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Valve co-founder Gabe Newell does Reddit AMA, sets Internet hearts aflutter

Gordon Freeman

With the release of The Last Guardian this past December, two games that most people thought had long ago turned into vapourware, the aforementioned Last Guardian and November’s Final Fantasy XV, not only came out after extended and tortured development cycles, but turned out to be pretty great titles.

It gave gamers hope that another long overdue title, Half Life 3, would also finally see the light of day.

While it’s probably best not to start shouting “Half Life 3 confirmed!” from the rooftops just yet, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said his studio is working on a single player title during a Reddit AMA he did on Tuesday. Newell avoided the question of whether the forthcoming game is related to the Half Life franchise, saying, “The number 3 must not be said,” in response to a direct question about the development status of Half Life 3.

He later provided some insight into Valve’s secretive ways, saying:

“Our decision making is way more conditional than most other companies. The one thing we won’t do is waste our customers time and money, which means we will cancel or change stuff much later in development. Tracking our choices would be annoying and frustrating.”

“Another way to think about this, and the way we talk about this internally, is that we prefer to communicate through our products. We are all pretty devoted to reading and listening to the community — everyone here believes it is an integral part of their job to do so. And when it comes time to respond, we generally use Steam — shipping updates that address issues or add functionality. Obviously, this doesn’t work for everything. Working this way imposes latency on our communication – it takes longer to ship and update than to do a blog post. This can lead to the feeling of an echo chamber, where it seems like Valve isn’t listening. We’re always listening. So sometimes the latency is rough for everyone, including us when we want to address issues quickly. On balance we think it’s usually worth the trade-off.”

Newell also noted two previously announced JJ Abrams movies se in the Half Life and Portal universe are “coming.”

Check out Newell’s entire AMA session by following the source link below.

[source]Reddit[/source]

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