A documentary celebrating the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2 has shown development footage of the canceled Half-Life 2: Episode 3.
The new documentary, which can be seen below, was produced by Secret Tape, a production arm of the popular crowd-funded documentary studio Noclip.
The documentary follows the development of the 2004 PC game and features interviews with most of the game‘s most prominent developers, including Valve boss Gabe Newell.
The documentary concludes by explaining why a third episode of Half-Life 2 was announced but never released. The Half-Life 2 team largely attributes the need to work on other Valve titles at the time as part of the reason the episode was never released.
“I think we were six months into it when we moved to Left 4 Dead,” said David Speyre, engineer for Half-Life 2. “We left episode 3 to help Left 4 Dead.”
“When we considered going back to episode 3, there was an argument that ‘well, we missed it,'” he continued. “We definitely could have gone back and spent two years to make episode 3.”
Valve president Gabe Newell said: “My personal failure was getting stumped. “I couldn’t understand why making Episode 3 was pushing anything forward.”
In addition to the documentary, Valve has released a series of updates for Half-Life 2, which is now available for free on Steam for a limited time.
“Valve level designers have reviewed every Half-Life 2 map to fix long-standing bugs, restore content and features lost over time, and improve the quality of things like light map resolution and fog,” Valve said.
Half-Life 2 now includes the full Episode One and Episode Two expansions alongside the base game. They can be accessed from the main menu and you will automatically advance to the next expansion after completing each one.
Developer feedback on Half-Life 2 was also added to the PC game, along with Steam Workshop support.
