I want to believe Why Half-Life 3 speculation is reaching a fever pitch again New leaks and cryptic clues point to active development the long-awaited sequel. Kyle Orland Jan 2, 2025 4:30 pm | 23 The Valve seems to be leaking... Credit: Geoff Keighley The Valve seems to be leaking... Credit: Geoff Keighley Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe more than two decades since Half-Life 2's release have been filled with plenty of rumors and hints about Half-Life 3, ranging from the official-ish to the thin to the downright misleading. As we head into 2025, though, we're approaching something close to a critical mass of rumors and leaks suggesting that Half-Life 3 is really in the works this time, and could be officially announced in the coming months.The latest tease came just before the end of 2024 via a New Year's Eve social media video from G-Man voice actor Mike Shapiro. In the voice of the mysterious in-game bureaucrat, Shapiro expresses hopes that "the next quarter century [will] deliver as many unexpected surprises as did the millennium's first (emphasis added)... See you in the new year."The post is all the more notable because it's Shapiro's first in over four years, when he concluded a flurry of promotional posts surrounding the release of Half-Life: Alyx (many of which were in-character as G-Man). And in 2020, just after Alyx's release, Shapiro told USGamer that he had recently worked on a "blast from the past" project that he would "announce... on my Twitter feed when I'm allowed to" (no such announcement has been forthcoming for any other game)."I was working on that game for quite a while before I knew [what it was]," Shapiro said at the time of the unannounced project. "There was a rehearsal and some recordings, and after one of the recording sessions I was having a drink with the director. He told me what the game was, and nobody knows that this is coming."This is going to be such a mindblowing re-up from what people have come to know," Shapiro continued in 2020. "It's going to really... it's going to make people have a complete re-understanding of what they thought they knew about the story in the game prior to it, and I don't even know if people are expecting it."Raised HLX-pectationsOn its own, a single in-character post from a voice actor would probably be a bit too cryptic to excite Half-Life fans who have seen their sequel hopes dashed so often over the last two decades. But the unexpected tease comes amid a wave of leaks and rumors surrounding "HLX," an internal Valve project that has been referenced in a number of other Source 2 engine game files recently.Those HLX references got a lot more attention about five months ago when noted Valve watcher Tyler McVicker posted a video analyzing the Valve code and concluding that the HLX project is "a fully-fledged non-VR Half-Life game." In subsequent videos, McVicker has gone into more detail on datamined code for everything from voxel-based deformation systems to zero-g and underwater navigation systems to "so much flammability stuff," all seemingly in service of "HLX.""It's obvious that Valve wants to be able to push the envelope in the same way that Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 did in their day," McVicker said in November in a video bluntly entitled "Valve Isn't Trying to Hide HL3 Anymore." McVicker now believes that "instead of pushing graphical fidelity like everybody else, it seems like Valve is pushing for physical fidelity" with its in-game systems and objects.Beyond those data-mined details, Valve-watching YouTuber "Gabe Follower" said in a video this week that "according to my information, in the last few months Valve has started active HLX playtests, now not only with people from other teams, but also friends and family members." That suggestion gains at least a little bit of extra credence given Gabe Follower's history of leaking early Valve content, including screenshots and information about Deadlock (originally code-named Citadel) well before it was officially revealed."It is a quite important stage for the project," Gabe Follower says of the reported friends and family playtesting. "If it survives the New Year holidays and there are no serious problems during the playtests with a close circle of people, then the development will continue at the right pace and the announcement in 2025 may turn out to be quite possible."Add that to leaks regarding a mysterious "Project White Sands" that Valve seems to be using in public hiring announcements, and you have enough smoke to suggest there might actually be some real Half-Life 3 fire burning at Valve this time around. We know it's easy to be gun-shy after so many years of false starts, but we hope you'll forgive us for still wanting to believe.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. 23 Comments