Valve the company as of this moment is very vocal, and with Half-Life: Alyx now available, it shouldn’t come in as a surprise that the company is taking up interviews left and right. With that said, Valve’s level designer, Dario Casali, in an interview with IGN touches on Half-Life being an IP that pushes “tech-forward” and why the company has stopped episodic releases.

If you want a summary of the following interview between Casali and IGN, you can read a short-list that Twitter user Nibel wrote up:

Valve on why they never made Episode 3

– episodic model didn’t work well for them because they became too ambitious
– they wanted to avoid working on an engine (Source 2) and a game at the same time again
– HL games are meant to push tech forwardhttps://t.co/yK9NYaL4bY pic.twitter.com/mToXI2JSdQ

— Nibel (@Nibellion) March 23, 2020

Firstly, website IGN asked Casali why did Valve turn to episodic releases (like Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2) and why did the company stop. Here’s the dev’s response:

“After working on Half-Life 2 for six years we decided we didn’t want to go dark for so long. That’s why we started doing the episodes where we thought, ‘well, we have the stable technology now. We understand the characters, we understand the story, we have most of the mechanics. Let’s just bite off little chunks and then release more often. We think players are going to prefer that from waiting six years and going through however many delays we went through.’”

Later in the interview, Casali notes that the team at Valve kept trying to implement more and more into each episode, and then episodes started to turn into “sequels.” From here, the company wanted to stop doing these time-consuming “sequels” (and given that Valve can’t count to three) the idea was later abandoned:

“We found ourselves creeping ever forward towards, ‘Well, let’s just keeping putting more and more, and more, and more stuff in this game because we want to make it as good as we can, and then we realized these episodes are turning more into sequels.

I think at that point we realized, ‘Okay, maybe this episodes thing, it was a good concept, but we’re not executing terribly well as far as getting things out quickly enough.”

IGN later highlights Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, and cites him saying that Half-Life games are supposed to “solve interesting problems,” and how Valve isn’t here to “crank Half-Life titles out because it helps make the quarterly numbers.”

Agreeing with Newell’s sentiment is Casali. He notes that Valve won’t release a game if it doesn’t playtest well — even if it will make mad money at launch:

“Our judge and jury is always the playtesting. It never comes from us. It always comes from somebody outside. And they always tell us how we’re doing. And no matter what it is that we’re doing, we get validated by that playtesting process, and we stick to that religiously.”

Lastly, Casali says that Valve did not want to make the same mistake it made in the past by making a new episode (or game) while working on the Source 2 engine since that combination “created a lot of pain the first time” the team tried to do that.

If you want to read the full interview, you can hit up IGN (archive link).