Just days ahead of its 20-year anniversary, Half-Life 2 has a new trailer for its RTX remaster.Valve’s influential first-person shooter launched on Steam on November 16, 2004.
Ever since then, and the release of Episode 2 in 2007, fans have called on Valve to release Half-Life 3. But alas, it seems further away now, all these years later, than ever before.Still, Nvidia has decided to release a new trailer “celebrating the game’s enduring legacy” that offers another look at the remaster, Half-Life 2 RTX.
Half-Life 2 RTX is in development at 100-person mod team Orbifold Studios, and adds full ray tracing, remastered assets, and DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction as a free DLC for Half-Life 2 owners.So, what is the status of Half-Life these days?
In 2020, a making-of for VR exclusive Half-Life: Alyx revealed a swathe of games developed and shelved by Valve between the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Valve's latest VR game.
That list included details on a version of Half-Life 3 that was in development for around a year.Geoff Keighley's The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx revealed that at least five Half-Life games were canceled between Episode 2 and Alyx, along with a number of other projects — the most notable being a project officially referred to within Valve as Half-Life 3.Half-Life 3 was said to have been created in the Source 2 engine and drew some gameplay inspiration from Left 4 Dead.