There’s growing evidence, via datamining and voice actor leaks, that Valve is working on a brand new, yet-to-be-announced Half-Life video game. And before you go running to tell folks that, finally, Half-Life 3 is confirmed, keep in mind that we don’t know if that’s true.
Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was released all the way back in October 2007 and left fans in suspense with a massive cliffhanger ending. The planned Episode 3 never materialized and fans wouldn’t see the cliffhanger resolved until the release of Half-Life: Alyx, a VR-only prequel launched in 2020. That game’s ending moved the franchise forward about 40 seconds and seemingly set up the next main entry in the award-winning sci-fi shooter series. Now, about four years later, we have evidence suggesting that a team within Valve is quietly working on a new Half-Life game, and has been for some time.
Project White Sands leaks via a voice actor’s site
On August 4, fans spotted a listing for a Valve game codenamed “Project White Sands” on a voice actor’s website. The listing didn’t reveal who the actor was playing and the entire site and original post have been scrubbed from the web. But before the site was killed, Kotaku confirmed that the listing was real and it did indeed mention a Valve game using the “White Sands” codename.
Interstingly, White Sands is a desert located in New Mexico, the same state where Half-Life’s Black Mesa facility is located. Hmmm…
Not long after this project was leaked, longtime Valve reporter and content creator Tyler McVicker uploaded a new video sharing data and code he had found in recently updated Source 2 projects. (Source 2 is Valve’s main engine, and the company has a history of leaving behind bits of code and data from other games in updates as all of its projects use the same engine and tools.)
As explained in the video, we know that Valve and the Half-Life: Alyx team started pre-production on a different game during the development of that VR title.
In 2021, dataminers discovered its codename was HLX. However, Deadlock, a different recently leaked Valve game, was long thought by some to be HLX or what the project had evolved into. Others maintained that Deadlock (which was known internally as Citadel) was separate from HLX. It was hard to say, as data mining is tricky when you don’t know how many projects a studio is working on or the status of each game. But now that we know what Deadlock is, and that it’s not a Half-Life game, it’s become easier to start piecing together HLX using datamined code.
White Sands aka HLX might be Half-Life 3
“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,” explained McVicker in his new video.
According to strings of code found in Valve’s DOTA2, the character in HLX (which is believed to be Project White Sands) wears an HEV Suit, goes “offworld” at some point during the game, and encounters things like “storks,” “pentatanks,” “feral man hacks,” “Xenogorillas, Xen Jellyfish, and Xen Swoopers.” (Xen is the dimension you visit at the end of the original Half-Life.) It’s believed that some of these enemies or creatures were planned for Alyx but got cut and have instead made their way into HLX aka White Sands.
Toward the end of the video, in a section clearly labeled “speculation,” McVicker asks himself if this leaked game is Half-Life 3. And after a pause, he says: Yes.
“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.”
Of course, until Valve confirms any of this, we won’t know for sure. It’s always possible—and this has happened before—that the project won’t be finished and won’t ever see the light of day. We just have to wait. But if devs at Valve have been working on HLX aka White Sands for about three-to-four years so far, we might not have to wait too long before the next Half-Life game—whatever that ends up being—is officially revealed.
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