Gamers were understandable shocked when it was revealed that Valve has been working on another Half-Life game, but it was pretty much as far away from Half-Life 3 as you could get. Announced as a VR title, Half-Life Alyx puts gamers into the shoes of the titular character in a new story that takes place between the events of the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2. The question, of course, remains: Why did Valve choose to make a VR spin-off instead of what people have been crying out for ever since Episode 2?

Good ol’ Geoff Keighley had that same thought on his mind, which is why he asked a few members of the Half-Life: Alyx team why they chose to tackle the VR title instead of Half-Life 3. “In all honesty, back in 2016 when we started this,” Valve’s Robin Walker began, “Half-Life 3 was a terrifyingly daunting prospect, and, I think, to some extent, VR was a way we could fool ourselves into believing we had a way to do this. By starting with VR and then trying to think about Half-Life and how it worked with it and play-testing those…it was really easy to not try and think about the big picture of ‘We’re making Half-Life 3!’ and just focus on ‘Let’s figure out what people enjoy and let’s make forward progress.'”

Admittedly, Half-Life: Alyx does indeed look like a lot of fun, and it’s good that Walker made the distinction of “what people enjoy” versus what people wanted. Still, at least now we know that the Half-Life: 3 dream isn’t completely dead, it’s just buried underneath a new VR game.

Half-Life: Alyx is slated to release in March 2020.

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