Just days forward of its 20-year anniversary, Half-Life 2 has a brand new trailer for its RTX remaster.
Valve’s influential first-person shooter launched on Steam on November 16, 2004. Ever since then, and the discharge of Episode 2 in 2007, followers have known as on Valve to launch Half-Life 3. But alas, it appears additional away now, all these years later, than ever earlier than.
Still, Nvidia has determined to launch a new trailer “celebrating the sport’s enduring legacy” that gives one other take a look at the remaster, Half-Life 2 RTX. Half-Life 2 RTX is in improvement at 100-person mod staff Orbifold Studios, and provides full ray tracing, remastered belongings, and DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction as a free DLC for Half-Life 2 house owners.
So, what’s the standing of Half-Life nowadays? In 2020, a making-of for VR unique Half-Life: Alyx revealed a swathe of video games developed and shelved by Valve between the discharge of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Valve’s newest VR recreation. That listing included particulars on a model of Half-Life 3 that was in improvement for round a yr.
Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx revealed that at the very least 5 Half-Life video games had been canceled between Episode 2 and Alyx, together with a lot of different tasks — probably the most notable being a mission formally referred to inside Valve as Half-Life 3.
Half-Life 3 was mentioned to have been created within the Source 2 engine and drew some gameplay inspiration from Left 4 Dead. The mission often called Half-Life 3 would have used procedural era between hand-crafted story moments to create a extra replayable recreation. For occasion, the sport would generate a constructing and an goal (similar to rescuing a prisoner), then create a route by it and fill the constructing with enemies, that means that part would at all times play out otherwise.
The staff went so far as scanning Frank Sheldon, the actor whose likeness was used for the sequence’ G-Man. However the Source 2 engine was unfinished, and the mission “did not get very far” earlier than it was dropped. It was in improvement for round a yr between 2013 and 2014.
What may need been? Since then, Valve has launched Counter-Strike 2 as an up to date type of CS:GO, and multiplayer recreation Deadlock in early improvement kind. The firm has but to make any indication {that a} new Half-Life recreation, Half-Life 3 or in any other case, is within the works.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can attain Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.