This, honestly
The way they've been keeping fans in the dark about Half-Life 3/Episode 3 for 10 loving years is stuffty. Like, Valve fans were/are some of the most loyal fans out there and they just completely left them hanging without any indication of where the series is and where it's going. When Episode 2 first came out, Gabe kept talking about Episode 3 like it was going to happen (e.g. "When Episode 3 comes out...") and then slowly over the years stopped talking about it until now he just refuses to answer any questions about it. It's loving rude.
On top of that, people who were key to the Half-Life series have been leaving Valve so now it kind of seems like Half-Life 3/Episode 3 is dead in the water.
Yeah. A few years ago I felt that they were waiting to develop the next big game-changer to make episode 3. It made sense; Half-Life 1 and 2 are major contributions to how gaming narratives are done, and both times they introduced something pretty unique. I've loved the series for around 7 years now, and I've played a downright unhealthy amount of Valve games in general.
But it's been a decade. Okay, fine, whatever, maybe genius takes time to make. It wouldn't be unheard of for Valve to go through dozens of iterations before deciding a new one after all. The staff leaving though, that's absoluting disconcerting. That says to me that Valve has either taken too long that the staff is abandoning ship or that they just aren't doing anything in general. It doesn't help the situation that Valve is entirely uncommunicative with ALL their IPs.
CSGO recently got a new event added, usually something you see once or twice a year, but they just didn't do one last year. No reason given. TF2 had a shoehorned competitive mode and the removal of the old (and better) method of finding servers. Again, no reason given. Valve just does stuff with no regard for the people who play their games and frankly it gets old. It feels like Valve's lost sight of what makes their games so good, and that makes me sad.
