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I strongly disagree.

First of all, what did Alyx do to the industry? It was higher fidelity than most other VR games at the time, but that can hardly be called revolutionary the way HL1's environmental storytelling or HL2's physics systems were. Very few VR games have attempted to follow in its footsteps at all, because lookin' good is more about dev hours than it is creativity and game design. Other than convincing a few extra people to buy VR headsets, it didn't do anything at all to the direction of the VR market. Games before and since Alyx have used much more interesting, immersive movement controls and ammo management systems.

Second, the expectations for HL3 don't have to be All That. If it were a fun game at all, it'd sell like crazy and people would be happy. It's Valve's self-imposed roadblock of new games being "different" somehow that stops them from finishing anything. But even then, I'm not sure they've been accomplishing that. Beyond CS2 being little more than a glow-up and Artifact being... ill-received, I'll stick to HL and beat up on Alyx a bit more--it was just fine, But what little story it had shat on the 12 year cliffhanger in the least satisfying way possible, its weapon selection was just sad, and there are a hundred smaller things I could bring up from the sound design to the repetitive puzzles that stop actual gameplay every 2 minutes. Everything from the movement to the combat was dumbed down to the point where it might be accessible for a first time VR user, but at the cost of being extremely repetitive for anyone playing through a second time (though I will grant them props for including tools for community mappers to make much more interesting encounters).

Yet people hail it as some industry changing turning point. Don't get me wrong, for all its faults, I enjoyed playing it, but it's not this new Valve masterpiece that so many people make it out to be. It's just fine. And the way it's been lauded for the last 4 years proves that "fine" is good enough for Half Life.

I've agreed with this for the past decade. But considering the scope and costs of games made today, I think that sort of expectation is far too high for Valve to achieve anymore with the type of company they are. The size of development teams has ballooned at every other studio to keep up and budgets are many times higher than what Valve has spent on any game ever.

Sure, Valve makes loads of money from Steam and they could conceivably pour untold millions into hiring a massive team of talented developers to try to produce a worthy new Half Life title as a passion project for Gabe Newell. To what end? It likely still wouldn't live up to the hype and the process would irreversably upend the way Valve has operated very successfully for decades.