Valve appears to be working on a new, non-VR Half-Life game

We've known about a few projects in development at Valve under various codenames. Alongside Half-Life: Alyx, dataminers discovered projects like ‘Citadel', now believed to be Valve's new game ‘Deadlock', as well as a new Half-Life game codenamed HLX. As it turns out, HLX might be a much bigger deal than initially thought, with new leaks pointing to a full-fledged single-player non-VR Half-Life game. 

After datamining Valve's latest updates for various titles, Tyler McVicker, who also accurately leaked many Half-Life: Alyx details prior to its release, in large part thanks to datamining, new strings for the project ‘HLX' have been discovered.

HLX is a codename that has been floating around for a while now. Due to the way the Source engine works, you can often find strings of code related to other in-development projects whenever an update is pushed to a game like Counter-Strike or Dota.

According to McVicker's findings, the Half-Life: Alyx team transitioned to working on HLX after the release of Valve's virtual reality masterpiece. However, this new game is a non-VR title. When hiring voice actors, Valve referred to the game as ‘Project White Sands'. Some of the key features gleamed from code include the return of the HEV suit, an ‘offworld' section with new types of aliens.

While there is not any evidence to say that this game will be Half-Life 3, it is, at the very least, a new non-VR Half-Life game, in which the main character wears an HEV suit. Whether or not we step back into the shoes of Gordon Freeman still remains to be seen. Notably, there has been no crowbar reference found yet.

While this project does appear to be in active development with a large team, it is unlikely to be the next game Valve announces. In recent months, there have been a ton of leaks regarding Deadlock, a new shooter in a similar vein to TF2. While Valve has not officially announced Deadlock yet, so many people have been playing it in closed beta that we expect it to launch before the end of the year.

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KitGuru Says: A lot of the datamined information for Half-Life: Alyx turned out to be accurate, so we can only hope that this is a similar case. As fantastic as Alyx was, its VR-focused gameplay made it inaccessible to many fans who grew up with the Half-Life games, so a new, non-VR Half-Life title will most definitely garner more excitement. 

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