[dropcap size=dropcap]M[/dropcap]ore than one year ago, Valve announced that they are working on a new graphical engine. The announcement seemed to be quite important for the huge community of Half Life series fans who were also expected news related to Half Life 3, the rumor that all of them were hoping to be true. “We’ve been working on new engine stuff for awhile,” Newell said. “We’ve just been waiting for a game to roll it out with,” he added. Moreover, he confirmed that Valve was at that day working on a completely new engine not just on improvements to the 10 year old Source engine.
Now, several months later, it seems that Valve has involuntarily confirmed that in fact, they are already working on Half Life 3 and that it is just a matter of time until the information will be released to the public. The confirmation occurred through the User Picker tool, an internal Valve tool used by the company’s developers to manage personnel involved in development of specific projects and track the projects currently open. Of course, the tool is not available to the public and no one can access information from it unless it is involved directly in the process of game development at Valve. However, an internal error or perhaps a major gaffe rendered the tool accessible to the public. Thus, fans of the Half Life series were able to take a look at the Half Life 3 entries.
Rumor has it that 46 developers are working on Half Life 3 at this moment. However, the numbers were not confirmed by anyone. Recently, we wrote about an unconfirmed rumor about Valve Software’s intention to acquire the trademark for Half Life 3. It was supposed that their request was lodged on September, 29 in the European Union. Unfortunately, company’s officials declared that this was just a hoax and the filing for the trademark had nothing to do with Valve: “We can now confirm that the “Half-Life 3″ trademark has been removed from the Trademarks and Design Registration Office of the European Union (OHIM) website. The entrant appears to have disappeared entirely after only being listed on the website database for little over a week, allowing us to identify that the trademark’s listing was more than likely a hoax intended to generate fake buzz for a game which is unlikely to appear for several years.”
Let us know if you have any comments or news related to the development of Half Life 3 and stay tuned as we will get back to you as soon as we’ll find out more about this specific topic.