"Half-Life 3 is not being worked on at this time"

One man close to Valve has delivered a crushing blow to the millions of gamers patiently waiting on Half-Life 3.

Kotaku reports that John Patrick Lowrie, an actor who has starred in a number of Valve games and is married to the voice of GLaD0S Ellen McLain, has claimed that the game is not in active development.

"Sorry, I’m afraid that the opposite is true,” he said in response to the statement ‘Half-Life 3 confirmed’. HL3 is not being worked on at this time as far as I know.

Here is the biggest challenge with bringing out HL3: the big thing now with FPSs is motion capture, or mo-cap. One of the great things about HL2 is that all of the characters that you meet actually look at you when they talk to you no matter where you go or stand. With mo-cap you can’t do that, at least not yet.

Once you film the actor doing something and capture that motion, that’s what the character is going to do. This works great in movies, but when you make something interactive it gets way less interactive with mo-cap. So that’s one of the things they’re working on.

Right now they’re pretty full up with all the games they already have out there that they continue to support, plus the Steam stuff that they do, so, I don’t want to get people’s hopes up. I have no idea what they’re planning for the future. But I did have that conversation with some Valve folks, so I thought you might like to know what they’re thinking about.

As far as I know they are not developing HL3 now for several reasons, among them the mo-cap issue. Sorry for any confusion. What they might decide in the future depends on lots of different factors. I hope they do, personally, but it has to make sense for them.”