Valve insider Tyler McVicker claims Half-Life 3 is reportedly fully playtestable from start to finish.
A new update from the Valve camp has come out, revealing more hopeful news. Valve insider Tyler McVicker claimed Half-Life 3, reportedly codenamed HLX, is playable from start to finish. In McVickers’ last YouTube video discussion, he reported that the game in development is in the next stage of playtests, where playtesters can play the full game now. This is a major development, as McVickers noted, this is the furthest a rumoured Half-Life 3 project in development has undergone.
McVicker was one of the first insiders to report on Valve’s project in the early 2020s, when Valve was working on a game then known as Citadel. This was the game that evolved into Neon Prime and then Deadlock.
McVicker also addressed the procedural generation rumours. Unlike earlier speculation, HLX will not feature terrain generation or roguelike mechanics. Instead, it uses a system similar to Left 4 Dead’s AI Director to dynamically adjust elements like enemy placement, items, and NPCs. The story itself remains fixed. “The way Valve is going about that is akin to taking the [AI] Director from Left 4 Dead 2 and making it significantly more powerful. It’s not changing geometry. It’s instead changing entity placement, right [like] doors, physics props, enemies, items… [etc.]”
He added that the game is being widely tested and leaks are more likely now than ever, going as far as playtesters already leaking plot details to some people. McVicker said he avoids discussing story details, though he did say: “I actually do think [Portal’s] Chell may turn up in Half-Life 3.” He delved deeper into how HLX is being “playtested so religiously and so widely that there are individuals who will just talk.”
McVicker proceeded to talk about how “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. This suggests 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.”
On where the stage of development currently lands, McVicker said that the game could be ready for an announcement this summer and a release in the winter. At least, this was his best guess. “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.”
Slowly but surely, Half-Life fans and data miners are always scraping at the next biggest updates. This would be a significant announcement if McVicker is right about an announcement this summer. If there is one thing hopeful about the sequel in development is that it is being playtested more, so there is something of substance worth Valve’s time and research. The last major video game development was Rockstar moving GTA 6’s supposed release date.
