Never before seen gameplay footage from Valve’s canceled Half-Life 2: Episode 3, featuring a new weapon called the ice gun, has been revealed.
On the occasion of the Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary, Valve has released a documentary that brings members of the development team back to talk about the game’s production, how the company almost ran out of money, what it was like when it was hacked, what happened when it was sued by its publisher at the time, and more.
During the documentary, writer Marc Laidlaw mentioned that he still doesn’t know what Half-Life 2: Episode 3 would have been if it had been built because it hadn’t been completed. As a team, it wasn’t about imposing a top-down mandate like, “This is what we must do to tell our very important tale.” Instead, it was more like, “Oh, we have new features. How do we use them? What kind of story can we tell with these?”
New Enemy Type: Blobs
The game was set in the Arctic and centered around the Borealis. Valve engineer David Speyrer recalled the development team working on enemy blobs based on the iso-surface technology that it later used in Portal for the paint mechanic. The blob enemy could change its shape, and it could also split into smaller blobs that hopped around like headcrabs but behaved differently. The development team explored all kinds of gameplay ideas with them. For example, they could pass through grates, allowing for more dynamic encounters. It focused on combining these creatures and behaviors with other gameplay mechanics to create fresh, innovative moments.
New Weapon: Ice Gun
Valve engineer David Speyrer worked on Half-Life 2: Episode 3 and was working on this gun called the Ice Gun. It basically allowed you to create amorphous shapes out of ice. For instance, you could raise a small ice wall in front of yourself that would attach to the floor. The Combine soldiers could shoot holes through it, causing it to shatter and eventually break, somewhat like glass. That was the gun’s primary mode. You could also use it to build ledges for yourself to descend cliffs. The gun also came with what was described as kind of a “Silver Surfer” mode, where you could extrude the ice in front of yourself, run along it, and use it to cross gaps or chasms.
Why Was Half-Life 2: Episode 3 Canceled?
About six months into development, the team shifted to Left 4 Dead. Things were moving at a brisk pace, but it felt like Half-Life 2: Episode 3 needed to be much bigger or something entirely different. The team had explored so much of what made sense in the Half-Life universe. Even Arkane, which was working on the Ravenholm game, had trouble coming up with new ideas.
Episode 3 needed to feel bigger than everything Valve had done before, including Episode 2. Then Left 4 Dead needed an all-hands-on-deck effort to ship, so the development of Episode 3 was paused to focus on it. By the time the team considered going back to Episode 3, the argument was made that it had missed the moment. It was “too late”, and there was talk of needing a new engine to continue the Half-Life series. Some of the team moved on to Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2. At the time, many members of the development team had been working on Half-Life for over eight years. They saw compelling reasons to explore more multiplayer-based projects, driven not just by player demand but by what they wanted internally. A lot of them found themselves wanting to play multiplayer games.
