Inhale Some Hopium with These Half-Life 3 Leaks & Rumors

Despite all the rumors, Half-Life 3 wasn't announced at the end of 2025, but that doesn't mean it's not coming, at least according to Gabe Follower, one of the most prolific sources of leaks concerning Valve.

In fact, he returned with more information about the game that became a meme sometime in the past couple of decades. In a new video, he talks about HL3, also known as HLX, and what improvements we can expect from it (if it ever comes out), based on leaks and files from other Valve games, including CS2 and Dota 2.

Many fans expected Valve to announce Half-Life 3 in 2025, and Gabe Follower believes the news was delayed, which was the reason the second edition of Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar was postponed: he thinks the book will be out once the game is revealed.

For now, we can get glimpses of HL3 features in the updates to Valve's Source 2 engine. Based on mentions of HLX in the code, Gabe Follower says that the game will offer dynamic physics and gravitational anomalies, where gravity no longer pulls objects in one direction but can be tied to a point, making objects' gravitational pulls affect each other. 

Characters will now have more accurate hitboxes that adjust to their limbs instead of simple boxes.

The creator also mentions realistic weapon ballistics, where bullets actually fly and do not hit the target immediately, physical and thermal smart surface properties for more realistic interactions with fire and electricity, voxel density, object deformation, interactions with characters and facial animations, and a mood system for NPCs.

Moreover, Valve is seemingly preparing volumetric game events, optimized crowds and background characters, a crawl state for NPCs, dynamic physical collisions and ragdolls, NPC damage and destruction system, interactions with liquids and weather conditions, dynamic wind and airflow systems, which interact with grass, foliage, and hair, graphics and dynamic, volumetric fog, ray tracing with supersampling and ray reconstruction.

You can see the code and examples of these features from other games in Gabe Follower's video above.

In conclusion, he says that now seems like that time just before Alyx, so perhaps we'll actually hear about HL3 soon.

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