Half-Life 3 Is Still M.I.A., but Nvidia Has a New Trailer for the Half-Life 2 RTX Remaster

Just days ahead of its 20-year anniversary, Half-Life 2 has a new trailer for its RTX remaster.

Valve’s influential first-person shooter launched on Steam on November 16, 2004. Ever since then, and the release of Episode 2 in 2007, fans have called on Valve to release Half-Life 3. But alas, it seems further away now, all these years later, than ever before.

Still, Nvidia has decided to release a new trailer “celebrating the game’s enduring legacy” that offers another look at the remaster, Half-Life 2 RTX. Half-Life 2 RTX is in development at 100-person mod team Orbifold Studios, and adds full ray tracing, remastered assets, and DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction as a free DLC for Half-Life 2 owners.

So, what is the status of Half-Life these days? In 2020, a making-of for VR exclusive Half-Life: Alyx revealed a swathe of games developed and shelved by Valve between the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Valve's latest VR game. That list included details on a version of Half-Life 3 that was in development for around a year.

Geoff Keighley's The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx revealed that at least five Half-Life games were canceled between Episode 2 and Alyx, along with a number of other projects — the most notable being a project officially referred to within Valve as Half-Life 3.

Half-Life 3 was said to have been created in the Source 2 engine and drew some gameplay inspiration from Left 4 Dead. The project known as Half-Life 3 would have used procedural generation between hand-crafted story moments to create a more replayable game. For instance, the game would generate a building and an objective (such as rescuing a prisoner), then create a route through it and fill the building with enemies, meaning that section would always play out differently.

The team went as far as scanning Frank Sheldon, the actor whose likeness was used for the series' G-Man. However the Source 2 engine was unfinished, and the project "didn't get very far" before it was dropped. It was in development for around a year between 2013 and 2014.

What might have been? Since then, Valve has released Counter-Strike 2 as an updated form of CS:GO, and multiplayer game Deadlock in early development form. The company has yet to make any indication that a new Half-Life game, Half-Life 3 or otherwise, is in the works.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.