I was thinking about Half Life 3 or Half Life 2, Episode 3 whichever you prefer to think is coming out next. Everyone knows its taking a crazy amount of time to come out and I was thinking that the reason why is probably not anything to do with actually continuing the story or anything like that.
Both previous Half Life releases have been watershed moments for games. Half Life 1 set the standards for First Person games for years to come afterward and launched titles like Counterstrike and Day of Defeat which are still played by huge numbers today.
Half Life 2 sort of marked the end of PC First Person games. It launched the Source Engine, Steam and came out to huge reviews. Both subsequent episodes were well received. After that, the PC gaming started to decline in favour of console gaming.
But where is Half Life 3? I think that the title is more the victim of its own success than anything else. The next HL game must live up to the high bar set by its predecessors. But, how could Valve have achieved that in the markets that existed since HL2? PC gaming has gone through a huge trough lately and is only recently recovering with titles like StarCraft 2, Elder Scrolls V and Battlefield 3 making the PC a must have once again. Its been years since anything debuted that made the majority of people think that it was time to upgrade their PCs and get back in. So, all this to say that Valve, always a primary PC developer, can release a game that is supposed to redefine the genre when no one is paying attention. They had to wait till PC gaming came back around.
I think we're just at that point now, I would say that with Wii2 now confirmed, there's probably only about a year and half until Microsoft and Sony come out with their new consoles. For all that time, PC games will continue to lead in terms of graphics and gameplay.
Additionally, somewhere during the HL2 episodes, first person games took a huge shift. Titles like Halo, Call of Duty etc. changed the way the genre was played. These games focused purely on action, breathtaking moments, contain almost no in-game story and a very simple subset of actions and abilities of the player. This proved the winning formula to take to the console market and achieve unprecedented success. Success also means the market has gotten quite saturated with very similar looking and playing titles. The big innovators in the FPS field on consoles (Infinity Ward and Bungie) are both almost out of the picture (Halo Reach being Bungie's last title in that franchise and IW loosing a lot of its best talent), its likely that this genre has peaked for the time being.
Finally, I think that Valve's releases during the interim between Episode 2 and now are experiments in where to take the Half Life experience. If HL is know as part FPS, part puzzle, a great story with sci-fi and horror elements then Valve needed to take some time to explore where to take these elements without risking the HL brand name. Left 4 Dead takes HLs horror elements (ie. Ravenholm) and explore the genre and portal obviously looks at puzzle games in new ways. Both explore extensively how to tell a story through a first person perspective without use of a narrator, or even a speaking protagonist in some cases. All of these gameplay elements were introduced in HL and are being worked on in these titles. I think of them as safe places for Valve to experiment without jeopardizing its flagship brand. The last piece is what to do about the actual shooting elements, since this is where the genre has changed so much away from what HL uses - but both L4D and Portal explore this as well, with new ways of exploring health and and inventory management which are more in line with modern tastes. This is to say nothing of Team Fortress which is an amazing sandbox for testing FPS ideas.
Ok, so the big point is that Valve need Half Life 3 to be another major milestone in gaming - it needs to raise the bar for everyone and influence how the genre develops from then on. This is the only acceptable standard for Half Life 3. The reason for waiting so long is to wait for the genre to show signs of going stale, for PC gaming market to become the leader again and for the direction of the core elements in the HL experience to be perfected.
I believe all these elements are in place and that we'll see an announcement for HL3 sometime very soon. I'll even guess that it's teased at E3 this year.
J
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