Arkane-developed Half-life shelved because headcrabs were “played out”
By Alice Lynton on January 13, 2013 at 11:04 am
Did you know that Valve and Arkane once teamed up to produce a Half-Life spin-off? Called Return to Ravenholm, and occasionally, erroneously nicknamed Half-life 2 Episode 4, the project was shelved prior to announce. Valve’s Mike Laidlaw explained the situation to LambdaGeneration:
“We are big fans of Arkane and wanted to come up with a project we could work on together. We threw ideas around, they built some cool stuff, but we eventually decided that it didn’t make sense to pursue it at the time. As I recall, we felt like a lot of the staples of Ravenholm–headcrabs and zombies!–were pretty much played out,” he said.
“And the fact that it would have to take place sometime before the end of Episode 2 (so as not to advance beyond where Valve had pushed the story) was a creative constraint that would hamper the project … and Arkane.”
All that’s left are a few screenshots, available on ValveTime. Although they shots look quite dated now, in the wake of Dishonored reminding us just how talented the team at Arkane is, it’s a little bit heartbreaking to see that which never never came to be.
Source: LambdaGeneration via VG247
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Would have been interesting to see, being a big fan of Arkaine myself (not to mention zombies and thier headcrabs cousins). I’ve never played or seen an Arkaine first person shooter game as opposed to a first person melee. Regardless though I’m glad it wasn’t released as an actual half-life episode.
I liked Ravenholm as a level in HL2, but a whole episode based on it? nah, a bit to zombie apocalypse for a half-life game. A spin-off maybe, but I would expect a lot more coverage of the half-life world if it was released as an episode to the official series. Not to mention a boat load of sci-fi and technical scientist babble.
Mike Laidlaw works at Bioware.
Marc Laidlaw works at Valve.