To celebrate Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, Valve dropped a few surprises in our lap on Friday afternoon, like putting together the original dev team to record in-game commentary for the legendary FPS, which is free for the weekend on Steam.
Awesome! Valve also posted a two-hour documentary on the making of Half-Life 2 on YouTube. Also awesome—unless you had something else to watch tonight like a ridiculous boxing match.
Personally, I'm less interested in the development of a 20-year-old game I know like the back of my hand as I am in some hints about what might come next for Half-Life.
So, I did the thing you do when you just can't wait to find out who done it in a whodunnit: I skipped to the end. Is there confirmation of Half-Life 3 in the Half-Life 2 documentary?
Or confirmation of Half-Life: Alyx 2? Or confirmation of anything specific at all? No. But in the closing minutes of the documentary, there are some hints that the Half-Life saga isn't over. «It was easy to think about VR being a vehicle for Half-Life because that was a big technological innovation and kind of a core reason for that product's existence,» said Valve engineer Brian Jacobson. «And I think one of the things we have internally tended to attach to the Half-Life IP is innovation.