Gabe Newell does not like to mislead people, and when it comes to Half-Life, it has to be extremely tough for him to talk about it all the time to journalists, or fans mailing him for answer. He did, however, reveal a little bit as to why it is taking so long in an interview with Penny Arcade.
He said, “Part of the reason that we backed off talking so much about what was happening in the future is that when we’ve done that in the past, you know, with Half-Life 1 it was a year after we originally said it would be, Half-Life 2 basically if you go and read the forum posts apparently took us 50 or 60 years to get done, so we’re trying to be careful not to get people too excited and then have to go and disappoint them.”
“So we’re sort of reacting in the other direction and saying, ‘okay, well let’s have things a little more baked before we start getting people all excited about it.'”
I completely understand the stance taken by Newell and his team, but you cannot ignore the fact that, it’s been like, what, 6 years since Half-Life 2 came out? It has to be a torturous time for Half-Life fans, and even Newell acknowledges that.
“We’re acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation,” he said.
“We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it.
“But we recognize that it’s been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love – Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, not a whole lot of Ricochet enthusiasts out there, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and those stories and those characters are moving forward while also making sure that we don’t just get into terminal sequelitis.”
But he does not want to talk more about Episode 3 or Half-Life 3, whatever they’re making because of solid reasons. But he is not willing to reveal those reasons yet.
“I get a ton of email every day saying why aren’t you talking about Episode 3? And there are very good reasons why we’re not talking about Episode 3, which I can’t talk about yet, but I will,” Newell concluded.
