Can We Really Expect Half-life 3 at E3?

You guys and gals out there aren’t tired of all of the E3 hype surrounding the surprise Valve announcement already right? This rumor may sound quite far fetched, but VG247 reports that they have had an anonymous tip that Valve will announce Half-life 3 running on the source engine 2 at this years E3. Wait a minute though! Last time I checked Valve was not only happy with the graphic fidelity in most of their games, but they also update the source engine in increments. Have they really gone so far as to overhaul the entire engine to deserve the name source engine 2? Will it be a slight incremental update where they claim that they are now up to source engine 2?

What about Half-life 3? Why exactly are we even expecting Half-life 3? Is it because of that fake logo, which floated around for sometime on the web (or maybe the crappy photoshop image I made in 5 seconds for this article)? Valve has been pretty clear that the episodes follow a Star Wars pattern. Episode 1 was similar to Star Wars Episode 4, A New Hope and Episode 2 was modeled after Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Especially the whole part at the end). Continuing this model wouldn’t it make sense to expect Half-life 2 Episode 3 and not a full blown sequel?

Valve can be pretty tricky at times. They threw Steam at old school users, and it had a rocky start, but it definitely caught on over time. Then Valve suddenly announces a new UI for Steam and that Steam will be coming to Macs. What’s my point? Well there is quite a divergence in Valve’s behavior at times. Can one expect them to spend all of this time working on one episode?

Let’s take a look at episode one, quite a bit of time was spent on it, and it did not meet the episodic deadline that Valve originally indented. Valve has been known to take their time especially with episodic content, but if their behavior has recently changed, perhaps Valve has suddenly decided that episode 3 couldn’t just be considered an episode. Don’t you think Valve plans to do something similar to the Orange Box with Portal 2 combined with some mystery game? Then again isn’t Valve going to sell Portal 2 separately for 50 dollars?

Well, I am sure that pretty much every gamer is confused. Our minds are most likely swarming with conspiracy theories about how Gabe may have eaten all the contents in our refrigerators last night in order to scare us. But hey, if there is one thing we know about Valve, it’s that they usually don’t disappoint once Valve’s Law of time is satisfied. Whatever the surprise may be, it better be good!

Source: vg247.com