Like Agent Cooper being warned about a murder by a ghostly giant in Twin Peaks, the people who hover around Valve’s code for any inkling of news are at it again. Last night, both major Valve leakers, Tyler McVicker and GabeFollower, published videos claiming that Half-Life 3 (or Half-Life X) is very much gearing up for release.
When you hear “take it with a pinch of salt”, with these types of rumors, it’s best to take a fistful. Maybe even switch to kosher salt. Valve is notoriously opaque in terms of what they’re working on internally and only starts to show things off when they’re ready. The company is so powerful in the industry, it’s one of the only remaining studios to still operate on that “when it’s done” mentality.
Here’s how Valve’s information and games leak in 2025
Before we jump into the rumor mill, the thing you have to realise is that a lot of these rumors are based on evidence. It’s not a “We heard from a person who knew someone who is my uncle at Nintendo” type of deal. Valve’s codebase is effectively wide open for perusal if you know where to look. It’s not open source, but it’s not difficult to crack open some files.
While there’s no Half-Life 3 game to peer into, there are current Source 2 games – the proprietary engine Valve uses – to sniff about. Mainly, Valve’s esports shooter Counter-Strike 2 and Deadlock, its upcoming iterations on the Dota or League of Legends concept.
Valve games effectively share the same code, and it’s often tidied up or has things removed from specific games. Sometimes, as these tea leaf watchers will quickly point out, Valve leaves bits behind, or the cleanup isn’t exactly done. So an update hits, and Counter-Strike suddenly reveals a little about the upcoming Half-Life game.
Let’s break down those rumors from Half-Life obsessives
First, Tyler McVicker, a longtime and admitted obsessive fan of Valve’s work, released a video diving into what is essentially a code refactoring. That’s when a development team will tidy up their codebase before winding down the main development so that patches and future work can be easily accomplished without having to wade into the mindset from months or years prior.
McVicker theorises that Valve is potentially tidying things up as it’s almost done with the development of the game. Another part of this is that code around in-game entities has begun to spring up, something that McVicker explains the Source 2 engine needs to be pre-defined in a specific file type before it can be used in the game.
He explains that Hammer, the long-time editor of Source and Source 2 games, doesn’t actually know what anything inserted is. At a boiled-down level, unless you tell Hammer and Source what something is, it won’t know what to do with it.
Part of the update seemingly confirms a rumored feature that the next Half-Life game will have non-player characters (NPCs) able to “react” to visuals, as well as in-game sounds. There’s also code and “plain English” explanations (as McVicker repeats) of the game’s supposed new physics engine.
Amongst the code was a direct reference to “Antlions” and “Thumpers”. If you’ve not played Half-Life 2 or its two additional episodes, Antlions are the third faction involved in the game’s story. Alien bugs that you eventually harness and control, and Thumpers are these giant machines in the game that keep them away.
Physics changes might show where Valve’s at
The Gabe Follower video is a little more granular, but points out various new additions to the codebase, specifically referencing “HLX”. Half-Life X is the code name for the project, as we don’t know if Half-Life 3 will even be the final name.
He points out that new code was introduced to handle objects affected by physics in the game. So if a pile of debris, objects, or bodies is left alone by the player, Source 2 will intervene and sort of combine them into one mass to improve performance. This would be rather than leaving several potentially resource-intensive things strewn across the game.
There’s also some NPC interactivity bits included, which Gabe Follower links to Valve hiring developers of Rockstar, who make GTA. He also digs into similar stuff mentioned in McVicker’s video, including refactoring. The Valve watcher speculates that we could see modding tools come for the game, considering the amount of explanations in the game.
A very brief run-down of the last 20 years of Half-Life 3
Half-Life 3 has become a nearly 20-year joke. Valve conceived the “Episode” idea for Half-Life 2 so that it could pump games out faster than it took to make Half-Life 2 itself. After Episode 2 ended on a cliffhanger in 2007, Valve’s interests drifted from the single-player shooter. After Portal 2, it doubled down on multiplayer experiences and esports, generating millions of dollars out of just Counter-Strike and Dota 2 alone.
On top of that, the company became far more invested in its Steam platform, which effectively holds a monopoly over the PC gaming market. Some players won’t use anything else, except under certain circumstances (World of Warcraft, for instance, isn’t on there yet).
Between esports success and nothing of Half-Life, the original writer, Marc Laidlaw, published the now removed “Epistle 3“. It’s something he claims he “regrets” these days, but it gives a good insight into where the story was intended to go.
Half-Life: Alyx was released in 2020, surprising everyone and becoming the one game you can point to in the virtual reality space that’s genuinely a good game and not just a “good VR game”. It’s part prequel and part set up for whatever the next Half-Life game is, returning to that cliffhanger in an unexpected way.
Since then, there have been drips of news based entirely on these code updates. Most recently, news seemingly snuck out of Valve that the game was in play testing.
However, until I see credits roll on Half-Life 3, I won’t believe it truly exists – even if I’ve paid cash for it.
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