Valve’s bearded Boss, Gabe Newell, recently confirmed the development of a next-generation version of its popular Source engine during a recent birthday-time visit from the internet’s underbelly, 4chan.
While I have to wonder who’d let anybody from 4chan in to the building, the folks from the insanely popular, anonymous internet message board asked a pretty pertinent question to Valve’s honcho on camera; and no, it wasn’t directly about Half-Life 3.
"Is Valve working on a new Source engine?" 4chan’s /v/ asked. "We’ve been working on new engine stuff for a while," Newell answered blithely. the audio in the accompanying video becomes garbled and distorted, but the subtitles say "We’ve just been waiting for a game to roll it out with."
Valve has previously said that they approach their aging Source engine iteratively, adding more features to the existing codebase instead of making an entirely new engine – which made 4chan’s next question, and Gabe’s reply, rather interesting.
"Is it more than just an extension to Source? Like, is it an entirely new engine?" 4chan asked.
"Yeah," Newell replied.
In the same pseudo-interview, Newell confirmed that Valve was busy working on Ricochet 2, a follow up to its multiplayer Half-life mod from 2000 that hardly anybody remembers. It’s worth noting, however, that Newell and co have used Ricochet as a thinly veiled reference to another game that may or may not have “Half-Life’ in the title.
Whether it’s Half-Life 2 episode 3 or Half-Life 3 proper, my worry is that after the lack of news and the huge expectations that surround it, it could never live up to the hype it doesn’t actually have.
Last Updated: November 12, 2012
