Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx recently became available and scored big with critics. It’s the first title in the series to be in VR but also the first major single-player game from Valve in a long time. The team was composed of about 80 developers, making it the company’s biggest yet, and members of Campo Santo were included.

The kicker is that Campo Santo, which was acquired by Valve in 2018, had halted its own project In the Valley of Gods to work on Half-Life: Alyx. So with the latter out, is the team back to working on the first person adventure? Not quite. Former member Chris Remo, who’s now a designer at Valve, spoke to PCGamesN and said that In the Valley of Gods is “on hold for the time being.”

“We were working on it when those of us from Campo Santo came up to Valve, and something we found over time was, in contrast to working on that game, Valve was a place with a lot of teams, a lot of projects, a lot going on.”

As per Remo, there wasn’t a “particular moment or decision” as such that resulted in this. Different people just began working on other things. Remo noted that, “I worked on Underlords for a bit. I’ve been working on Half-Life: Alyx now for a while. We just eventually came to a conclusion as a team like, ‘Oh, it looks like we’re all kind of working on other stuff right now. Let’s put this thing on hold for a bit and figure out over time what that means.’ Really, that was about it.”

It does create some uncertainty for the future of In the Valley of Gods, which looked to be another strong narrative in the vein of Firewatch. Nevertheless, all we can do is wait and see if Campo Santo decides to return to it. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

Campo Santo, known for its critically acclaimed first person narrative-driven adventure Firewatch, has recently been purchased by Valve. The rather surprising announcement was revealed in a blog post over the weekend when the studio noted that it would shift to Bellevue, Washington.

There aren’t many changes at this point – the blog noted that the studio “maintain our jobs as video game developers”. To that, you can still expect its next game In the Valley of Gods to ship in 2019. Those who thought that joining with Valve would affect the game’s launch for consoles, Campo Santo said on Twitter that it wouldn’t. Thus far, In the Valley of Gods has only been announced for PC.

What motivated the desire to join the Half-Life and Portal developer? According to Campo Santo, “We had a series of long conversations with the people at Valve and everyone shared the satisfaction we take in working with people whose talents dwarf our own to make things we never thought possible.

“Both sides spoke about our values and how, when you get right down to it, we, as human beings, are hard-limited by the time we have left when it comes to making the things we care about and believe in.”

Valve revealed recently that it would begin shipping games once more after many years of managing Steam, supporting competitive titles like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: GO, and constantly denying that Half-Life 3 was in development. Perhaps Campo Santo joining the studio could factor into that plan? Stay tuned for more information in the coming months.

Nope!

— Campo Santo (@camposanto) April 21, 2018