Rumours began circulating in November that Valve was working on a Half-Life 3 trailer to release in 2025, so the community pieced together a calendar of all the possible dates it could be announced, assuming the last would be December 11, i.e. The Game Awards.
However, like every other date, TGA came and went without a whiff of Gordon Freeman, and now fans are staring down the barrel of complete despair, wondering what happened to ‘HLX’ and all the leaks, while flooding Twitter, the game’s dedicated subreddit, and community forums with utter disappointment.
Some argue that Geoff Keighley was baiting them with the Mega Man reveal when he hinted at a beloved franchise finally returning, even dangling a ‘3’ in front of them, while others are getting worked up over the ‘Rise and Shine’ caption in the new Control Resonant trailer. But when every single leaker was saying that ‘TGA is unlikely’, and considering Valve’s track record, why did anybody expect Half-Life 3 to show up?
Please Stop Hyping Up TGA
First, let’s look back at where the rumours started; Valve reporter Tyler McVicker said, with a fist-full of salt, that he heard murmurs of a trailer in production, possibly, maybe, for November. Unlike past leaks, which were sourced from Dota 2 and Counter-Strike updates, this rumour was entirely hearsay, and McVicker stressed that it might not pan out. But c’mon, this is Half-Life we’re talking about. People took November and ran with it.
The cope really took hold when reporters and outlets began sharing cryptic hints at earth-shattering Valve news, which turned out to be a trifecta of hardware – exciting stuff, but still no sign of Half-Life. In the weeks that followed, Insider Gaming senior editor Mike Straw, among others, claimed to have heard several dates for a possible announcement, though they explained that Valve may be feeding false dates to weed out leakers.
November turned into December, week one rolled by with nothing, and all of a sudden, everyone latched onto The Game Awards as the last hope before Valve shuffled off to celebrate the holidays. Just imagine, the screen fades to black at the very end and all of a sudden, the eerie, inhuman mutterings of G-Man ring out through the halls; it’s an exciting idea, but it was always a pipedream. Insiders stressed again and again with every morsel of news that a TGA announcement was incredibly unlikely, and that it was more plausible the announcement had been pushed back to 2026, similar to how Alyx’s reveal was delayed.
But with the ‘Raise and Shine’ rocket, Keighley’s cryptic teases, and the mysterious statue that turned out to be for Divinity, the Half-Life community hyped up TGA, hoping for a showstopping reveal to finally end the two decade wait. That didn’t happen, and now we’re watching the usual comedown. But the writing was on the walls before the rumours even began circulating.
I know, I know, copium games and award shows go hand-in-hand. We did this already with Silksong, as fans clung to everything from Nintendo Directs to State of Plays and Xbox showcases, spamming the live chats with “Where Silksong?” until it finally manifested. But, going by all of Valve’s recent announcements, expecitng a showcase never made an ounce of sense. Instead, you should turn on push notifs for its Twitter account, since that’s where all the biggest news is dropped – like the Steam Machine.
Still, even in the face of these blatant red flags, many argued that Valve ‘owed’ Geoff Keighley for pulling out of TGA in 2019, where it would’ve unveiled Alyx gameplay, but there’s nothing to support this claim, and it completely ignores the fact that Valve always intended to announce its VR spin-off in a tweet before the event.
All of this is to say that, yes, Half-Life fans are having a meltdown right now, but let this be a warning for the next year – don’t hinge your bets on a tentpole gaming event. Valve will probably do its own thing when it comes to announcing Half-Life 3, and it’ll probably be a very low-key affair for what is an enormous announcement.
And yes, the game still exists, it just looks the trailer will come in 2026, now.
