We never got Half Life 3. We never got Half Life 2: Episode 3 either. Fans worldwide have made their peace with the fact that the resolution to the cliffhangers in those games is never coming. However, speaking in a recent interview, Marc Laidlaw, who worked as a writer with Valve on the Half Life games, has revealed that the original plan was for each Half Life game to end on a cliffhanger. This way, the series would be able to continue indefinitely.
“I will say that I expected every installment would end without resolution, forever and ever…there was some rumor going around that Ep3 or HL3 would end Gordon Freeman’s story, and I don’t think that was accurate,” Laidlaw said in an interview with Arcade Attack. “My intention was that Ep3 would simply tie up the plot threads that were particular to HL2. But it would still end like HL1 and HL2, with Gordon in an indeterminate space, on hold, waiting for the next game to begin. So one cliffhanger after another.”
Well, that… I suppose fans may still have been okay with it as long as the series had continued on, instead of the fate that it went on to suffer. As it stands right now, the story remains unfinished and untold, and Half Life itself is a relic of a time when Valve was on the cutting edge of single player games.