After Two Months Of Unprecedented Copium, Half-Life 3 Probably Won’t Be Announced In 2025 After All
With rumours of a Half-Life 3 trailer in production, fans have been counting down the days for two months straight, like pilfering through an empty advent calendar. Every torn piece of cardboard a window to disappointment, as we creep closer and closer to pulling open the last panel.
Sure, Rocket Lab – who fired a gnome into space to celebrate the release of Half Life: Alyx – have a new launch lined up for tomorrow called ‘Raise and Shine’, presumably referencing G-Man, but it’s probably just a coincidence. And yes, Resident Evil 9 leakers claimed that “Half-Life: Xen” will be announced at The Game Awards, but that’s not what HLX means.
The unfortunate reality is that there’s no light at the end of this Highway 17 tunnel; Half-Life 3 probably won’t be announced this year.
“HLX is not an acronym, it’s a generic codename representing future Half-Life production, previously used when Valve was working on the episodes for HL2,” reporter Tyler McVicker explained. “It won’t be at The Game Awards. 2026 is likely.”
Indeed, just three days ago, Insider Gaming senior editor Mike Straw posted a GIF of a bridge exploding. He has been at the forefront of Half-Life 3 coverage alongside Tyler McVicker and Gabe Follower these last couple of months, and claimed that Valve was feeding multiple different dates to weed out leakers, hence why nobody has shared an exact time yet. More to the point, Straw said that when those dates had passed, he would let people know – the bridge appears to be him keeping his word.
Valve will go back on holiday in just three days for the festive season, leaving a very narrow window to announce Half-Life 3, but we still have TGA to look forward to tomorrow. However, leakers have stressed again and again just how unlikely it is that Valve would announce a game at the ceremony. Fans often refute this, arguing that Valve planned to announce Alyx at The Game Awards, but that’s not the case. In reality, it was always going to announce Alyx independently, with gameplay to follow at TGA, but the studio pulled out at the last minute.
Don’t Worry, Half-Life 3 Is Still Real
It’s certainly possible that Valve and Geoff Keighley struck a deal behind the scenes over the last few weeks, but an internal delay seems far more likely. After all, Alyx was originally intended to be announced alongside the Index VR headset in April 2019, but was postponed by several months after internal playtests led to major rewrites. At any rate, we’ll find out tomorrow.
While it might be disheartening to go through two months of sheer, unfettered copium, all for nothing, it’s worth remembering that Half-Life 3 not being announced in November or December does not mean that it has been cancelled, or that it was never real to begin with. Countless references have been uncovered within Source 2 games, showing it to be in the polishing and optimisation phase. Back in 2020, Valve developer Robin Walker also explained that the team sees “Alyx as our return to this world, not the end of it.”
So, yes, we might have to wait a little longer for its reveal, but we’ve been waiting since 2007 – what’s another few months?
Systems
Released
November 19, 1998
ESRB
M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language
Publisher(s)
Sierra Studios
Engine
goldsrc, source
Multiplayer
Local Multiplayer
