We may never get Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (basically Half-Life 3), but at least we have the first taster of Project Borealis out now with Project Borealis: Prologue. You know how these prologues work, it's a glorified demo with a fancy name.
Powered by Unreal Engine 5 this game is "inspired by the epic cliffhanger from Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Project Borealis represents a fan-made effort to realize a cohesive story conclusion to the episodic series. This prologue chapter invites players back into the HEV suit of Gordon Freeman, offering a glimpse into the next chapter of his journey".
There's no Linux version, so you'll need Proton to try it out. Although, you will need to swap it to Proton Experimental, as the current main Proton 9.0-3 results in this error:
It loads up fine with Proton Experimental. See more in my Proton beginner's guide if you're confused.
The developer said they are already planning plenty of updates to fix up various bugs and performance issues. If you can't even launch it, you might be able to with the "-vulkan" launch command on the game (right click -> properties) but the developers noted it's not directly supported on that mode.
Performance on my system showed it to not be especially great, but playable enough when changing a few settings down. But even on Medium overall settings it struggled to stay at 60FPS with my Ryzen 5800x / Radeon 6800 XT.
Don't expect something big (yet) from it, the demo is incredibly short. I managed to finish it including the credits rolling in only about 15 minutes. Incredibly exciting though, they've clearly put a huge amount of effort into this and it really does look and feel the part.
Although we might not be getting Half-Life 3 exactly, Valve do appear to be working on something Half-Life related as we saw from a previous leak.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
But beggars can't be choosers, so I welcome any attempt to bring closure to the number 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT3v5dd0SFU
Last edited by Leahi84 on 12 November 2024 at 3:51 pm UTC
I'm surprised Valve allowed this. I can't think of a single time a company has allowed their property to be used on an engine that wasn't theirs. This seems so wrong to not be on Source. Won't be playing it. This will never be as polished as a proper Valve release of conclusion anyway, so I'll stick with that "fan fiction" the original writer released years ago as my conclusion.
do you happen to have a handy link to that fanfic?
Curious about future developments in terms of story, which from what I remember is inspired by Marc Laidlaw's Epistle Three. I understand that there are some controversies around it (even the author regretted writing it), but I believe it still has value for Half Life universe.
njaguardsheep Nov 12
I'm surprised Valve allowed this. I can't think of a single time a company has allowed their property to be used on an engine that wasn't theirs. This seems so wrong to not be on Source. Won't be playing it. This will never be as polished as a proper Valve release of conclusion anyway, so I'll stick with that "fan fiction" the original writer released years ago as my conclusion.
do you happen to have a handy link to that fanfic?
https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Epistle_3
I'm surprised Valve allowed this. I can't think of a single time a company has allowed their property to be used on an engine that wasn't theirs. This seems so wrong to not be on Source. Won't be playing it. This will never be as polished as a proper Valve release of conclusion anyway, so I'll stick with that "fan fiction" the original writer released years ago as my conclusion.
do you happen to have a handy link to that fanfic?
https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Epistle_3
Nice, thank you!!! I'm going to send this to my kobo and read it later tonight :) (also have to even remember what happened at the end of ep2 omg I was a kid back then)
I'm surprised Valve allowed this. I can't think of a single time a company has allowed their property to be used on an engine that wasn't theirs. This seems so wrong to not be on Source. Won't be playing it. This will never be as polished as a proper Valve release of conclusion anyway, so I'll stick with that "fan fiction" the original writer released years ago as my conclusion.Sure, it's not canon, but it's a cool "what if?". Besides, the real HL3 is on its way, so we have nothing to complain about.
I'm surprised Valve allowed this. I can't think of a single time a company has allowed their property to be used on an engine that wasn't theirs. This seems so wrong to not be on Source. Won't be playing it. This will never be as polished as a proper Valve release of conclusion anyway, so I'll stick with that "fan fiction" the original writer released years ago as my conclusion.Sure, it's not canon, but it's a cool "what if?". Besides, the real HL3 is on its way, so we have nothing to complain about.
Woodlandor Nov 14
I’m waiting for the developers working on this to take their sun glasses and fake moustache off and say “Muwahaha it was me, Gabe, all along!”
HLX is the working title of Half-Life 3. It is being developed in Source 2, and is updated frequently. Project Borealis is based on a scrapped version of a Half-Life 2: Episode 3 script called "Epistle Three".
Both are bound to be fantastic games, for sure.
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