Rumors and facts about the contents of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 and why it was never finished have circulated for years, but a new documentary released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary is particularly revealing, showing us a glimpse of unfinished Episode 3 guns and enemies—including an ice ray that had «kind of like a Silver Surfer mode»—and getting a few of its developers to explain why it was never finished.
For the uninitiated, Half-Life 2 was famously followed up with two episodic expansions that were going to form a trilogy, but after Episode 2, Valve abandoned the Half-Life story for 13 years, only picking it up again in 2020 with VR game Half-Life: Alyx.
Since then, speculating about Episode 3, or the fabled Half-Life 3, has become a cherished PC gaming forum pastime. What happened to Episode 3 is no big surprise: The gist is that they didn't know how to push the game design forward enough to make it feel worthwhile to them.
That ice gun was apparently not up to Valve's standards of innovation, nor were the blob enemies that use Portal tech. In the documentary, Half-Life 2 level designer David Riller says that they were experiencing «element fatigue» and needed to «go bigger or do something else.» «I think we had really explored a lot of what made sense in the Half-Life universe and setting,» Riller said.
Writer Marc Laidlaw echoed that feeling, noting that even Arkane was struggling to do new things in its canceled Ravenholm spin-off.