Half-Life 3 is “playable end-to-end” and could be announced this year, a Valve insider has claimed.
Tyler McVicker, who has a history of insider reporting on Valve projects, claimed in his latest YouTube discussion that the game, which is reportedly codenamed HLX, is far enough ahead in development that it can be played from start to finish.
McVicker claimed that HLX is being playtested by a sizeable group of people, and that some of them have already leaked plot details to other people.
“HLX is being playtested so religiously and so widely that there are individuals that will just talk,” he said. “I personally have a policy of avoiding any story-related questions or information where possible, so I currently have avoided all of them. But I’ve been offered it by people whom are trustworthy and I know that some of my contemporaries have been given it, so there is information out there about the plot.”
Elsewhere in his video, McVicker stressed that “Half-Life 3 is not a VR title” like Half-Life Alyx was, and that Alyx had been leaked significantly more than HLX had been at this point in development, suggesting that the current project is being kept more tightly under wraps to an extent.
“At this point [in Alyx’s development] I knew the ending, I knew pretty much every major gameplay aspect of it, at this point I had screenshots.”
Given its reported stage of development, McVicker said that the game could be ready for an announcement this Summer and a release in the Winter, though it was stressed that this was purely guesswork on his part.
“This is the furthest it’s ever been,” he explained. “Period. The game is playable end-to-end, period. It’s never been that far. And they’re optimising it, polishing it. They’re probably content-locked, or if they’re not they’re mechanic-locked.”
Back in 2021, McVicker said there was no Half-Life 3 game in development at the time, because Valve was instead busy working on a game called Citadel, which would eventually evolve to Neon Prime and then become Deadlock.
