Valve developers discuss why Half Life 2: Episode 3 was abandoned

Despite the new weapons and mechanics that were already in the works for Episode 3, many developers quoted in the documentary cite a kind of fatigue that had set in after so much time and effort focused on a single franchise. “A lot of us had been doing Half-Life for eight-plus years” designer and composer Kelly Bailey noted.

That lengthy focus on a single franchise helps explain why some Valve developers were eager to work on anything else by that time in their careers. “I think everybody that worked on Half-Life misses working on that thing,” Engineer Scott Dalton said. “But it’s also hard not to be like, ‘Man, I’ve kind of seen every way that you can fight an Antlion,’ or whatever. And so you wanna get some space away from it until you can come back to it with fresh eyes.”

After the first two Half-Life 2 episodes were received less well than the base game itself, many developers cited in the documentary also said they felt pressure to go “much bigger” for Episode 3. Living up to that pressure, and doing justice to the fan expectations for the conclusion of the three-episode saga, proved to be too much for the team.

“You can’t get lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving the story forward,’ Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said of the pressure. “That’s copping out of your obligation to gamers, right? Yes, of course they love the story. They love many, many aspects of it. But sort of saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next… you know, we could’ve shipped it, like, it wouldn’t have been that hard.

“You know, the failure was—my personal failure was being stumped,” Newell continued. “Like, I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.”