Sensational Half-Life 3 Open World Rumor Exposed

There are a few games that perennially make it to lists of “most wanted” games and on to the less-honorable list of rumored games or even vaporware. Half-Life 3 is no exception.

Two of the best games of all time, on any platform, is Valve’s Half-Life and Half-Life 2.

Not only are the two games master classes in gameplay and narrative but they also tell one of the most compelling stories in gaming to boot, a tale that has yet to reach its conclusion.

With Half-Life 2’s release all the way back in November 2004, rumors of an impending third game have persisted, often taking a variety of forms and speculating about the future directions the game could take.

After all, Half-Life 2’s story was very much left on a bit of a cliffhanger, so it isn’t like a sequel wasn’t baked into the narrative from the beginning.

And that doesn’t even address the changes that have occurred at parent company Valve since the release of the last Half-Life game.

Indeed, now at the helm of Steam, the PC market’s go-to service for downloading games, Valve itself evolved well beyond what it was and might have a whole lot more stuff on its table now than ever before.

Half-Life 3 Hopes and Dreams

But Half-Life fans shouldn’t and never have lost hope, as the re-emergence of a rumor proves.

First surfacing on the forums over at video game website Giant Bomb all the way back in 2013, one rumor that swirls around the next installment in the Half-Life franchise is that Half-Life 3 will be an open-world game.

Speculation about Half-Life and an open-world game again resurfaced on Reddit where users speculated as to what form the next game in the Half-Life series could take.

So is there any merit at all to the rumors that Half-Life 3 will be an open-world game?

And what would that mean exactly for the gameplay?

Further, where are these rumors coming from and is that a credible source?

We will attempt to answer these questions in this article exploring the rumor that Half-Life 3 will be an open-world game.

Half-Life 3 Release Date Rumors

The earliest appearance of this rumor began in 2012 with Destructoid reporting that Half-Life 3 would be an open-world game debuting after 2013. Of course, with 2013 having come and gone and Half-Life 3 nowhere to be seen, this rumor has both not been proven nor disproven. After all, vague statements about something happening some indeterminate time after a certain date are typically hard to disprove if they eventually happen.

What has changed is that the nature of the rumor has adapted to changing gamer tastes. The open-world slant began to take on more and more elements of Bethesda’s Fallout franchise as the rumor has grown older. The most recent posting on Reddit merely speculates about what Half-Life in a World War II setting would be like, still retaining the open-world environment rumor bandied about before.

So what gives? Is Half-Life 3 going to be an open-world game with RPG elements? It’s tough to say but the rumor has proven so persistent that, if we strip away all of the nonsense that has been tacked on sense, may hold a kernel of truth.

An open-world Half-Life 3 would be an interesting game but fans are more likely to expect a traditional outing that completes the game’s narrative, continuing the gameplay established in the previous two entries.

Only time will tell if this old rumor proves to be true.