Half-Life fans usually don’t have reasons to be happy: the saga has been completely dead since 2007, when ‘Half-Life 2: Episode 2’ was released, and it was only revived in 2020… for a virtual reality game. Not that ‘Alyx’ was bad (quite the opposite), but it limited its player base a lot and had, as a result, very little social relevance. But, as they announced at the time, it was just the return to this world. And the best could be yet to come.
Return to the place where you were happy
In the mid-2000s, Valve decided to press the “Pause” button on the development of ‘Half-Life 3’ and anything related to its universe (beyond ‘Portal’), but now it seems that they have finally gotten their act together to solve the cliffhanger from that episode 2. If things continue as they seem, it will have taken 20 years to solve the mess.
And it’s that game fans saw, on a voice actor’s website, something called ‘Project White Sands’, by Valve. Shortly after, he deleted it quickly, but it was already too late: it’s the codename for a game. That’s clear. What’s happening? White Sands is the name of a desert in New Mexico, the state where Black Mesa is located, in fiction. Too much of a coincidence?
But the thing goes on: Tyler McVicker, Valve’s expert leaker, has come across a project called HLX, which is supposedly ‘Project White Sands’, which is supposedly ‘Half-Life 3’, and for which models of some character and enemy files have been found that would attest to this. Of course, until Valve confirms or denies it, we won’t know exactly what’s going on in their offices. For now, all we can do is keep our fingers crossed.
