Valve: We’re not saying no to a VR Half-Life

Half-Life 3 could come to virtual reality, says Valve.

The latest statement from the firm will reassure fans, who have been eagerly awaiting news on the long over-due sequel. Earlier this week, HTC – which is building the Valve VR headset – said it was ‘working with Half-Life’. But it was just a mistake by the interviewee, who meant to say ‘working with Valve’.

But in a move that will reassure Valve’s dedicated fanbase, programmer Jeep Barnett told Kotaku that there is still a chance that Half-Life will come to headsets.

We’re not saying, ‘no’ but we don’t know what the right thing is,” he said.

Our most precious resource is time, and we don’t have enough time for people to do everything. Would we like to make all of our franchises in VR? Absolutely. But we don’t have enough time or people. So we have to figure outwhat’s the best fit, what plays to the strengths of VR.”

Valve has been demoing its VR product with characters, scenes and scenarios from the Half-Life universe, including Portal.

We’ll grab some headcrabs, we’ll grab the machine guns from Half-Life, the rocket launcher – all those different fun things – and see how they play in VR,” added Barnett.

But right now, it’s a tool for exploring the different kind of game designs we want to do.

Is Half-Life a good fit? Is Left 4 Dead a good fit? Is a new franchise a good fit? I don’t know yet. We’re really trying to cover the broad spectrum of what we could do, and then we’ll start focusing on spearheading that.”