The beloved 'Half-Life' series finally got a new game, but there's a good reason it's not the sequel fans were expecting

"Half-Life Alyx"/ Valve

"Half-Life: Alyx" is the next game in the beloved "Half-Life" series from Valve. It's a virtual reality game.

• For the first time in over a decade, the beloved "Half-Life" video game series is getting a new entry: "Half-Life: Alyx."
• The game is scheduled to arrive in March 2020, and it can only be played in virtual reality headsets.
• The last game in the "Half-Life" series, "Half-Life 2: Episode Two," ended on a cliffhanger that's never been resolved. Fans have been waiting for "Half-Life 3" for years.
• The team behind "Half-Life: Alyx" explained why they're not making "Half-Life 3" in an interview with Geoff Keighley ahead of The Game Awards in December.
• It turns out, the team felt that creating a sequel was "a terrifyingly daunting prospect," and VR became a new avenue for making the game happen.  
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Over 12 years ago, Valve released what would be the final entry in its long-running, beloved "Half-Life" video game series.

The game ended on a narrative cliffhanger which turned into a real-life cliffhanger. Would another "Half-Life" game ever come out? For years - 12 and counting - the answer was no. 

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Earlier this week, seemingly out of nowhere, a new "Half-Life" game was announced. "Half-Life: Alyx" isn't the "Half-Life 3" people have been waiting for. Instead, it's a prequel - set between the events of "Half-Life" and "Half-Life 2." 

Oh, and there's another big caveat: "Half-Life: Alyx" is a virtual reality game that can only be played on PC in VR.

"Half-Life Alyx"/ Valve

"Half-Life: Alyx" is said to be as big a production as "Half-Life 2.'

It turns out there's a good reason for both of those major derivations from fan expectations.

"In all honesty, back in 2016 when we started this, 'Half-Life 3' was just a terrifyingly daunting prospect," Valve game designer Robin Walker said in an interview with Geoff Keighley ahead of The 2019 Game Awards. "I think to some extent, VR was a way we could fool ourselves into believing we had a way to do this."

Instead of starting the project as "Half-Life 3," it was started as a way to answer the question, "Where's the big VR title?" Walker said. That's because Valve - the company behind the massively-popular Steam storefront - has been pushing hard into VR for years now.

First, the company teamed up with HTC to create the Vive. Now, it produces the Valve Index, which is an even higher-fidelity VR headset than the Vive. Valve's Index is considered the Ferrari of VR headsets, a title it earned both by its technical prowess and absurdly high $1,000 all-in price point.

But even for all of Valve's support for virtual reality - to say nothing of Sony's support with PlayStation VR, or Facebook's support with Oculus - the market for VR headsets has not taken off. One major reason for that is a lack of so-called "must-play" games, and, in 2016, Valve employees sought to solve that problem.

To that end, Valve only has so many properties that make sense for virtual reality.

"We settled on 'Portal' or 'Half-Life' as interesting," Valve game developer David Speyrer said. 

Valve Software

"Portal 2," the last major game in the "Portal" series from Valve, was released in 2011.

Both franchises are in first-person, making them logical choices for VR. "Portal" was quickly ruled out, he said, because of concerns about making players sick while being flung through the air in VR.

With "Half-Life," the franchise was simply a template for experimentation with a "big" VR project - not an attempt to conclude a beloved franchise after 12 years of dormancy. Instead, it became a project named "Half-Life: Alyx" over time as the development team went from prototyping game mechanics to creating a full-on game. 

"It was really easy to not think about the big picture of, 'We're making Half-Life 3,'" Walker said, "And just focus on 'Let's figure out what people enjoy in this and make forward progress.'" 

He compared VR, as a gameplay hook, to the iconic gravity gun from "Half-Life 2" - a means of focusing the team around something specific that could guide design. "In some ways, VR was a little bit ... the way the gravity gun helped us in 'Half-Life 2,' where it just became the tentpole that you could wrap so much around. And so VR became this thing that we could wrap everything around."

Valve

Valve's Index VR system, which costs $1,000.

To that end, the game isn't planned for a non-VR release. "Half-Life: Alyx" is designed specifically with VR in mind, and its designers say it wouldn't translate easily to PC or game consoles. 

That doesn't necessarily mean there won't be more "Half-Life" on other platforms in the future, but the developers of "Half-Life: Alyx" are hesitant to make any promises. And they should be - the last 12 years have included a lot of "Half-Life" suggestions and non-committal statements about the state of the franchise. 

"We want to put this out and see how the world reacts to it before we make any concrete plans about what's next," Speyrer said.

"Half-Life: Alyx" is scheduled to arrive in March 2020 on Valve's Steam service.

Check out the debut trailer right here:

And check out Geoff Keighley's interview with some of the game's developers right here: