Let me start by saying Half Life 3 has not been confirmed that was an inflammatory title designed to get your attention, I’m sorry but it’s not a complete lie, we will get to that.
First off though, steam has finally fulfilled one of its promises, it announced its plans for the long-overdue Steam Machines. They’ll be released in the fall this year, Valve is also releasing a device called Steam Link, and at about £32 (roughly) this streaming box will let you broadcast games from the PC to the TV. That will support 1080p at 60Hz with low latency.
Not quite a steam machine but actually pretty useful if you just want to stream your PC games to your TV screen, I can think of a few games I’d happily play on my TV with the use of a controller. Which brings me on to the second announcement.
Valve have confirmed the final specs of its Steam Controller, The Controller will have both touch haptic pads and motion capabilities, as well as the generic Dpad and ABXY buttons. This new iteration is still ugly and haptic pads are weird, I’m hoping for a chance to try it, I may like it but I fear it won’t be able to replace the comfortable feel of an Xbox controller.
Third was something about VR, I’m going to gloss over that. Valve president Gabe Newell finished with this: “We continue to see very strong growth in PC Gaming, with Steam growing 50% in the last 12 months, with these announcements we hope that we are helping build on that momentum.”
There was one final surprise from Valve; they have announced Source 2. The next generation of its game engine, which will be available for free to content developers. What does this mean, well it’s been over 10 years since the original Source engine was released and we still use it. The first Source engine came with the launch of Counter-Strike and was later used to run Half Life 2, could it be that they needed a new engine in order to run Half Life 3.
Who knows, maybe they are making a new IP it would be a shame for them to release Half Life 3 and end this 8 year long wait.