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Marc Laidlaw On The Cancelled Half-Life Spin-offs: Return To Ravenholm And “Episode Four”

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Fans have always been curious about the scrapped, the cancelled, and the replaced. That’s why we have “communities within communities”, fan-followings that study and emulate the HL1 and HL2 “betas”, as some choose to call them. But it’s when we get wind of mysterious projects we’d previously never heard of, that we really get excited.

We decided to e-mail Marc Laidlaw himself, to find out what’s the deal behind all these supposed, canned Half-Life spin-offs. And not only is he great at telling stories, he’s also great at… telling us stuff. So he actually did tell us some stuff – regarding the recent info we dug up on Return To Ravenholm, and the controversial possibility of an Episode Four.

Marc Laidlaw On The Cancelled Half-Life Spin-offs: Return To Ravenholm And “Episode Four”

Regarding the Ravenholm project, Marc told us:

Hi, Vic, there was indeed a project called Return to Ravenholm. 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, 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.

We also asked him about Episode Four (since resumes belonging to former Arkane devs that had been leaked in the Eidos network intrusion did mention an Episode Four), and the little that Gabe and co. had spoken about in 2006-2007:

I’m pretty sure that Gabe was referring to Ravenholm. Makes no sense why there would be [an Episode 4].

Well, there you have it. This “Ravenholm” project was real after all. There may have never been an Episode Four at all, and this “Return To Ravenholm” seems to have been all Arkane got to work on. Of course, that didn’t harm Valve and Arkane’s relationship – they would later go on to work on The Crossing, which was inexplicably put on hold due to “financial difficulties” in mid-2009.

Unfortunately, at some point in 2010, Arkane was acquired (read: devoured) by ZeniMax/Bethsoft. Now they’re working on something else with Viktor Antonov – “Dishonored”, built on the Unreal engine and designed by Harvey Smith, which, much like “The Crossing”, takes place in an alternate universe, with a steampunk twist. Unfortunately, but predictably, The Crossing’s trademark “Crossplayer” system (which you can experience in some capacity in Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2) will not be present.

Still, if only Valve was this transparent regarding another Half-Life game all the fans want to hear about…

10 Comments

  1. So much news, I would do anything to see a new Half – Life or The Crossing

  2. Thanks for this information.
    I will make a news about that in Steam-France.

  3. Man, I really really need to update our articles. Too much information! 😛

  4. Ah so it was cancelled for a fairly simple reason. Nice that he responded so openly

  5. I think Valve waiting Viktor Antonov to finish his work on Dishonored and come back to make new concepts for Half-Life 3. I don’t want Half-Life to end soon… I want at least two more Half-Life games, not episodes.

  6. And besides, the idea that there is an episode four is completely ridiculous. Why would a company release something that happens in the future when the next chronological item is missing? That only worked with Star Wars

    • According to Laidlaw, Episode 4 was planned to take place before Episode 2’s ending, not in the future. Also, where does it say they were planning on releasing it before Episode 3? Prequels definitely work outside of Star Wars.

  7. I am afraid that the puzzle isn’t coming together. Valve has left a lot of confusion in the Half-Life community, and I don’t understand why us fans follow it. All this chatter with HL3 and the T-shirt incident is just a conspiracy. There aren’t any true-blue messages that Valve is sending to the community.

  8. This puts something in clear, if VALVe does answer the community about CANCELLED Half Life game, then that most certainly tells us that HL3/EP3 has some kind of activity inside the studio. Based on that, VALVe wouldnt be so hypocrit to tease the community with it instead of clearly saying its over, we are ont making it

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