Half-Life Episode 3

From Eurogamers.net
Half-Life 2: Episode Three is in pre-production and Valve doesn't anticipate gamers returning to City 17, according to marketing director Doug Lombardi. We were in Valve's offices this week talking to them about Episode Two, and we couldn't resist checking in on the third. "Pre-production is definitely going, and it'll be ramping up rather quickly now that they're ramping down on Episode Two," Lombardi told us. There's a "skeleton crew" doing the work, he added, although their attention is being split between that and ongoing development of Episode Two, which is nearing completion ahead of what Valve hopes will be an October release. Lombardi and programmer David Speyrer also continued to fuel rumours kicked off in PC Gamer UK that Episode Three might climax with a battle at an Arctic research station. "We're not going to spoil it. No matter what Doug said," Speyrer joked. Perhaps tellingly though, in a separate discussion about moving the player towards the team's "ultimate goal" over the course of the episodic trilogy, Speyrer mentioned that a lot of work had gone into "creating a natural progress of topography and climate". Our emphasis. So will Episode Three change setting drastically, we asked? "I don't think you'll head back to City 17, for sure," Lombardi said. "Not in Episode Three, anyway."

From Computerandvideogames.com
Don't go calling it confirmed, but Valve gave us a very strong hint that Episode Three will be a climactic battle in the arctic when we visited them in Seattle recently.

The arctic base is glimpsed in Episode One. The battle takes place at the arctic base we see Mossman reporting in from during Episode One, and the battle that takes place there is described in great detail in Valve's Half-Life 2 coffee-table book, Raising the Bar. It was intended to be the climax of Half-Life 2 itself, but was cut when the game's scope was scaled back. So it makes perfect sense that Valve would want to flesh it out in the final episode of the post-Half-Life 2 trilogy, when they've got time to do it justice - Episode Three has been in development for as long as Episode Two already.

After some futile probing about the details of Episode Two's plot (I came away with "Someone somewhere on the internet is right" written in my notes), I went all-in and suggested that Episode Three would be the huge arctic conflict described in Raising the Bar. And rather than yet another "You'll have to wait and see", PR man Doug Lombardi said "That would be exciting, wouldn't it?"

Taking that as a yes, I told them they gave away too much in Raising the Bar. Doug agreed: "We figure if you're paying $25 for a book, we ought to give away something."