'Half-Life 3' release date: still no announcement despite promo hoax

Valve

Despite the clamor from fans for "Half-Life 3," Valve seems to have no plans of releasing the game anytime soon.

The demand for the third installment of the sci-fi themed first-person shooting game intensified after a promotional banner appeared during Gamescom 2016, as reported by Eurogamer. The banner, showing the familiar orange background, had a large "Half-Life: 3" text written at the top. But upon closer inspection, the text written on smaller font revealed the entire copy of the banner that was actually translated to "Half-Life: 3 editors who played it back then."

The very expensive prank reminded "Half-Life" fans of the joke posted on NeoGAF in June 2012, where a forum member uploaded a post with the misleading titled "first Half-Life, 3 screen-shots." This tricked fans into checking out the post, which only contained three screenshots taken from the original game instead of the sneak peek for the highly anticipated third installment.

This means that Valve is not planning to release a new version of game in the coming days.

Kotaku Australia also pointed out that the game developer might not be interested to create a new "Half-Life" game. The report speculated that the series met its end after the death of Eli Vance in "Half-Life 2: Episode 2."

According to the report, the game's mission was concluded after the death of the character since the main goal of the game is to rescue Eli. With the demise of Eli, the main purpose of the game will not be meet any longer.

Valve CEO Gabe Newell also admitted that there will be a lot of things to consider before the game studio comes up with a new "Half-Life" game.

"The only reason we'd go back and do like a super classic kind of product is if a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation for why," Newell said in a statement, as reported by The News Independent in June. "But you know if you want to do another Half-Life game and you want to ignore everything we've learned in shipping Portal 2 and in shipping all the updates on the multiplayer side, that seems like a bad choice. So we'll keep moving forward. But that doesn't necessarily always mean what people are worried that it might mean."