This Cancelled Half-Life Game Was Going To Be a Set During Episode 2
A new gaming documentary from YouTube channel NoClip will premiere this upcoming Tuesday and it’s about the history of Bethesda’s Arkane Studios. Along with giving a detailed look at the studio’s entire history, it will also possibly feature footage from a cancelled Half-Life 2 project that was in development back in the mid-2000s.
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— Noclip (@noclipvideo) May 21, 2020
Titled, “Return to Ravenholm”, Arkane’s Half-Life game was supposed to be set “sometime before the end of Episode 2”, according to what former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw told Half-Life fansite Lambda Generation back in 2012. Laidlaw left Valve in 2016.
“We are big fans of Arkane and wanted to come up with a project we could work on together,” Laidlaw reportedly said. “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 continued, “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.”
Now, more than a decade later, fans might be getting a glimpse at the cancelled project.