Valve haven’t made any major announcements recently, and that includes saying anything about “Left 4 Dead 3”, one of the titles their fans have been most eager to see. At this point, it’s likely that the game is a long way off, although there have been rumors that people have seen it in internal design documents from the studio. Valve have a lot on their plate right now, and while it’s not clear what exactly the studio is doing at the moment, other companies have occasionally been taking the opportunity to poke fun at them.
For example, “Dying Light” includes a peculiar reference to the title, hidden in one of its levels, which was recently noticed by players and subsequently started circulating around various gaming news sites. Looking out through a window in a building at one point, players can see a store with a sign on top of it that reads “Left 4 Bread”. It’s not the first time gaming studios have made fun of one another in a light-hearted manner, and in this case it’s particularly fitting as both titles are from the same genre, and even share some gameplay similarities.
Valve haven’t made any public remarks about that, although they rarely do in these cases. At the same time, the company has also not been giving out any new information about “Left 4 Dead 3”, and so far they haven’t even officially confirmed the game’s existence. At one point, the company used a classic level from an earlier “Left 4 Dead” game to showcase the capabilities of their new Source Engine 2, and while many fans saw that as a sign that the studio is about to unveil “Left 4 Dead 3”, that didn’t happen back then.
The game was spotted in an internal bug tracking database used by Valve, but even then the studio refrained from making any comments and admitting that the game is being worked on. From what we know so far, it seems very likely that not only is “Left 4 Dead 3” being developed on the new Source Engine 2, but Valve are also apparently using the game as a test bed for the engine’s new features.
Does that mean we’ll see “Left 4 Dead 3” before the long-awaited “Half-Life 3”, or will Valve prefer to use “Half-Life” as a flagship title for their engine? Both are equally possible, although Valve don’t seem to rely so much on engine licensing for their financial success, so they might not care a lot about which game they’re specifically using to preview the engine. With that in mind, we could very well see “Left 4 Dead 3” spearheading the new tech’s release.