Allergic to "3" Valve developers discuss why Half Life 2: Episode 3 was abandoned Anniversary doc also includes footage of unused ice gun, blob enemies. Kyle Orland Nov 18, 2024 4:06 pm | 32 The ice gun would have been the main mechanical gimmick in Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Credit: Valve The ice gun would have been the main mechanical gimmick in Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Credit: Valve Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAfter Ars spent Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary week looking back at the game's history and impact, Valve marked the occasion with a meaty two-hour YouTube documentary featuring insider memories from the team behind the game itself. Near the end of that documentary, longtime Valve watchers also get a chance to see footage of the long-promised but never-delivered Half-Life 2: Episode 3and hear more about what led the project to be abandoned.The Episode 3 footage included in the documentary focuses heavily on a new ice gun that would have served as the episode's main new feature. Players would have been able to use that gun to freeze enemies, set up ice walls as makeshift cover, or construct icy ledges to make their way down sheer cliff faces. The developers also describe a so-called "Silver Surfer mode" that would have let players extrude a line of ice in their path then slide along it at slippery speeds.The Episode 3 developers were also working on a new, blob-like enemy that could absorb other blobs to grow or split into segments to get around small barriers or pass through grates.Missing the momentAccording to the documentary, Valve spent about six months working on Episode 3 before deciding to pull all hands in to work on Left 4 Dead. At that point, the Episode 3 project was still an unordered set of playable levels set in the Arctic, with few story beats and concepts between them. Developers quoted in the documentary said it would have taken years of more work to get the episode into a releasable state.By the time work on Left 4 Dead was wrapping up in 2008, Valve was still publicly saying that it hoped Episode 3 would be ready by 2010. But after so much time spent away from the Episode 3 project, developers found it was hard to restart the momentum for a prototype that now felt somewhat dated. The technology behind these blob-like enemies ended up being reused for the paint in Portal 2. Credit: Valve Looking back, Valve Engineer David Speyrer said it was "tragic and almost comical" that "by the time we considered going back to Episode 3, the argument was made like, 'Well, we missed it. It's too late now. And we really need to make a new engine to continue the Half-Life series and all that.' And now that just seems, in hindsight, so wrong. We could have definitely gone back and spent two years to make Episode 3."Despite the new weapons and mechanics that were already in the works for Episode 3, many developers quoted in the documentary cite a kind of fatigue that had set in after so much time and effort focused on a single franchise. "A lot of us had been doing Half-Life for eight-plus years" designer and composer Kelly Bailey noted.That lengthy focus on a single franchise helps explain why some Valve developers were eager to work on anything else by that time in their careers. "I think everybody that worked on Half-Life misses working on that thing," Engineer Scott Dalton said. "But it's also hard not to be like, 'Man, I've kind of seen every way that you can fight an Antlion,' or whatever. And so you wanna get some space away from it until you can come back to it with fresh eyes."After the first two Half-Life 2 episodes were received less well than the base game itself, many developers cited in the documentary also said they felt pressure to go "much bigger" for Episode 3. Living up to that pressure, and doing justice to the fan expectations for the conclusion of the three-episode saga, proved to be too much for the team."You cant get lazy and say, 'Oh, were moving the story forward,' Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said of the pressure. "Thats copping out of your obligation to gamers, right? Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But sort of saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next... you know, we couldve shipped it, like, it wouldnt have been that hard."You know, the failure wasmy personal failure was being stumped," Newell continued. "Like, I couldnt figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward."Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming EditorKyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 32 Comments Prev story