Last week, Half-Life fans were whipped into a frenzy after a mysterious project called White Sands was found on a voice actor's resume. It's a project currently in development over at Valve, and while the listing doesn't directly mention Half-Life, White Sands is the name of a National Park in New Mexico, the state in which you can also find Black Mesa.

It's not much to go off, but combined with the fact that we know the team behind Half-Life: Alyx is working on a single-player title, it convinced many that this could be the fabled Half-Life 3 of legend. It convinced reputable Valve dataminer Tyler McVickers to take interest in the whole situation, and in a new video posted to their YouTube channel, they seem to have uncovered even more evidence that Half-Life 3 might actually be real and in development.

We've known for a while that the Half-Life: Alyx team had been working on something for a while under the codename HLX, but there were also questions as to what it actually was. McVickers had been working on an answer to this conundrum for a while, diving into Source 2 (the engine which is used to make all of Valve's modern games) to find elements such as voxel-based destruction, vehicle simulation, and Xen creatures, but he hadn't been able to attribute them to a particular project.

That brings us to the new information, and McVickers' recent datamining has found some pretty interesting stuff. For starters, McVikers reveals that the main character for Project White Sands - whatever it may be - definitely wears an HEV suit, the iconic orange and black suit worn by protagonist Gordon Freeman. He has also found references to various Xen creatures, such as swoopers, jellyfish, and gorillas, the latter of which was teased in Half-Life: Alyx's zoo level.

McVickers ends his new video by claiming that he believes this could be Half-Life 3. At the very least, it's a single-player Half-Life game that features a main character wearing a HEV suit. McVickers also says that this project has been in development since Half-Life: Alyx was released over four years ago, and that features development for the project has been ramping up while systems development has been slowing down.

With that knowledge, and the fact that we know that the average development time for triple-A games is roughly 5 to 6 years these days, it seems as though this mystery Half-Life game could get an official reveal sooner rather than later. That's just speculation, but the fact are that Valve is working on something Half-Life-related, so all we can do is cross our fingers and hope for the best.



Posted: Aug 10, 2024 1:17 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.thegamer.com/half-life-3-leak-continue-after-counter-strike-dota-2-datamine/