A DOTA 2 update pushed on the 6th of October had some code describing a procedurally shattering glass panel entity. However, there was a mention of another entity called HLVR. So, could this mean the upcoming Half-Life 3 will be a VR game? Well, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of VR from Valve. It goes back a year ago when Valve programmer Jeep Barnett had an interview with Kotaku.
Half-Life 3 could be VR?
“We’ve said, ‘Let’s take some existing art and see how it fits’. So yeah, 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. But right now, it’s a tool for exploring the different kind of game designs we want to do.”
This was from an interview a year ago and the recent data mining leak confirms our suspicion that Half-Life 3 will be a VR game. When he was asked about a possible Half-Life VR game, this is what he had to say:
“We’re not saying, ‘no,’ but we don’t know what the right thing is [yet]. 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 out what’s the best fit, what plays to the strengths of VR.”
Also, the data mining leak from DOTA 2 isn’t anything new. There was a similar data mining leak a year ago where players discovered a hl3.txt file after a patch. It had referenced features like referenced features zipline, procedural spawning, VR movement, and NPC speech.
So, we have pretty much everything but a direct confirmation from Valve that Half-Life 3 will be a VR game. Stay tuned to MobiPicker as we confirm whether the adage “Valve can’t count to 3” is true or not.