14 DAY TRIAL // In a recent interview with Eurogamer (full text here), Valve revealed that the just-released Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and the forthcoming Episodes 2 and 3 will serve as the third game in the series.
Rather than make gamers wait another six-plus years for Half-Life 3, the developer thought people might appreciate playing the game in smaller chunks if they didn't have to wait as long.
"The original Half-Life took us two years to develop," said Gabe Newell, managing director, Valve. "With a considerably larger team Half-Life 2 took us six years to develop, so we thought if we were going to continue our trend with Half-Life 3 we would basically ship after we had all retired. We're trying to come up with a better way of getting more timely updates to our customers and also come up with something that didn't have the complexities. Projects increased logarithmically with how much we tried to do, so if you tried to put twice as much content or technology into a box it ends up taking you four times the amount of work, right, and so we're trying to figure out a better solution."
As for why the names of the episodes were changed from their original codename Aftermath: "I think that Aftermath was almost a temporary name. I always thought of it as Episodes One through Three because that's how we planned the products out. I think people thought we'd need a name for them, and Aftermath ended up being more confusing than helpful. Probably a better name for it would have been Half Life 3: Episode One, but these three are what we're doing as our way of taking the next step forward..."
Throughout the interview, Newell refers to the episodes as Half-Life 3, and points out that they aren't considered expansions. Whereas Half-Life was about the G-man grooming Gordon Freeman to be a hero, and 2 was about how the G-man uses his creation, the episodes (Half-Life 3) focus more on the G-man and how he reacts when he loses control of Freeman.
Though Episodes 1-3 take place after the events of Half-Life 2, Newell doesn't rule out the possibility of returning to the Half-Life 2 timeline, though.
Finally, Newell also warned fans not to expect a Half-Life movie anytime soon, as he had some unkind words to say about the script treatments Hollywood has offered: "They all sucked!"
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