Valve never even started HL3. They’ve said so themselves in multiple interviews. I’m not even sure where the rumors about it started unless somehow HL2:Ep3 was just called “HL3” by someone once and it caught on, since the episodic DLC was supposed to be a trilogy but they only ever released 1 and 2.
Half-Life 3 was in development between 2013 and 2014, but dropped because Source 2 wasn’t production-ready, according to Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life: Alyx. It sounds like it never got further than an early gameplay concept, but saying that it was never even started is incorrect.
Valve never even started HL3. They’ve said so themselves in multiple interviews. I’m not even sure where the rumors about it started unless somehow HL2:Ep3 was just called “HL3” by someone once and it caught on, since the episodic DLC was supposed to be a trilogy but they only ever released 1 and 2.
Half-Life 3 was in development between 2013 and 2014, but dropped because Source 2 wasn’t production-ready, according to Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life: Alyx. It sounds like it never got further than an early gameplay concept, but saying that it was never even started is incorrect.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200713154054/https://www.ign.com/articles/half-life-3-left-4-dead-3-details-cancelled-valve
Both the headline and the comment you replied to only mentioned episode 3.
…Which they did do a lot of work on, then abandoned to work on HL3. HL3 was very specifically a thing and a different thing
But the context here is EPISODE 3 which had a fair bit of development.