I feel as if it's better that it's kill cause expectations are at such ridiculous level that delivering would be close...

>Boneworks comes out
>People liked it
>Valve is like - yeah that was HLVR by the way
>People hate it

You're right. Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 were events. They amazed players and inspired other developers. In 1998 and 2004 this was possible. It was possible for a linear single-player shooter to do this. That's not true anymore. Today, even if Half-Life 3 were great, we would all play it, beat it, say it was really good, and then probably go back to playing an online game. The length of time Half-Life has been dormant plus the fact that, historically, Half-Life games have been paradigm-shifting moments both mean Valve is under a lot of pressure and likely won't make a move until they know they can dazzle people again.

>Just six years between HL1 and HL2
>when it's been twice as much since 2007 and 2019 and all those years fucking blew
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Don't forget, Valve will rewrite HL3/Episode 3 if they ever come back to it. Epistle 3 already revealed all the crazy plot points that the game was set to have, and they'd probably want to keep people "unspoiled", even if that means ditching stuff Wolpaw had planned out.
Or, Valve skips Ep 3 and HL3 follows Gordon in a whole new setting much like HL2 did and Ep 3 was supposed to set up, with Episode 3 being canon in broad strokes but its events only being referenced.

But the game's never going to come out.

Yeah, it'd more likely be something like "DOG Command" where you point signals at him to do stuff like how Portal 2 has those beacons used to communicate in co-op.

I feel like the Portal games shouldve done that too but theyre outrageously irrelevant now

I still have no idea what F-Stop's mechanics were going to be.

This. I just want a map pack with more enemy types and weapons. Half Life's core gameplay is good enough for that to work.

Valve are literally incapable of a coding a game that qualifies as AAA anymore. They're so out of practise with coding and leave every ounce of work to interns.

VR is a meme

People think it had something to do with cameras and forced perspective, similar to this:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=HOfll06X16c

>says increasingly poor user for the thousandth time this year

The reason they couldn't make another paradigm shifting game is they literally haven't done anything in years and are completely out of touch.

steamcharts.com/app/583950
They're unable to even make a game for paypigs, arguably the easiest crowd to please. It's a big R&D department + Steam. The fact they managed to make Index a reality is a miracle in its own right, and even then they fucked it up in the last moment.
Different user, I'm not poor and I bought a HOTAS/Wheel/FBT and other devices for VR, I still think you have to be an enthusiast to get into it, and for your average normie, it's as much of a gimmick as it gets.
The only roomscale games that still matter are VRChat and Pavlov, and those are run by retards and are objectively janky shit, their only ace in the hole is community and blatantly copying Counter-Strike. Beat Saber devs carried PCVR for some time, but it's obvious Sony/Occulusbucks are more important now, so I'm fully expecting them scratching their heads to think how to completely fuck up modding and get away with selling music packs to PC crowd.
The only game that's pushing the boundaries at this point is Blade and Sorcery, and it's uber jank for psycho incels, made by one gay, and its yet another wave shooter/slasher game. It's a meme, It's a good one, I like it, but it's not consumer ready, and won't be because the only devs it attracts have their heads so deep in their asses they probably have a hard time wearing the headset to actually play their own shitty fucking games.