Former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw says he 'retired too hard', but there's no way he's coming back for Half-Life 3: 'We need new stuff, [not] me going 'Well the G-Man wouldn't do that in my day''

This kind of mentality is how most modern sequels of old properties have failed, BTW.

Majority of the audience are the people that would say "The G Man wouldn't do that in my day." That kind of thinking helps continuity as well.

Otherwise you end up with spectacular failures like Star Wars Episodes 8 and 9.

Eh, I think there's just as many examples of burned out creatives not wanting to make a sequel, being forced to make a sequel, and it turning out poorly. A recent example would be Matrix 4.
I agree that continuity is important, but I think inspiration is the most important thing. If somebody doesn't have a good story to tell in a universe, it doesn't matter if they have perfect attention to continuity, they're telling a bad story.
To be fair to Star Wars, the suits at Disney changed tactics because of negative fan reaction to the first sequel so we don't actually know how good they could have turned out if we had just let the creatives in charge finish their vision that started in 7. 8 and 9 were weird specifically because Disney suits were afraid of pissing off fans and changed direction twice instead of committing to the original vision. Fans complained about the prequels as well but Lucas committed to his vision and now so many years later the prequels are viewed far more favorably.
- As an avid pre-Disney SW fan myself, fans weren't that pissed at 7. Outside of it being ~~ANH again~~ very safe and Rey being too good at everything from the get-go with absolutely no character development to support that, 7 was met with mostly lukewarm reception. Not awful, but not great either. It played it safe and everyone could tell.
  Then Rian entered the picture. The individual that is documented on video saying he wanted to make a movie that at least half of viewers hated. Well, mission accomplished, buddy.
  Tied up every loose end from 7 and tied up its own loose ends leaving absolutely no meaningful questions for 9. Not to mention half the movie could have been deleted with no consequence (seriously, what on earth was going on with the Canto arc?), multiple character assassinations, killed off a character with lots of potential to be a decent BBEG in the most unceremonious way ever, and introduced a major canon-breaking scene.
  I feel bad for JJ on 9 honestly. How do you even follow up on 8? 7 was such a soft-ball lay-up for anyone to write a sequel to, and Disney thought the best guy for the job was Mr. I Want To Make A Movie That Passionate Fans Hate? Its almost like Rian was spiteful and wrote 8 to be bad on purpose because he didn't like that Abrams had written 7. Why they did not have JJ just write the whole trilogy is beyond me. Would definitely have been better than what we got, at least it would have been more coherent. At the very least, mid is better than awful. Maybe Rose Tico could have been a real character with actual development and purpose instead of a useless character with an entirely unnecessary death.
  The prequels are only viewed better now because 7, 8, and 9 proved something could be worse. As Qui-Gon Jinn said, "There is always a bigger fish."
I interpreted this more like a reference to the original developer of God of War who was pretty vocal about not being happy with the new games.
we could do something crazy like create new IPs
- There's so many great book series out there. Ian Banks' Culture Series, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin series, could re-do Altered Carbon properly and base it on the second book more faithfully; which was actually quite interesting. Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series. Terry Pratchett's last contribution in The Long Earth series. What happened to the supposed adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars series? Neal Asher's Polity series. Dan Simmon's Hyperion, anyone? And that's just a small fraction of more modern SciFi.
  None of these series really get a look in because we're still busy repeating the same formula ad nauseam until the fan base literally can't take ingesting another two hours of recycled dross.
  Let's try something new.

All the new hype about a possible HL3 coming soon™ are more than likely a sequel to Alyx, considering it also coincides with leaks, trademarks and other info about an incoming new VR setup from Valve and/or a new Steam Deck.

It could be a straight up new VR game, or, hell, it could be doing something to show off a new idea in the handheld space now that I am really thinking about it. Maybe the new Steam Deck will have gnarly new gyroscopic motion tech or something they wanna show off.

They've been pretty adamant about not making a sequel for the sake of a sequel; if they have nothing they think is super cool to show off, they're not doing it. So the likely true rumors about them doing something is still exciting to me, even if it's not HL3 itself.

Yeah. They have been developing their new Deckard VR headset, so I see it being more aligned with that than anything else. They don't really have another reason to just release HL3.
- They might have just cracked a new mechanic. Let's not get too hasty - especially considering the reports of non-VR HL3 being beta-tested end to end, with such a mechanic: supposedly it has actually good procedural generation.

New stuff is for new IPs.... Fans want a G-man that operates within his original concept.

It could go either way, the new blood writing for an old IP might be too scared to expand it in any meaningful way - see the newest starwars trilogy for the perfect example.

Fans dont want more of the same though, they want to be even more immersed with expanding lore, and they want it to be meaningful and worthwhile. But when it comes to characters they dont necessarily want them to change. Its the plot that needs to be driven forward.

Investors that want to milk an IP dont care if the property is expanded upon, they dilute the IP in search of profits.

I hope HL3 gives us something worthwhile. I believe GabeN will make sure that happens.

