As we get closer to winter, rumors about Valve working on a new game in the Half-Life franchise are once more starting to catch fire. The latest one comes from one of the studio’s developers accidentally mentioning the codename for Half-Life 3 – HLX – during a Q&A panel at GameSoundCon. As caught by social media user Tyler McVicker, the developer in question – music designer Mike Morasky – was discussing high dynamic range audio when he mentioned HLX.
Morasky was discussing how Valve’s various in-development projects have their own implementation of HDR audio, and ended up mentioning Deadlock and HLX. This has led the datamining community to try to figure out if any references to HLX can be found in the files for games like Deadlock, Dota 2, or Counter-Strike 2.
There is also a chance that Morasky meant to say HLVR rather than HLX, with the former being a codename for 2020’s VR-only title Half-Life: Alyx. McVicker has also noted that “the guy next to Mike says ‘nice work’ under his breath. I don’t think they will be able to say that he meant HLVR.”
The last Half-Life 3 popped up in the news was a report from back in December 2025 that discussed the possibility of the title being released alongside the Steam Machine. Since then, however, Valve’s Linux-based gaming PC has been launched, and there has been no sign of a new Half-Life game.
There were also reports last year about Half-Life 3 potentially being announced in December 2025, with The Game Awards at the time being a likely candidate for such a reveal. However, more reports would come out indicating that Valve likely had its own plans in place for when it would announce the highly anticipated shooter. According to Insider Gaming’s Mike Straw, while plans at the time were to unveil the project before the end of the year, no deal had been struck with Geoff Keighley to make such an announcement.
Back in August 2025, one report indicated that Valve was quite far along in making Half-Life 3, with McVicker believing that the project was in its final stages of development. This information came from lines of code found in the files for the company’s Source 2 engine. These lines of code seemingly made references to Half-Life-specific things like thumper machines that last showed up in Half-Life 2.
While the code was unlikely to be an indicator of thumper machines showing up once more in Half-Life 3, McVicker believed the line to be a direct message to dataminers to indicate that development had been progressing at a steady pace.
As for what Half-Life 3 could potentially entail, while the ending to Half-Life 2: Episode 2 indicated that protagonist Gordon Freeman would have to deal with the death of Eli Vance and the grief of his daughter Alyx, the ending from Half-Life: Alyx brought about a few changes, with Eli’s life being spared, and the G-Man taking Alyx into stasis as a replacement for Gordon. The new ending indicated that Gordon would be working with Eli to find and save Alyx.
