For the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, Valve not only started giving away its cult shooter, but also released a documentary dedicated to the game's development. Among other things, it featured concept art, screenshots, and even levels from the cancelled Episode Three.
The screenshots show a new type of weapon and a new enemy. Apparently, players could freeze surfaces with a special device to slide on them or overcome obstacles. Episode Three also planned to add another enemy in the form of a jelly mass using technology from Portal.
The concept art looks no less interesting. One of them apparently depicts the Borealis ship, which was shown in the finale of Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
But why was the Episode 3 never released? According to a much slimmer Gabe Newell, releasing a sequel just to finish the game would be cheating:
You can't get lazy and say, «Oh, we're moving the story forward.» That's copping out of your obligation to gamers. Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next, you know—we could've shipped it, it wouldn't have been that hard. The failure, my personal failure was being stumped. I couldn't figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.
As for Half-Life 3, the head of Valve sparingly said that they still have ideas for this universe. In addition, for fans of the series, a website was launched in honor of the 20th anniversary of the second part, where you can find more archival information, free wallpapers for PC and smartphones, soundtracks and much more.
Earlier, a new presentation of Half-Life 2 RTX took place — a fan remaster with updated graphics, ray tracing and other improvements. The developers also shared an updated design of Gordon Freeman.