Valve Composer dropper HLX-kodenavnet og Half-Life 3-ryktene starter på nytt

Valve composer Mike Morasky said the codename HLX out loud at GameSoundCon in Burbank, California this week, on a panel about Valve’s Source 2 audio engine that he shared with sound designers David Feise and Carlye Nyte. HLX is the string dataminers pulled out of Source 2 updates after Half-Life: Alyx shipped, and the name attached ever since to a new Half-Life game Valve has never acknowledged. Two decades have gone by since Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and the studio is rumoured to have killed at least one attempt at a third game somewhere in that gap.

The talk was titled “Valve’s Approach to an Open and Flexible Audio Engine” and was meant to cover extensible systems. Late in it, Morasky compared how different Valve projects handle HDR and named two of them. The full panel sits on Vimeo, with the line landing around the 57-minute mark, and Feise can be heard whispering “Nice work” right after it.

“I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR. You know, HLX has its own version, so on and so forth.”

— Mike Morasky

As the panel wraps, Feise leans in again with what sounds like “Good job. You only said ‘HLX’ once.” Morasky answers “I did?” A member of the gaming leaks subreddit clipped the exchange, and the post cleared 1,700 upvotes and close to 300 comments inside a day.

Posters there counted it as the third time Morasky has said HLX on camera, with one regular putting the number at four. Earlier clips collected on the Half-Life subreddit have him starting the word and correcting himself mid-sentence, and in another he refers to working on two Half-Life games when his public credits list only Alyx, the 2020 VR prequel. What the thread settled on is that this is the first time the whole codename came out without a stop in the middle.

“At this point I find it hard to believe it’s an accident.”

— MegaManZer0

The replies pushed back on that reading. One argued that anyone who discusses a project with colleagues daily, then stands in front of a room and gets flustered, will eventually use the internal name out of habit. Another asked why a staged tease would reach for a codename that has been public for years instead of the title people actually want to hear.

The codename is still the closest thing to a title anyone has. Valve reporter Tyler McVicker has said the game is titled “HLX” and sitting in its final stages, with polishing and graphics work left to do, and told his audience in 2025 that it is playable from end to end. None of that has been confirmed by anyone at Valve, on or off a panel.

The engine side carries its own hints. Erin Catto, who built Box2D and announced Box3D this year, said Valve’s Rubikon physics engine from Alyx has been rebuilt into one called Ragnarok and that the work will show up in future Valve games, which is where the talk of unusually realistic physics in the next Half-Life comes from. Physics has carried the series since the Gravity Gun, so that one at least points somewhere specific.

Not every piece of evidence has held up. Images posted to a Discord server and 4chan in July, deleted within minutes each time, showed a wooded area resembling White Forest with Eli Vance standing in it and a watermark reading HLX v1.4 LOCFILESTEST dated 4 July 2026. Plenty of people who looked at those possibly fake screenshots saw Unreal Engine 5 lighting and generated detail rather than anything Source 2 produces.

I have watched enough of these cycles to read a codename as proof that a project exists and nothing else. The distance between a datamined string and a release date has eaten years before, and this franchise has already lost one rumoured attempt inside it.

Timing keeps circling back to hardware. Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out Steam Machine exclusivity in July, saying that restricting where people can play a game is not a model the company sees value in, and the machine arrived at $1,049 for the base configuration and $1,428 for the top one. The thread’s favourite theory is that the two were once meant to ship together.

“I still think that was the plan at some point, but they realized the steam machine would not be well received after hardware costs ballooned and decided not to associate the two products”

— West_Island_9777

The other theory in the thread is the award show, and it has been the same theory every December for years. One poster pointed at the precedent: Half-Life: Alyx was lined up for The Game Awards in 2019, Geoff Keighley said so publicly, and Valve pulled out hours before the broadcast and announced the game on its own terms instead.

“Yeah, at this point solid rumors of HL3 announcement at TGA are an annual tradition”

— PressEnteR1990

Half-Life is not the kind of open world I normally live in, so the part of this that would get me to install anything is Ragnarok rather than the promise of a third chapter. A physics engine rebuilt from scratch changes what a room can do to you, and that is a reason to play something regardless of which number ends up on the box.

I think the thread landed on the right shape of answer without meaning to. A slip like this tells you the project is real and discussed daily enough inside Valve that the name comes out under pressure, and it tells you nothing at all about when. Valve has said nothing since the panel, and the recording is still up.