One of Valve Software’s regular voice actors John Patrick Lowrie, who is married to Ellen McLain (GLaDOS’s voice), recently stated in the comments thread of a blog post that he doesn’t believe Half-Life 3 is in development.
“Right. As far as I know they are not developing HL3 now for several reasons, among them the mo-cap issue. Sorry for any confusion. What they might decide in the future depends on lots of different factors. I hope they do, personally, but it has to make sense for them.”
While the post is two years old, Lowrie’s comments are fairly recent. He also talked about issues with motion-capture for Half Life 3. “Here is the biggest challenge with bringing out Half-Life 3: the big thing now with FPSs is motion capture, or mo-cap. One of the great things about Half-Life 2 is that all of the characters that you meet actually look at you when they talk to you no matter where you go or stand.
“With mo-cap you can’t do that, at least not yet. Once you film the actor doing something and capture that motion, that’s what the character is going to do. This works great in movies, but when you make something interactive it gets way less interactive with mo-cap. So that’s one of the things they’re working on.”
Of course, Valve is also very busy with just about everything else, primarily Steam. “Well, I’m not sure how big it is for HL2 fans. They don’t tell me their business plans, this was just a conversation I had. Right now they’re pretty full up with all the games they already have out there that they continue to support, plus the Steam stuff that they do, so, I don’t want to get people’s hopes up.
“I have no idea what they’re planning for the future. But I did have that conversation with some Valve folks, so I thought you might like to know what they’re thinking about.”