More evidence of ‘full-fledged Half-Life game’ revealed by Valve dataminer

After yesterday’s shocking news that Valve could be is developing a new Half-Life game, Valve expert Tyler McVicker has stepped forward to say that he, too, believes it’s true.

McVicker claims that the new game, codenamed “HLX”, “appears to be a full-fledged Half-Life game that doesn’t run in VR, which seems too good to be true”.

I’ll go into a bit more detail after the video below, but be aware that there may be spoilers for this new game.

“Almost everything you’re about to hear is true, not speculation, and comes straight from datamines from Valve’s recent updates,” McVickers says at the start of the video.

“Valve and the team behind Half-Life Alyx began pre-production on another single-player title (around the same time as Half-Life Alyx). We learned the codename for that title in 2021: HLX.

“It was argued at the time and in the years since that HLX was not representative of a full-fledged game in development, but rather was perhaps a feature of the engine, or simply a file format for saving files.

“In the meantime, I’ve been slowly and quietly digging into this story. HLX is confusing. HLX seems to be a full-fledged non-VR Half-Life game, something that seems too good to be true, and something I wanted to be very sure about before going live with this information.”

McVicker adds that because “Valve is actively developing a lot of titles on Source” – most notably perhaps “Citadel aka Neon Prime aka Deadlock” – he wasn’t sure what HLX was for a while.

“Half-Life Alyx was announced nearly five years ago and fully released in four years. And as it turns out, that entire time was spent developing the next major single-player title, codenamed HLX. And now – thanks to a mistake by one of the project’s voice actors – we now know that the internal codename Valve is using to hide the project’s real name when casting voice actors is Project White Sands.”

Interestingly, McVicker points out that Valve, like many other studios, uses “very arbitrary” codenames, like “Hot Dog” for Left 4 Dead VR and Left 4 Dead 3, and “Jamiroquai” for Half-Life Alyx. So why this one is so openly associated with the Half-Life series, we’re not sure.

McVicker has since “learned a lot” about the project through data mining. According to “strings” in games like Dota 2, the character you play as “in any HLX” wears an HEV suit and goes “Offworld” where there are “workers”, “storks”, “pentatanks”, “feral man hacks” and “Xengorillas, Xenjellyfish and Xenswoopers”. McVicker believes these things were originally cut from Half-Life Alyx, but “are still in some form of development according to Valve’s most recent updates to Source 2 projects”.

“Do I think this is Half-Life 3?” McVicker adds. “I have to be very careful about answering that question.

“But yeah.”

Vickers added: “I think this is a Half-Life game that’s not VR, where you play a character wearing a HEV suit, and that’s in development at Valve Software and has been in development since Half-Life Alyx.”

The actor’s website, which revealed Project White Sands to the world last night, has already been updated to remove the reference.