In spite of the brand-new weapons and mechanics that were currently in the works for Episode 3numerous designers priced estimate in the documentary point out a sort of tiredness that had actually embeded in after a lot effort and time concentrated on a single franchise. “A lot of us had been doing Half-Life for eight-plus years” designer and author Kelly Bailey kept in mind.

That prolonged concentrate on a single franchise assists discuss why some Valve designers aspired to deal with anything else by that time in their professions. “I think everybody that worked on Half-Life misses working on that thing,” Engineer Scott Dalton stated. “But it’s also hard not to be like, ‘Man, I’ve kind of seen every way that you can fight an Antlion,’ or whatever. And so you wanna get some space away from it until you can come back to it with fresh eyes.”

After the very first 2 Half-Life 2 episodes were gotten less well than the base video game itself, lots of designers mentioned in the documentary likewise stated they felt pressure to go “much bigger” for Episode 3Measuring up to that pressure, and justifying the fan expectations for the conclusion of the three-episode legend, showed to be excessive for the group.

“You can’t get lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving the story forward,’ Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said of the pressure. “That’s copping out of your responsibility to players? Yes, naturally they enjoy the story. They enjoy numerous, lots of elements of it. Sort of stating that your factor to do it is due to the fact that individuals desire to understand what takes place next … you understand, we might’ve delivered it, like, it would not have actually been that tough.

“You know, the failure was—my personal failure was being stumped,” Newell continued. “Like, I couldn’t figure out why doing Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.”