Half-Life 2: Episode 3 story synopsis released by ex-Valve employee Marc Laidlaw
Closure.
"Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman. Rise and shine."
Those are the words that started off the saga of Half-Life 2 back in 2004. And as of yet, we still await a resolution on how the story ends -- Episode Two finished with the death of a major character and one of the greatest cliffhangers in the history of gaming, but since then...nothing. That was 10 years ago, and since then it seems as though pretty much everyone who was working on Half-Life at any point is no longer a Valve employee. There is no news of a Half-Life 3, or an Episode Three, and it appears for all intents and purposes that Half-Life is dead.
However, one of those ex-Valve employees is Marc Laidlaw -- Half-Life's main storywriter throughout the franchise's history, who left the company in 2016. And today, he broke the Internet by releasing a synopsis that is presumably the story of Half-Life 2: Episode Three -- or rather, what was supposed to be the story. Only the names have been changed; Gordon Freeman becomes Gertrude Freemont, Alyx becomes Alex, and Episode 3 becomes Epistle 3, presumably to make sure it doesn't fall foul of copyright. The release of Epistle 3 almost immediately smashed Laidlaw's personal site to smithereens, although it is now back up and you can read it there. Alternatively, you can read a Pastebin of the synopsis where the names of the characters have been changed back to their regular ones.
Of course, it is not for me to go ahead and detail the synopsis here -- that is the job of the writer himself, and he does a pretty great job of offering a vision of what Episode Three was going to be. There's plenty of twists and turns, new details about characters...and of course, not everything is wrapped up in a pretty little bow at the end -- there is a definite big sequel hook for what would have presumably been Half-Life 3. A sequel that, like this, will never come. But for those of us who have been waiting on any kind of news for so long, perhaps this synopsis brings some sort of closure to the whole deal -- we can at least read what happened. It may not be what people wanted, but there it is.
But there is one other thing to be said though -- the interest that this little document, one that Marc Laidlaw is happy to present as pure fan fiction, has generated today surely shows that many people are still interested in Half-Life. The series may well be dead, but its fanbase lives on -- and that fanbase is huge, still comparable to all but the most major FPS franchises. It remains to be seen whether, somewhere in a compound in Washington State, anyone is prepared to do anything with this information.
