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Following our report yesterday that Valve may be developing a new Half-Life game according to a voice actor, Valve source Tyler McVicker (who previously ran the video channel Valve News Network) has now publicly stated that he believes the news is true.

According to him, the new game codenamed "HLX" "seems to be a complete non-VR Half-Life game", and said that the good news is "a bit unbelievable" - after all, most people have regarded Half-Life 3 as a joke for so many years and have no hope.

In the latest video, McVicker said: "Everything you are about to hear is real, not speculation, and comes directly from Valve's recently updated data mining."

“Valve and the team behind Half-Life: Alyx began pre-production on another single-player game (around the same time as Half-Life: Alyx). We discovered the codename for this game in 2021: HLX.”

"At the time, and in the following years, some people thought that HLX didn't actually represent a full game in development, but perhaps just an engine definition, or just a format for saving files."

“In the meantime, I’ve been slowly and quietly digging into this story. HLX is a confusing story. HLX appears to be a complete, non-VR Half-Life game, which seems a little unbelievable, and I want to make sure I’m very sure before I make this information public.”

“Half-Life: Alyx was announced nearly five years ago and fully released over four years ago, and it turns out that entire event was spent developing the next major single-player game, codenamed HLX. And now, thanks to a voice actor on a project who accidentally screwed up, we now know that the internal codename Valve used to hide the real project name when casting voice actors was ‘White Sands’.”

Interestingly, McVicker pointed out that like other studios, Valve uses very random codenames, such as "Hot Dog" for "Left 4 Dead VR" and "Left 4 Dead 3", and "Jamiroquai" for "Half-Life: Alyx", so the codename "White Sands" has nothing to do with the content of the game.

He went on to say that he "learned a lot" about the project through data mining, including code mining of Valve games such as "DOTA 2". He determined that no matter "what game HLX ends up being", players will be "wearing HEV suits" and will go to the world outside the earth "Offworld", where there will be many different objects, including "workers", "storks" (storks?), "pentatanks", "feral man hacks" (the classic small attacking drones in "Half-Life"), and some alien creatures codenamed "Xengorillas (gorillas), Xenjellyfish (jellyfish), Xenswoopers (divers)".

He believes that these are all content that was deleted from Half-Life: Alyx, but "according to the latest update of Valve's Source 2 engine project, it continues to be developed in some form."

He concluded: "Do I think this is Half-Life 3? I have to be very cautious in answering that question..."

“But I would say, yes.”

“I think of it as a non-VR Half-Life game where you play as a character wearing HEV armor in Valve’s game that’s been in development since Half-Life: Alyx.”

Currently, the personal introduction page of the voice actor who made the mistake has removed the reference to "Codename: White Sand".