Summary
- Half-Life 2 Episode Four: Ravenholm was being developed by Arkane before Valve pulled the plug.
- Arkane’s founder says this was because Valve lost interest in the episodic format.
- He adds that Ravenholm could have launched if it had another 6 to 12 months of development time.
You don’t need me to tell you that Half-Life is a series full of missed opportunities and broken dreams. For many, Half-Life 3 will always represent what could have been, but there are plenty of other cancelled projects to pine over, such as Hostile Takeover, an expansion for the first game, and Episode Three for Half-Life 2.
However, we have known for some time that Valve had plans beyond this, with another project, sometimes referred to as Episode Four or simply Ravenholm, also in development. This was being made by Arkane Studios as opposed to Valve, with the French team given free reign on how it approached the title. However, Valve cancelled the project late into development. In 2022, Noclip shared about an hour’s worth of gameplay footage from Half-Life 2: Ravenholm, showing just how far it was into development when Valve pulled the plug.
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Now, as spotted by GamesRadar+, Arkane founder Raphaël Colantonio has shed some more light on Ravenholm. This comes from an interview with Quad Damage Podcast, giving us some more insight into the Half-Life installment that never was.
“It Was Great”: Arkane Founder Shares More Details About Half-Life 2: Ravenholm
“We needed another year – at least six months,” Colantonio explains, highlighting just how close it was to launch. However, he says that Valve just didn’t want to commit to the project anymore: “That was not going to work for Valve in terms of the business model that they wanted to put together.
“Valve had a very clear business plan for those Episodes. You know, they were trying to make the Episode business work, and they could not internally because the costs were too high,” he says. He adds that the game was “great, frankly” and believes that anyone at Valve who played it would agree.
Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. At the very least, the playable build still exists, as we saw in the Noclip video. Colantonio also says that new employees at Arkane would play the unreleased game as something of an initiation ritual, so it lives on in some form.
- Released
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November 16, 2004
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence