Everybody panic: A Valve developer said "HLX" in public

Gamers still hoping against hope for a true follow-up to Half-Life 2 (after so, so many years) may remember last year’s flurry of speculation that Half-Life 3 was finally nearing completion. Amid all those rumors, though, we never got any official sign from anyone inside Valve that a Half-Life project was currently in development.

That changed this week thanks to an apparent slip-up during a panel at GameSoundCon, an industry conference devoted to “the art, technology, and business of game audio.” In a panel devoted to Valve’s use of open audio engines (captured in this Vimeo clip), Valve composer and audio artist Mike Morasky let an interesting string of three letters slip while talking about the way the company implements high dynamic range (HDR) audio:

Our HDR system is basically that’s one of the three pieces that come together to make an HDR that you can easily optimize. And in fact, I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR. HLX has its own version, so on and so forth [emphasis added].

Our HDR system is basically that’s one of the three pieces that come together to make an HDR that you can easily optimize. And in fact, I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR. HLX has its own version, so on and so forth [emphasis added].

“HLX,” of course, has been widely reported as the internal code name for Valve’s next Half-Life project. The codename has shown up in Valve engine code since at least 2024, but it has never been referenced in public by a Valve employee until now (though Morasky was responsible for a close call in an interview last year).

In the panel video, fellow panelist and Valve sound designer David Feise can be seen mumbling a sarcastic “nice work” to Morasky after the HLX codename slips out of his mouth. Later, while the audience is clapping at the end of the Q&A session, Feise leans in to Morasky and appears to say, “Good job—you only said HLX once!”

When are they gonna get to the HLX factory?

An official utterance of the “HLX” shibboleth is of course a good sign for those looking for any indication of the franchise continuing beyond 2020’s Half-Life Alyx. But the question of when Valve will make its next Half-Life project official still looms large.

Remember, it was just under a year ago that journalist Mike Straw was adamant that Half-Life 3 would be a Steam Machine launch title. Now that the Steam Machine launch has come and gone without even a nod toward an announcement, we can understand why Valve watchers would be more gun-shy than usual over any new rumors.

Longtime Valve watcher Tyler McVicker—who said Half-Life 3 was in the “final stages of development” and suggested a 2026 announcement was “likely” last year—admitted in a recent video that he now doesn’t believe that HLX is being announced this calendar year. But he also pointed to recently increased coding activity within Valve (as measured by externally viewable internal “commit” numbers) that something big might be coming sooner than later.

One thing is for sure: Whenever Half-Life 3 finally is announced and released, it will have to be truly incredible to make up for the loss of the long-running metagame of speculating about its mere existence.

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