21 years on from Half-Life 2, we may be about to actually get Half-Life 3. A release is rumoured for later in 2025.
We had mostly given up on the idea Half-Life 3 will ever come out, but it’s almost finished according to noted Valve leak provider Tyler McVicker.
He held a mammoth 3-hour Q&A session on YouTube recently, during which he claimed Half-Life 3 is almost done. It’s also called HLX, at least internally.
“This is the furthest it has has ever been. Period. The game is playable - end to end,” said McVicker.
Developer Valve is known for canning its games if they don’t meet a very high quality bar, but it sounds like HLX may actually make it out into the world.
McVicker does not claim to have intimate knowledge of when Valve plans to release HLX, but does offer a best guess - he suggested that it will be announced in the Summer ahead of a release towards the end of the year, in the winter months.
And that, strangely enough, means this piece of legendary vapourware may actually arrive before GTA 6, which was recently delayed until May 26, 2026.
What is Half-Life 3, anyway?
Want to know more about Half-Life 3? It’s apparently not an open world game, but will make significant use of AI — and not the ChatGPT kind.
Remember Left4Dead? It had what was called a game director, a form of software intelligence that would decide how each level should play out based on your behaviour, and not just how well you’re doing at any one point. Half-Life 3 may have something like that, influencing how levels are laid out.
HLX, or Half-Life 3, is also not a virtual reality game. VR title Half-Life: Alyx was released in 2020, proving the series was still being worked on. It is widely recognised as the best VR game ever, but still hasn’t been played by huge numbers of Half-Life fans because of that fact.
Valve is currently also working on Deadlock, a multiplayer shooter that reached 170,000 concurrent players during a playlets in 2024, despite barely being talked about publicly by Valve. The developer also gave Half-Life 2 a significant — and free — update last year, to celebrate the game's 20th anniversary.
