A couple of weeks ago, a lot of us (I know I wasn’t the only person) got really anxious about the potential of what Valve could be announcing at GDC. The date and time of the announcement (3 March at 15h00) certainly didn’t help quell our trilogy fan-boyerism and I know I spent most of that day a bit of a nervous wreck. It’s quite silly when you think about it later, and obsessing over what Valve does and doesn’t do is a bit of a waste of time. But at the time, that glimmer of hope for Half-Life 3 was there. As we all know, the announcement was actually about some really cool things that Valve are doing (like the Steam Link and the VR) but there obviously there was not a peep about Half-Life 3. I got over my usual disappointment quite quickly (mostly because it happens so often) but then I started wondering about Half-Life 3; started interrogating just why I was so fanatical about it existing, so blindly obsessed with it that I have said many times in the past that when (if) it ever does get announced, that day will be happier for me than the day that I get married.
What is Half-Life 3 to me and why do I care about it so much? I started playing the Half-Life franchise quite a few years after the games were released. If I remember correctly, I think I purchased the Orange Box for Portal and then started playing Half-Life 2 when I didn’t have too much else to do. I’m never going to dispute that it is a brilliant game, and that it is one of the best games I have ever played. But is it the best? I don’t think so. When I compare my time with Half-Life to that with Mass Effect or The Last of Us, those latter two games were far more affecting. I loved those stories and I loved those characters. Did I care as much for Gordon Freeman and I did for Commander Shepard, or even my inquisitor in Dragon Age? I didn’t. Gordon Freeman, as excellent a narrative device it is to have a silent protagonist, is every man, which also translates to him not having distinguishing or memorable features in his character development. The interaction with the supporting characters, Alyx Vance and Eli Vance is what I expect from a narrative driven campaign. The story is so rich and compelling, but I couldn’t swear to it being better than the collective stories of BioShock or Mass Effect. Or maybe it all had to do with Half-Life being a decade ahead of its time; to have a game like that in 2004 was remarkable. But would it have still been remarkable if it was released in 2015, where our standards and expectations of games are far higher? I’m not sure that it would have been.
We treat Half-Life 3 as the holy grail of games. And Half-Life 3 is more important as a symbol now than it is as a game. Maybe Valve knows that, and maybe that means that Half-Life 3 will never see the light of day. Half-Life 3 appeals to our nostalgia and our glory days of gaming; for me it means a time before I cared about reviews, let alone review embargoes or the ethics policy of a gaming website or preorder rules. It’s appeals to a time in my life where I was just playing games because I was playing games; it was in a cocoon where my politics and my gender were irrelevant (atleast that was how I perceived it). Half-Life 3 is a symbol that a game can create a benchmark, and create that benchmark a decade before it is the norm of other narrative campaign driven games. Half-Life 3 is that perfect balancing act with character development, the narrative and an engaging and interesting combat system and game-play. It, for us, is the pinnacle of what a game can be and what it should be.
I think that I love the Half-Life franchise more now than I did at the time that I played Half-Life 2. I’m not for a moment saying that I didn’t love it then, it is really one of my favourite games, but my love for it now has more to do with the abstract than with me having an actual game that is Half-Life 3 that I will be playing. Because what the actual game can mean is all of us obsessing over patches and delays and whether it consistently runs at 60fps; all the very real things it means for games to be releasing in this hyper critical environment we’ve all helped to cultivate. But Half-Life 3 as an idea is a unicorn, its aspirational, it’s a goal for all other games to strive for. For gamers, it’s a beacon of hope for a pure and untainted love of a game, and that we will get that one day again.
I do want Half-Life 3 to exist, and I do want to play it, as a real game. I know that if Valve ever does decide to make it, it will be brilliant. But I also know that a game is just a game made by people, and that it will be tainted by all sorts of issues, as all games that get released these days are. It would be impossible, after all these years of hype for every piece of concept art, trailer or announcement not to be dissected and criticised and spawn a thousand opinion and news pieces. For it not to be made human, not to be fallible.
And what is more important? For it to remain as the holy grail of games, to feed into our expectations of what games should be and what our hearts want them to be? Or for us to realise that a holy grail doesn’t exist, and that games really are just that, games.
The post That’s What She Said: The Mysticism Of Half-Life 3 appeared first on #egmr.