Lmao I was not expecting this but yeah!!!! Gaben, please! I've been begging for crumbs here after you battered Tyler McVicker and left him in the streets post-L4D3 leaks. ;w;
Which turned out to be true and Valve just openly tore his whole validity apart at the time. I will never get over that, that must've felt so bad.

hope he's ready for Round 2 now that the entire gaming press has ran with "tyler says HL3 will DEFINITELY be announced THIS YEAR" and it probably slid back into 2026 which he actually always said was not unlikely

Pff, wouldn't doubt it. Poor lad.

If not at TGA then eventually. We're definitely getting it before 2030.

I have fully accepted that we are never going to get Half-Life 3

at the time before HL:Alyx was announced, there was an even more prevalent attitude that Valve would never make a new HL game, but many signs pointed toward exactly the game we soon after got. Same signs today point toward a new traditional FPS half-life game, which is almost surely a direct sequel to HL2. so....... i will hope (i really wasn't holding out for a TGA announcement tho lol)

yeah but that might also be because of the lowered expectations as well, like if expectations end up too high then valve employees might not be willing to work on it and just move to other projects in the meantime, currently i'd expect them to be fully focused on their hardware and software so that the launch goes smoothly, so it's likely quite a ways away
though from what i remember of post HLA rumours was that valve planned to make a game you could play in both VR and flatscreen, but idk how it holds up
but another thing is that they have said that one of the main things they want half life to be is innovative, which is why they went with VR for the previous game
but it's all so speculative about what might happen so idk

allow me a ramble from a hopium addict:
the hybrid desktop/VR game was a rumor from the "citadel" project that came well after the HLVR project (Alyx), but is separate from the "HLX" project.
Also, the hardware/steam software team is a different group of people from the game development staff.

using the same datamining techniques that pretty accurately determined when Alyx was nearing announcement, it looks like the "HLX" traditional FPS half-life project has been in active development for at least 5 years and the main focus of development for the past full year has almost entirely been optimization (what you would do when the game is basically content complete)
it's very very unlikely for the entire project to fall through that late into development, even for Valve.
Valve shares a code base between all Source 2 projects so it's pretty easy to find traces of what's changing on the engine level where it's not cleaned up.

and on what they've said, just last year, gabe newell himself said in the HL2 documentary they published, quote "I think that 'Half-Life' represents a tool we have and promises made to customers to capitalize on innovation and opportunities to build game experiences that haven't been involved previously, and I think that there are no shortage of those opportunities facing us as an industry right now." (and to hammer that home, this was said at the very end of the documentary after about a solid 10 minutes of tons of different valve developers talking about how they have high hopes for "future half-life games.")

even if people's predictions were wrong on dates, it seems very likely the game is getting ready to announce and ship. But Valve just takes their time to commit.

valve has a flat structure for the company so people regularly go between projects that they want to work on, i really doubt that game development experience is so specific as to not be useful for steam controller/steam frame/steam machine software development
i do wonder what innovation they plan to add to the new game if it isn't a hybrid but rather more half life 2, half life rtx i guess?
HLA did come out at a fairly low point for valve after all so im not entirely sure they'll go through with
HLA did take 16 years between the last half life game so there is an upper bound here, but not tomorrow

well I mainly say they're different staff because when valve had to produce a report of employee salaries a few years ago, game developers were listed separately from hardware and steam developers.

there's been some speculation on innovations based on engine code, seems like there will be fluid simulations? but I try to not look so far into it to get spoiled

Steam Machine launch title trust.

LOL.

Same as it ever was

Same as it ever was