Valve Reiterates On Left 4 Dead 3 Claims: “We Are Absolutely Not Working On Anything Left 4 Dead-Related”

It is now secret that fans of Valve’s most popular video game franchises are certainly hungry for a new entry: either it being Half-Life, Portal, or for this case Left 4 Dead, fans are patiently waiting for an announcement. Although players who follow the team are aware that the virtual reality spin-off, Half-Life: Alyx launched earlier today, the team still went the extent to revalidate on the matters of prior rumors.

Tracing back to the beginning of 2020 in January, HTC China President Alvin Wang Graylin disclosed what seemed to be a premature confirmation of the long-awaited Left 4 Dead 3 reveal. However, as noise quickly picked up on the information, Valve swooped in to denounce the claim as the team shares that they are “absolutely not working on anything […] related.”

Now with the launch day for the VR prequel arriving, Valve has come back to reiterate on the topic once again and even discuss what the team attempted to pursue with projects on the property previously.

We did briefly explore some Left 4 Dead next-gen opportunities a few years ago, but we are absolutely not working on anything Left 4 Dead-related now, and haven’t for years.

Robin Walker, Valve Developer

Despite the unsettling news for fans hoping that a new installment of sorts was on the horizon, Walker did share the meaning for the property not spawning another entry. At the time that Valve was conjuring a type of build for the Left 4 Dead series, it was later shelved indefinitely due to development of the approaching Source 2 engine. Walker went on to clarify that some things that represented the IP did emerge, but nothing grasped the team’s ambitions to make a project out of it.

“A couple of those were Left 4 Dead-related things, but none of them reached the point where we were like, ‘now this is a product team that we’re going to build a big product around.’ They were more tools for moving Source 2 forward,” Walker ultimately revealed in the conversation. Even more, the ideas of other properties also made its rounds at the drawing board elsewhere during the up and coming for the engine.

Walker admits that Portal was one that could have received a virtual reality game, but ended up falling flat when contradicting fundamental mechanisms for the gameplay. “So we looked at various IPs and, yep, Portal was one of them, [but] we didn’t get very far in that. It was pretty clear when we looked at Portal as a whole… If we can’t do player movement, not as a result of their choice, but by launching them… momentum…standing on things… all that sort of stuff… then a whole swath of Portal’s puzzles… the whole back half of Portal, or more… goes away, and we’d.”

Ending the discussion, Walker clarifies that the use of pre-existing properties were solely intended to help understand the development of Source 2. However, the only exception came to later be the title that released this week for Valve Index.

Source: IGN