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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.

Project Borealis: Prologue

Official links and where to buy from:

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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M@GOid a day ago
As I was fearing, people are already reporting a lot of performance issues. Nothing surprising really, since multiple professional studios had trouble with UE5. I would be shocked if people working with it in their free time would achieve better optimization.

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
Raaben a day ago
Half Life on Unreal just feels wrong.
Leahi84 a day ago
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.


Last edited by Leahi84 on 12 November 2024 at 3:51 pm UTC
Jarmer a day ago
Quoting: Leahi84I'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?
dubigrasu a day ago
While I'm disappointed with their choice of UE instead of Source, I must say that it does feel and look like Source (pretty much felt like Black Mesa) at least on the medium/low settings that I've used. Identical, no, but one minute in and I forgot is made in UE, sensation enforced by their evident efforts to mimic everything Source, gun-play, movements, physics, hud, sounds and even the menus.
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 a day ago
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Quoting: Jarmer
Quoting: Leahi84I'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
Jarmer a day ago
Quoting: njaguardsheep
Quoting: Jarmer
Quoting: Leahi84I'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)
Xpander about 22 hours ago
Completed it. Super short one this. Physics are pretty close to source engine actually. Gunplay feels a lot more clunky though, not as responsive and gun sounds need some work. Typical Unreal engine stuff also, visuals looking blurry due to TAA i guess and tbh the lighting isn't that great either. Snow looks pretty good though. Performance is complete horror, barely getting ~70 fps with high settings. DLSS with render scale 70, 1440p on a RTX 3080.
D34VA_ about 19 hours ago
Quoting: Leahi84I'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.
Jarmer about 18 hours ago
Quoting: D34VA_
Quoting: Leahi84I'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.



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