Given the plaudits that Alyx received around launch, it absolutely worked. Valve developer Robin Walker said to Keighley, “We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most.” Half-Life: Alyx was used as a way to channel all of the studio’s resources into a single task. With Valve having long allowed their staff to pick and choose the projects and areas that they worked on, this would see developers drift away from projects as they got stuck, and the game development then crumble. The bespoke in-house engine would constantly have new demands placed upon it, of being able to handle Left 4 Dead 3’s open world or Half-Life 3’s procedural generation, which would then lead to projects stalling. The documentary is pretty forthright about Valve’s game development process during this period, with so many projects affected by the progress, or lack thereof on Source 2 engine. Another Left 4 Dead project – codenamed Hot Dog – was also dropped alongside a fantasy RPG project (called RPG), a voxel-based game called A.R.T.I., and SimTrek which was a VR game in development by part of the Kerbal Space Program team. Laidlaw previously revealed the story planned for this game or Half-Life 2: Episode 3 in a thinly veiled blog post.Įlsewhere Left 4 Dead 3 was briefly in development, as an open world game set in Morocco, but deemed unworkable because of Source 2’s slow development. This becomes a bit of a running theme through Valve’s 2010’s.įurther projects were Shooter, a Half-Life themed VR shooter that would have been a part of The Lab, which was Valve’s VR demo showcase for SteamVR, and Borealis, another Half-Life VR project that was led by writer Marc Laidlaw, set on the titular time-travelling ship Borealis as it jumps back and forth between time periods like the Seven Hour War. The game was ultimately cancelled because the development of Source 2 engine wasn’t finished.