Mason has been a part of the Half-Life modding community since he was in junior high, so when he was offered the chance to become a design lead on Keep Away From Fire’s effort to develop Half-Life 3 in Source, he jumped at the chance. By night, he assists with programming, sound design, texture art, and modeling as part of Keep Away From Fire’s development community. So when we decided on Unreal, there was this other group that said, ‘Well, we’ll do it using Source!’”īy day, David Mason is a student studying digital animation at The University of Alabama. Like, ‘Is that gonna feel like Half-Life?’ People have played that game so much that if something feels wrong, they’ll know. It’s not going to be fun to work with.’ Some of the Half-Life community was hesitant about us using Unreal Engine. The Source engine is old, it hasn’t been updated in at least five years. “But early on, the programming team said, ‘You know, I don’t think that’s a good idea. “When we started the project, everyone’s assumption was that we would use the Source engine,” says Walton. In a surprise move, the team is developing on the Unreal Engine. The new bells and whistles in Project Borealis’ Half-Life project are only possible because the team made the controversial decision to move away from Valve’s long-running Source engine. We added a vortex mode to the Gravity Gun, so it can create these kind of tornados with hundreds of physics objects. But it’s been more than 10 years since Episode Two, so we’re experimenting with stuff that’s a natural next step. “We were not going to add aiming down the sights or cover mechanics so it becomes a completely different game. “We want this to feel natural,” says Walton. At the same time, Project Borealis is committed to making a game that stays faithful to what the series has done before. The team wants to push the envelope a bit and add modern gameplay sensibilities, such as destructible environments, snow vehicles, and new enemies like frostbitten headcrab zombies. Laidlaw’s blog post talked a lot about Half-Life’s story, but was vague on gameplay, which gives Project Borealis a fairly long leash with which to experiment. Over the last two years, this collective of weekend warriors has designed an impressive-looking shooter. Project Borealis even lists open positions on its site and conducts interviews with newcomers before they join the team. Team members have official job titles, report to team leads, commit to deadlines, and conduct group meetings. Project Borealis’ scrappy, ad-hoc development team is full of part timers and hobbyists, but it is also run a bit like a commercial game studio. And we have many team members who are currently at university or working for non-game dev organizations.” “Others have previously contributed to community projects such as Black Mesa or other Half-Life mods. “We have team members who are currently or have previously worked at triple-A game development studios, including Blizzard and Ubisoft,” says Walton. This eclectic team holds a wide array of interests and specialties and is spread across the U.S., U.K., eastern Europe, Russia, Australia, and South America. The team christened themselves Project Borealis (a nod to an Aperture Science research vessel introduced in Half-Life 2: Episode Two), and over the course of the last two years that initial group of fans has grown to over 80 designers – approximately the same number of developers listed in the credits of Half-Life 2. Dozens of Half-Life fans started to congregate around the subreddit r/DreamsofHalfLife3, where they talked about making the next Half-Life themselves. We had always thought, ‘Maybe it’s being worked on somewhere behind the scenes.’ But a lot of people saw that post and said, ‘Well, that’s probably that.’”īut out of disappointment grew a bold idea: Now that fans had an outline for the next Half-Life, maybe they didn’t need to wait for Valve to finally get around to working on the game they could just do it themselves. Like, if the lead writer was happy to publish that kind of thing, maybe the game was never coming out. “The Half-Life community took that as a signal that Half-Life 3 was probably not going to happen. “It was sort of vaguely cryptic, but everyone quickly realized that it was his interpretation of what Half-Life: Episode Three was supposed to be,” says Sam Walton, PR lead for the fan-driven Project Borealis. Laidlaw didn’t use the words Half-Life, Gordon Freeman, or Combine in his post, but the inference was clear: This was the outline for the missing episode in the Half-Life series. The post detailed the exploits of a couple of scientists who traveled to the arctic in search of a mysterious ship that had begun to shift in and out of reality. On August 25, 2017, Half-Life writer and ex-Valve employee Marc Laidlaw wrote a blog post called Epistle 3.
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