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Half-Life 2 just turned 20-years-old, and to celebrate Valve updated the game with some new features. They also produced a documetary in which several of its development team look back on their work on the game and its episodic expansions – including the never-released Episode 3.
The documentary includes in-progress footage of the episode in action for the first time, and it shows an ice gun and a new liquid enemy type.
The discussion of Episode 3 begins at 1h 52m, with concept art and eventually in-game footage. The in-game footage is all taken from test arenas and tech demos, not finished parts of the game. Various Valve developers say they worked on the episode for around six months, before moving over to the original Left 4 Dead, never to return.
There are two main features of the episode discussed. The ice gun let you create geometry by spraying ice, so you could create impromptu cover to hide behind, which soldiers would shoot through and eventually smash. You could also use it directly as a weapon to freeze enemies, or in what is described as a “Silver Surfer mode”, to extrude an ice path in front of yourself as you slid along it.
An ice gun is thematically appropriate given Episode 3 was due to take place (at least in part) in the Arctic, as Freeman headed to the icebreaker ship Borealis referebced in Episode 2 (and initially planned as a setting for Half-Life 2).
More interesting is the new enemy type, called “the blobs”, which is a descriptive name. They are blobs, like liquid droplets, which can change shape, separate, and sluice around environments. They could absorb other enemies or physics objects, and squeeze (or fall) through grates.
It’s anyones guess whether these elements would have made it through to a release version of Episode 3, or whether the blobs would have been fun to fight. They certainly look cool, though.
“I still don’t know what that would have been if we’d built it, because it hadn’t been built,” writer Marc Laidlaw says. “That was the feeling of excitement, of something I can’t even imagine is going to happen as a team. I was not imposing a top-down, ‘This is what we must do to tell our very important tale.’ Y’know, it’s like – we have new features? What kind of story can we do with these now?”
Laidlaw eventually published a short story telling a version of Episode 3 as essentially fanfiction, though later told us he regretted the decision. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”
Several Valve employees in the docuemntary offer their own takes on why they never continued with Episode 3. Fatigue after working within Half-Life for so long, doubt about the concept of episodic games, a feeling that they needed to ‘go bigger’ with the next instalment, excitement about other projects being developed internally including multiplayer games. Several also say that it was a mistake – that they could have and should have gone back to working on it, in retrospect.
“You can’t get lazy and say, ‘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 the reason to do it is that people want to know what happens next– y’know, we could have shipped it. It wouldn’t have been that hard,” says Gabe Newell.
“The failure was, my personal failure was being stumped. I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.”
I don’t think it’s lazy to resolve a story you ended on a cliffhanger. I’m also not sure if developers have an obligation to gamers, but if they do, it’s presumably more of a cop out to not make a follow-up at all, thus fully abdicating the responsibility to innovate. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue against the ethos that produced Half-Life and Half-Life 2 in the first place, and the several fantastic games in different series that Valve would make in lieu of Episode 3.
The whole anniversary documentary is worth watching, if you’re a Half-Life obsessive like me. There’s brief footage in there of Arkane’s abandoned Ravenholm project, near the end, for example. Valve have also uploaded some separate videos to their YouTube channel, including a SIGGRAPH demo from 2000, a never-before-seen cancelled E3 2002 demo, and the E3 2003 demo that eventually went ahead.