Some trolls pulled a fast one or a big joke on the attendees of the Gamescom 2016 held on August 17 to 21 at Cologne, Germany by putting up a huge supposedly “Half-Life 3” advertisement banner outside of the event venue.
The eye-catching “Half-Life 3” poster was displayed alongside banners for very real video games including “Dishonored 2,” “Watch Dogs 2,” “Sniper,” and “Ghost Warrior 3” outside of the Koln Messe convention center.
However, upon closer look, the poster turned out to be not of “Half-Life 3” but paid for only by three editors who previously played “Half-Life,” the original game.
The poster does not actually read “Half-Life 3” but “Half-Life: 3” and under in smaller German text “Editors Who Played It Back Then.” The 3 in the poster refers to the number of editors and not the latest installment of the highly-anticipated video game, details Polygon.
It turns out that the poster has also been paid for by a media company with a naughty sense of humor, which some critics describe as some kind of world-class trolling, the new term for misdirect or false advertising.
The logos at the bottom of the poster indicate that the poster was paid for by Spieletipps and Giga Games.
The “Half-Life: 3” poster reminds fans of an old NeoGAF joke thread titled “Half-Life, 3 screenshots” which was simply a thread with three screens from the original “Half-Life” game and nothing to do with “Half-Life 3” yet again.
While some gamers claim that they were upset by the misleading advertisement, the open-minded ones simply took it for what it was – a joke. More importantly, because of the reactions that it generated online, it only showed how widely anticipated a game “Half-Life 3” is.
Coming out in 2018
It seems that the rumors are getting louder and louder that “Half-Life 3” is going to come out of the gaming consoles in 2018 to mark the franchise’s 20th anniversary, reports Movie News Guide.
The first game of the franchise, the original “Half-Life” survival first-person shooter video game came out in 1998. The second game, “Half-Life 2” came out in 2004. So a third installment is very much long overdue.
This assumption is giving fans of “Half-Life 3” the hope that Valve is indeed busy with the development of the game at the moment and the developer simply wanted to keep everything under wraps until it is ready to finally unveil the game.
Many gamers and critics, however, believe that Valve Corporation has already let a number of major gaming events slipped by without announcing “Half-Life 3,” and that every passing day that the game is not released, it either turns gamer away or lessen their excitement on it.
But some others believe that “Half-Life 3” will always draw excitement in whatever event it intends to make an announcement.
Bigger team working on the development of the game
The latest almost official information that came from Valve’s end emanated from Alan Yates, the company’s hardware engineer.
In a recent post on Reddit, he said that he was quite fortunate to start working at Valve right around the time when Michael Abrash had begun the AR/VR research team.
He said that the group was a much smaller team than it is now and the team has since grown to encompass about a third of the company.
Yates said that the key individuals that solved most of the really difficult technological problems and facilitated the development of the next-generation consumer headsets are still working on the device.
The post of the hardware engineer pretty much confirmed that “Half-Life 3” shall come out of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One by 2018 already exuding VR technology. Unless Sony and Microsoft unveil their respective PlayStation 5 and Xbox Two before “Half-Life 3” officially comes out.