Did you expect to see any Half-Life news when you woke up today? Neither did I. Technically, we didn’t get any new news, but we did get some interesting screens and animation from a cancelled Half-Life title.
Arkane Studios, developer of Dishonored, was working on a Half-Life 2: Episode 4 (also called Return to Ravenholm) between 2006 and 2007, but ended up being cancelled. The following concept art and animation have all been confirmed as real by ValveTime, and they’ve even put all of the footage into one nice video for you to enjoy. In it, you can see some new textures and models that Arkane planned to use, as well as an ‘Absorption’ element on the game’s HUD. Now what are the chances of us ever finding out what that means?
As for why Episode 4 was cancelled, look no further than last year when Valve’s Marc Laidlaw offered this explanation to LambdaGeneration:
“We are big fans of Arkane and wanted to come up with a project we could work on together. We threw ideas around, they built some cool stuff, but we eventually decided that it didn’t make sense to pursue it at the time. As I recall, we felt like a lot of the staples of Ravenholm–headcrabs and zombies!–were pretty much played out, and the fact that it would have to take place sometime before the end of Episode 2 (so as not to advance beyond where Valve had pushed the story) was a creative constraint that would hamper the project…and Arkane.”
Could you imagine if Half-Life 2: Episode 4 came out before Episode 3? It would’ve been absolute madness, but I think we’d all quickly accept it. Because Half-Life.