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There are rumblings in the world of Gordon Freeman. No, it's not the sudden release of Half-Life 3, but instead another leak of apparent code from a version of Half-Life 2: Episode 3, revealing details of what Valve was experimenting in the latent follow-up.
The Valve-dedicated social media account GabeFollower posted the findings. They posted a screenshot of the source code for Episode 3, showing a couple of insights into the game's development.
The big takeaways this go round lie in the weapons, where you can find evidence of offensive items the Blobulator and the Weaponizer. The former was actually demonstrated by Valve back when the company actually did showcases and promoted upcoming games, around 2007 and 2008, where it was teased as part of Episode 3.
It's essentially a giant blob of mercury that you could use to attack or trap enemies. It could be separated up into different shapes and molded to suit various needs, and all pieces would revert back together like the T-1000. One drawback is that it's somewhat sentient, and would attack you in the wrong circumstance, so you had to be careful.
Of course, Episode 3 never came out, and the studio went through a number of different versions of the next installment of Half-Life between then and now. The tech behind the Blobulator eventually found its way into Portal 2, for the Mobility Gels.
The Weaponizer is far more mysterious. We still don't really know what its purpose would've been, and Valve isn't exactly forthcoming. The date range on the code places it around 2008, making it the first version of Episode 3, eventually thrown away by Gabe Newell and company for another iteration.
More source code provides ammunition for modders to build a Half-Life 3 of their own that perhaps resembles what Valve was hoping to achieve. Absent something more substantial from the mysterious halls of the Steam creators, that remains our best bet for another chapter in the story.