Yeah imagine if they went "ah gaben is old let's replace him. In fact let's just have a new company with only zoomers make the official hl3"

I'm glad for Laidlaw not getting stuck on Half-Life. It's been a long time, people grow and move on. Imagine him feeling like this about Half-Life but writing for the sequel anyway out of a sense of duty, completion or other silly reason. It would be a total disaster. Half-Life: Alyx was fantastic, and felt like just another entry, a natural fit, in the Half-Life universe. This is not in spite of, nor because of, Laidlaw being absent from its development. There are simply a bunch of amazing people putting their heart and soul into these games.

I do hope the next Half-Life entry will be a regular PC game though. I wouldn't wish it upon people who don't own VR to miss out on another excellent game.

On a sidenote its crazy we got a Love Death & Robots episode based on Laidlaw's first book. Definitely gonna watch that.

Which episode was that?
- Season 4 Episode 4 if I remember correctly. He is credited as writer on the Wikipedia list of episodes. I can recommend the rest of the season as well, less than two hours

Au contraire...

That is EXACTLY what we need for universe consistency and coherency

Can I just ask what people expect from a half life story? Like it's always been pretty thin on the ground, right?

What was the first game? Experiment goes wrong, aliens notice us and invade, we kill a bunch of them, there's the occasional macguffin, travel to their planet, beat the big bad enemy, boom, mysterious gman puts us in the fridge.

The two expansions seem like the same story from another POV, I have no memory of any important events from either one.

Second game, gman drops us mysteriously back like 20 years later. We kill a bunch of enemies, there's some more macguffin, the vortigaunts were enslaved now they're on our side. There's a bit of intrigue, we beat the local bad guy, the vortigaunts save us.

The following two chapters, apart from having to rescue people, I couldn't tell you what even happens. The world is implied to be so big that you are an insignificant player and you could never hope to grasp what's really gping on, and we never get more than glimpses of what's really happening. It seems more like the idea of a world that leaves open the possibility of more or less anything happening and within which to set games, than a coherent story with structure and tension and stakes, beyond "world in peril" or "friend in peril", which is pretty bog standard stuff.

Like sure we might be a bit invested in Alyx & her dad's stories, but I always assumed people were hyped for sequels because the games play well and have an interesting backdrop. What exactly is the special sauce that mark laidlaw brings? Yes the environmental storytelling was novel and well done, but it's always been so vague because they're so committed to never leaving the players POV, and they spend so little time explaining the actual world.

Speaking entirely personally, I thought at least Half Life Alyx's story worked on two levels. It was about freeing the gman as Alyx but gman sorta represented... Oh man, now I'm worried I can't remember the game well enough to communicate my original thoughts. I remember playing it and feeling like the gman represented the writers or creativity, a bigger picture concept or something that went meta. And if that was the case it felt like Valve creating a piece of art that said Alyx and VR have revitalized our desire to tell stories and GMAN is free again.
The moment they drop their new headset I'll buy it and play again just to relive the experience but I'd say I'm excited about Half Life because Valve makes A) good games B) they make solid diegetic games which I find to be kinda rare C) their games often feel like they came from a team of artists than just a team of coders. Maybe that's the polish or maybe that's the massive amount of testing I'm led to believe they do but when valve makes a new game it often feels like the guy who made Stanley Parable just made a new game - easy to recognize art because it's so good.
- I agree the diegetic storytelling is very well done and that did push the craft of game storytelling forwards, but the actual world itself is a lot of texture with very little substance. Loads of cool ideas, but almost no decisions, like they want the freedom to add anything at any time without ever restricting themselves by saying "here is how this concept actually works", or even "this is who this person is".
  We never really meet the aliens or the antagonists, ever. The gman is an alien in a skin-suit, and Breen is just a collaborator. They are both essentially puppets.
  Like, what was the nihilanth? We killed it, then... what? I guess the vortigaunts were freed, but how does that tie into the slug beings, the human cyborg slavery, any of it? The vortigaunts could easily explain at least some of the world, What does any of it mean?
  I get the idea of being deep in and unable to see the forest for the trees, and that is definitely a style of story that you can do, but it's unsatisfying long term. Eventually you have to get at least a glimpse of the broader picture or nothing has any meaning. The world has no rules, which doesn't make good science fiction.
  I say this as someone who regularly replays HL2 because I enjoy the texture so much, I just acknowledge it's very limited.
I think this is why I always loved System Shock and System Shock 2 so much more as the narrative building was so much bigger than any game I've played before I since. I wish someone would sort the licensing out for that game and bring us a System Shock 3.
- I'm working up the courage to try those for the first time, but as very old games now, I'm a little apprehensive about all the friction they're likely to have.

He should go back to Oldmanmurray.

He would be age appropriate now.

Oh no.. that doesn't bode well.

This reminds me of something that one of the other developers said while commentating a Half Life 2 speedrun: "When the main villain in the story looks like your high school principal, you know it was made by old people."

Is the G-man the main villain? I thought it was always a little unclear. In HL it's the Nialinth snd and HL2 it's the Combine. G-man seems like he's not clear on what side he is on, and it always felt that vagueness was intentional.
- I think the principal is the white bearded guy. I don’t see the G-man being the enemy, because it’s him who wake up Freeman in HL2. “Wake up, Mr Freeman, wake up and smell the ashes.”
  In HL1 I’ve always seen him as the corporate fucker who is trying to save the company.
- They were talking about Wallace Breen. That should speak for itself.