The string of rumors and speculations indicating that Valve might be working on a new Half-Life game – and not just any Half-Life game, but Half-Life 3 of all things – presists into 2025, with Tyler McVicker, the YouTuber whose findings in August 2024 reignited the community’s interest in the topic in the first place, presenting a new report suggesting that it is entirely possible for the developer to officially acknowledge and announce HLX – where “X” most likely stands for “3” – sometime this year.
As stated by Tyler, he and his team combed through the code from Dota 2’s recent update, uncovering a series of engine changes typical of the final stages of a production cycle, namely optimization and polish. Based on some of the code strings found in the update, available here, the YouTuber speculates that HLX is a single-player first-person shooter with heavily upgraded and enhanced physics, described as an evolution of Half-Life 2’s systems, groundbreaking in and of themselves by 2004 standards.
Purportedly, features like flammability, buoyancy, deformations, fluid simulation, vehicle simulation, NPC reactions, and entity AI have all been greatly improved for HLX, with human NPCs reportedly boasting an entire “mood-based system” where their visual, auditory, and even olfactory surroundings can affect their behavior and responses. Moreover, NPCs are also apparently capable of dynamically adjusting their navigation meshes if the map’s environment has been altered by destructibility.
As a cherry on top, the latest update for Deadlock, which changed the number of lanes in the game from four to three, featured the “hlx_fsr3” string of code, referring to AMD’s upscaling and frame generation technology – something typically only found when a project is nearing its completion. Taking all this into consideration, along with the previous rumors that surfaced last year, Tyler speculates that Valve might actually announce HLX sometime in 2025, emphasizing that this is just his prediction and not an indication that he knows the studio’s release schedule.
Valve
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