This may be hard to believe, but Steam platform holder Valve used to make video games — and good ones, at that. Now, a datamine of the new Steam Deck exclusive Aperture Desk Job has apparently revealed evidence of four new games that are in development at Valve, including a sequel to Half-Life Alyx.
Stop the presses —
As always with this sort of datamined info, these details are entirely unofficial and unconfirmed by Valve, so you should take them with an entire shaker of salt. Valve-focused content creator Tyler McVicker posted many of the details of the leak on his YouTube channel.
According to him, the four games mentioned in the leak include a hybrid first-person shooter strategy game called Citadel, a new take on canceled Portal follow-up F-Stop, a version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that runs in Valve's Source 2 engine, and the aforementioned sequel to VR game Half-Life Alyx.
Though McVicker is currently working on revealing more info on the latter three games, he uploaded a lengthy video where he discusses his sources and what Citadel might look like. As noted by other Valve fans, this isn't the first time that the company has experimented with a shooter/strategy formula. Team Fortress 2 originally included more tactical mechanics (such as a "Commander" class) before Valve decided to stick with the more traditional formula.
While we'd love to get excited about these hypothetical new games, the truth is that Valve has a rich history of leaking information about projects it’s working on, only for those projects to never actually come out in the first place. Back when Half-Life Alyx came out, the studio acknowledged that Alyx was "at least" the sixth attempt at a new Half-Life project since the last game in the series, Episode 2.
So while it might be true that there's a team working on a game called "Citadel" somewhere within the glimmering guts of Valve, that doesn't mean you're going to get to play it any time soon — or at all, really. Still, the company did say around the release of Alyx that it was trying to release more Half-Life games in the near future, so maybe it'll happen.
