“We found ourselves creeping ever forward towards, ‘Well, let's just keeping putting more and more, and more, and more stuff in this game because we want to make it as good as we can,’” he explains, “and then we realized these episodes are turning more into sequels.” While Episode One was successfully developed in about a year, Casali says “scope creep” became a problem. That plan didn’t work out entirely as Valve had hoped. Of course, I pointed out the irony of him saying Valve disliked going dark for six years when the gap between Episode Two and Alyx ended up being more than double that, to which Casali jokingly replied “yeah, it's like we adjusted to an extreme” after they moved away from the quicker episodic format.īut, regardless of how it ended, a plan was set to develop and release each episode in a year, designing them as shorter additions to the story to keep players satisfied more frequently. We think players are going to prefer that from waiting six years and going through however many delays we went through.’" Let's just bite off little chunks and then release more often. We understand the characters, we understand the story, we have most of the mechanics. That's why we started doing the episodes where we thought, ‘well, we have the stable technology now. “After working on Half-Life 2 for six years we decided we didn't want to go dark for so long. It was partly due to Valve’s worry about “scope creep” in what were supposed to be smaller expansions, partly the studio’s desire to begin development on the Source 2 engine, and partly the lack of a creative spark (and unsatisfactory internal experiments) worthy of carrying the Half-Life name. His answer is, frankly, the clearest I’ve heard on the issue yet, but there’s still no single, simple reason it never manifested. During that chat, we also discussed why Valve decided to make Episodes instead of a full sequel, and why the now infamous Episode 3 (and a sequel in general) never arrived. But now, after more than a decade, we’re getting a new Half-Life game – as well as some answers.Īhead of the release of Half-Life: Alyx, I spoke with level designer Dario Casali – a Valve veteran who has been with the studio since 1996 – about Half-Life 2, its development, and its influence on Valve’s new VR prequel. 13 years after release, its heart-wrenching finale is still unresolved, and the once feverish “Half-Life 3 Confirmed!” memes have mostly lost steam.
It’s not often that an unanswered cliffhanger in a story becomes echoed so perfectly by one in real life – but the legendary, lingering end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and the real world silence that followed is anything but ordinary.
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