public it absolutely will be. But Half-Life 3 should never be released. For the sake of the fans and the company, that game should never see the light of day. Because at this point, it's been eight years of waiting, and every passing day it isn't released only raises expectations and at this point expectations are already so high that if the game does not transcend the very fabric of space and time and cure at least three types of cancer, the fans will go rabid and burn Valve to the ground with internet hate fires.
*see Duke Nukem Forever*
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