Valve "White Sands" project spotted on Starfield voice actor portfolio, prompting Half-Life speculation
Is that you, Gordon?
As Hamlet requested of Horatio, it is time to absent myself from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw my breath in pain to tell you that the Half-Life 3 speculators are at it again. Over the weekend, the discovery of a mystery Valve project called "White Sands" on a voice actor's portfolio has set tongues and fingers wagging about potential Half-Life news in the offing.
Is it Half-Life 3, or something Half-Lifey but not Three-ey? A follow-up for acclaimed VR game Half-Life: Alyx, maybe? IDK what to tell you. Games journalists and Valve nuts alike have been chasing a proper resolution to Gordon Freeman's story for almost as long as I've been doing this. Hamlet is notorious for delayed release but he's got nothing on the G-Man.
The voice actor in question is Natasha Chandel, whose credits include Starfield and Call Of Duty: Vanguard. The reason people are linking her TBA "White Sands" project to Half-Life, other than it being a Valve gig, is that White Sands is a US military base in New Mexico, which is also the in-game location of Half-Life's Black Mesa laboratory. Chandel has yet to comment on the speculation, but the White Sands listing has now been removed from her portfolio, which I'm sure will put all the rumour-mongering to bed.
The history of unreleased Half-Life games post-Half-Life 2 is a giant puddle of wiki-spaghetti. It starts with Half-Life 2: Episode 3, the final act of Half-Life 2's DLC saga, which might have taken place aboard a stranded Arctic vessel, if Marc Laidlaw's webcomics are to be believed. Episode 3 never reached the finish line: according to Valve designer Robin Walker, speaking in 2020, nobody could think of a concept with the requisite "wonderment, or opening, or expansion" that had come to characterise Half-Life internally.
Also speaking in 2020, former Valve level designer Dario Casali offered "scope creep", difficulty with the supporting tech development, and a lack of promising ideas as reasons for Half-Life's on-going vanishing from public life. According to an official Valve documentary, meanwhile, there was a Half-Life prototype in development around 2013-2014 that would have had procedurally generated story sections, but this was shelved.
"Please shut up about it," begged Alice O (RPS in peace) in 2017, but methinks the lady doth protest too much. Having missed out on Alyx thanks to not owning a VR headset of sufficient muscle, I would love to play a new, old-timey non-VR Half-Life game in the Freeman chronology. In the meantime, there are always Half-Life homages like Abiotic Factor.
Valve may or may not be working on a new Half-Life game, but they are certainly working on other games. As reported by Eurogamer a few months ago, footage of something called Deadlock is in the wilds. It's a hero shooter with sky-rails that has apparently been in development since 2018. I am frowning in mild exasperation, Valve.