Valve Might Be Plotting A Half-Life Announcement At Gamescom

The companion app for Gamescom 2023 reveals Valve as one of the exhibitors, with Half-Life listed as its exhibited brand. Valve hasn’t been revealed as part of the upcoming event, so it could be a mistake in the app. Even so, Half-Life being on the list has sparked hope that the company might be planning to reveal Half-Life 3 or Project Citadel at Gamescom 2023.

The companion app serves as a guide to see the list of exhibitors and other details regarding the event. While many exhibitors have already been revealed, one unusual entry in the app appears to be Valve (thanks, u/ItzDarko42), with Half-Life as its exhibited brand. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a Half-Life 3 announcement is imminent, as it can be any other side project within the same franchise.

So far, one of the only projects we know that can be remotely close to fit that description is Project Citadel. Tyler McVicker first mentioned it on his YouTube channel. Later on, a TVNZ Journalist asked Gabe Newell questions regarding this project, which Newell refused to answer and said that it could be anything since codenames are constantly changed at Valve and that they have several games in development.

We have a bunch of code names — are you referring to a code name? I don’t know what ‘Citadel’ is; what is Citadel? Just to be clear — internally, we have a bunch of different names, and they change over time,” says Gabe Newell.

Although Newell dodged the question, he said, “We definitely have games in development that we’re going to be announcing — it’s fun to ship games.” His statement more or less confirmed that Valve has several projects, and we can expect some announcements soon. But it should be noted that the interview was conducted in early 2021, and a lot could have changed since then.

Despite the long interval, Valve’s potential appearance at Gamescom 2023 has sparked hopes among Half-Life fans, who long wish this to be Half-Life 3, which may or may not even be alive now. It could even be Neon Prime, for which Valve filed a trademark last year. For those unaware, Neon Prime is rumoured to be a sci-fi competitive FPS tangentially set in the world of Dota 2.

The Half-Life series was developed and published by Valve, with the first game released in 1998. Half-Life 2 was released in 2004 to expand the series. It was widely successful and resulted in the creation of several side projects within the same franchise, and even birthed the classic Portal series.