More evidence of "fully-fledged Half-Life game" revealed by Valve dataminer
"Do I think this is Half-Life 3? I gotta be very careful in answering that question, but yes."
Following yesterday's bombshell news that Valve could be developing a new Half-Life game, Valve expert Tyler McVicker has stepped forward to say he too believes it's true.
Codenamed "HLX", McVicker asserts the new game "seems to be a fully-fledged non-VR Half-Life game, something that seems too good to be true".
I'll go into some of the details after the video embedded below, but please be mindful there may be spoilers for this new game.
"Almost everything you're about to hear is real, is not speculation, and comes directly from datamines of Valve's recent updates," McVickers says at the start of the video.
"Valve and the team behind Half-Life Alyx started pre-production on another single-player title [around the same time as Half-Life Alyx]. We found out the codename of that title in 2021: HLX.
"There were arguments at the time and in the few following years that HLX wasn't actually representative of a fully-fledged game in development, but maybe could represent an engine feature, or was just a file format for saves.
"In the interim, I have been slowly and silently digging into this story. HLX is a confusing one. HLX seems to be a fully-fledged non-VR Half-Life game, something that seems too good to be true, and something that I wanted to be very sure of before going live with any of this information."
McVicker adds that as "Valve is actively developing many titles on Source" – perhaps most notably "Citadel aka Neon Prime aka Deadlock" – for a while, he couldn't be sure what HLX was.
"Half-Life Alyx was announced almost five year ago, and fully released over four and, as it turns out, that entire time has been spent developing the next major single-player title, codenamed HLX. And now – thanks to a screw up by one of the voice actors on the project – we now know the internal codename that Valve uses to hide the real project name whilst casting voice actors is called Project White Sands."
Interestingly, McVicker points out that, like a lot of studios, Valve uses "very random" codenames, such as "Hot Dog" for Left 4 Dead VR and Left 4 Dead 3, and "Jamiroquai" for Half-Life Alyx. So quite why this one is so candidly associated with the Half-Life series, we're not sure.
McVicker has since "learned a lot" about the project via datamining. According to "strings" inside games like Dota 2, the character you play as "in whatever HLX is" wears a HEV Suit, and will go "Offworld" where there are "workers", "storks", "pentatanks", "feral man hacks", and "Xengorillas, Xenjellyfish, and Xenswoopers". McVicker reckons these things were initially cut from Half-Life Alyx but have "continued to receive some form of development according to the most recent updates to Valve's Source 2 projects".
"Do I think this is Half-Life 3?" McVicker adds. "I gotta be very careful in answering that question.
"But yes."
Vickers added: "I think this is a non-VR, Half-Life game [in which] you play a HEV Suit-wearing character in development at Valve Software that has been in development since Half-Life Alyx."
The actor's website that revealed Project White Sands to the world last night has already been updated to remove the reference.