A “fully-fledged ‘Half Life’ game” is in the works at Valve, studio insider Tyler McVicker has claimed.
A 'fully-fledged Half Life game' is in the works at Valve, studio insider Tyler McVicker has claimed
Yesterday (04.08.24), fans of the iconic action franchise - which hasn’t been seen since 2020’s VR spin-off ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ - went ballistic after voice actress Natasha Chandel’s website revealed she would be working on ‘Project White Sands’ for Valve, which indicated to some the studio was finally developing the next chapter of the ‘Half Life’ series.
Now, Valve dataminer Tyler McVicker has shared details of the apparent game, which is said to be codenamed ‘HLX’.
In a video posted to his YouTube channel, McVicker claimed: “Valve and the team behind ‘Half-Life Alyx’ started pre-production on another single-player title [around the same time as ‘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.”
He continued: “‘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’.”