Perhaps average gamers would wonder what the Xbox Scorpio or the PlayStation Neo is. The two are the respective current gaming consoles of Microsoft and Sony with the main addition of a virtual reality (VR) support.
In other words, Xbox Scorpio is Xbox One with VR support while the PlayStation Neo is PlayStation 4 with VR support.
If the latest rumors are to be believed, it looks like the survival first-person shooter video game “Half-Life 3” shall become the first video game to come out with full VR support on the gaming consoles in 2018.
According to the same rumors, American game developer Valve Corporation is preparing “Half-Life 3” to be one of the big titles for the new gaming consoles, which shall be providing VR support already. In fact, the game is rumored to make a grand entrance as a VR-compatible title in 2018, reports the Ecumenical News.
The rumors emanated from the fact that Valve recently collaborated with Taiwanese tech company HTC in developing the HTC Vive or the virtual reality headset.
Since VR gaming has yet to become the mainstream gaming mode, it is possible that “Half-Life 3” will only become a full VR-compatible title by 2018 at the earliest.
However, all these remain as speculations pending the confirmation from Valve Corporation, which has yet to confirm whether “Half-Life 3” is already in development or not at all.
Two years to complete
Critics believe that a 2018 release date for “Half-Life 3” is a very realistic timeline because the creation of a good VR game will take at least two years to complete, notes The News Independent.
There are in fact rumors saying that Valve has already put one-third of its entire workforce on the “Half-Life 3” full VR game now just to be able to meet the intended release date.
While the company has not said anything official about the development of “Half-Life 3,” Alan Yates, a hardware engineer at Valve, recently said on Reddit that he was very fortunate to start at Valve around the time when Michael Abrash had begun the AR/VR research team.
Yates explained that it was a much smaller team compared to what they have now where they make up about a third of the company. He said that the key individuals who solved most of the really hard technological problems and facilitate the generation of consumer headsets are still working on the next generation.
Franchise’s 20th anniversary
Despite the fact that Valve has yet to make any confirmation about the development of the game, there have been ceaseless reports about “Half-Life 3” online, indicative of how popular and widely anticipated it is.
“Half-Life 2” came out to the gaming consoles back in 2004 so it has been 12 long years of wait for gamers of the “Half-Life” franchise.
According to the latest rumors, the game shall come out in 2018 because the year will mark the 20th anniversary of the franchise. The first game in the series “Half-Life” officially came out in 1998.
The same rumors are also saying that Valve may either come up with a full version of “Half-Life 3” or perhaps a next episodic installment of “Half-Life 2.” After “Half-Life 2” was released, Valve also unveiled two more episodic installments in the next three years, the last of which came out in Christmas of 2007.
Valve Corporation CEO Gabe Newell has said in an interview last year that the only reason that they would go back and do like a super classic kind of product is when a whole bunch of people just internally at Valve said that they wanted to do it and had a reasonable explanation why they are pushing for it.
He added that if they want to do another “Half-Life” game and they would ignore everything that they have learned in shipping “Portal 2” and also in bringing along all the updates to the multiplayer side, it would seem like a bad choice.