Half-Life 2: Episode 3 would feature an ice cannon with a “Silver Surfer-like mode,” and Valve just released footage

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Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary – YouTube


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The third DLC episode for Half-Life 2 was never completed because Gabe Newell and company didn’t just want to finish Half-Life 2’s story arc, but also do something gigantic and creative with the game’s design, and as Newell included it in a recent documentary, he was “embarrassed.”

But also in this documentary, released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, there’s footage of some pretty nippy looking stuff from Episode 3, including an ice gun that can be used to build limpid barriers, but also in “a bit like Silver Surfer mode” which allows you to run on ice ramps while building them. Details about the existence of the ice cannon have been known before, but as far as I know, this is the first time this footage has seen the light of day.

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There were also some cool enemies that used Portal 2 gel technology and could eat crabs, split themselves, and pass through grates with their amorphous bodies – if you want to see them, the segment of the documentary covering episode 3 starts around the hour and 53 minute mark. You can watch it in the player above or on YouTube here.

I guess I’m not Valve developer material, because if they had released episode 3 with the ice gun and the splashes in 2010, I probably wouldn’t have minded. Sure, it wouldn’t impress me as much as Half-Life 2’s Striders and Gravity Gun did back in 2004, but you know: ice gun, spots and the rest of the story. I would be into it! That wasn’t enough for them, Newell said in the documentary.

“You can’t get lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving history forward,’” he said. “It’s a fulfillment of my responsibilities to the players. Yes, of course they love this story. They love many, many aspects of her. But saying that the reason you do it is because people want to know what happens next, you know – we could ship it, it wouldn’t be that hard. Failure, my personal failure, stopped me. I couldn’t understand why working on episode 3 was pushing anything forward.

However, not everyone at Valve agrees: “We definitely could have gone back and spent two years to make Episode 3,” said engineer David Speyrer.

But hey, who said the window has passed? Half-Life 2 just received a gigantic update to celebrate its 20th anniversary: ​​along with the document, Valve added in-game commentary and made some fixes. It now also includes episodes 1 and 2 and is free for a restricted time. Maybe one day Gabe will come up with that great idea.

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