“We’re confident we can recreate the feel and look of Half-Life 2,” the team says. Fittingly for a series that always pushed technology forward, the game will use not Source but the far fresher Unreal Engine 4. In August 2017, Laidlaw posted a piece of name-swapped fan fiction – step forward Gertie Fremont, the One Free Woman – that very quickly revealed itself to be the plot of Episode 3, following directly on from Valve’s 2007 cliffhanger.Ī 2,000 word blog post seems like a sad end to Half-Life Not just any Valve staffer, but Half-Life lead writer Marc Laidlaw. “The reason that we let them know we’re still alive is because they’ve had so long wondering if this game would ever get made,” the Borealis team says.Īll this feverish community activity, after a decade of malaise and disappointment, can be traced back to a single blog post from a former Valve staffer. These are people who can’t stomach any more silence. Yet through the constant change, the team has scrupulously updated the Half-Life community on its progress.
The 80-odd strong development team of Project Borealis is a complicated beast, its many heads swapping frequently as a volunteer workforce does what it can for the fan-made Half-Life sequel before handing off art and code to other, equally driven Freeman devotees.
