"Basically, fast-paced interesting ADHD gameplay. Combination of Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, Orcs Must Die."
That's how notable Valve leaker "Gabe Follower" describes Deadlock, a Valve game that is seemingly in playtesting at the moment, for which a few screenshots have leaked out.
The game has been known as "Neon Prime" and "Citadel" at prior points. It's a "Competitive third-person hero-based shooter," with six-on-six battles across a map with four "lanes." That allows for some of the "Tower defense mechanics" mentioned by Gabe Follower, along with "fast travel using floating rails, similar to Bioshock Infinite." The maps reference a "modern steampunk European city (little bit like Half-Life)," after "bad feedback" about a sci-fi theme pushed the development team toward fantasy.
The writer left valve and posted the plot on his website.
Yeah, but they did Half-Life: Alyx after that and they reshuffled the cliffhanger ending of Episode 2 via the G-Man's cosmic reality altering shenanigans in it
Tbf, it would actually be kind of funny if they also left the new cliffhanger ending sit unresolved for 15 years
Even the hypothetical episode 3 draft it ends on a cliffhanger, I'm not sure Half Life can ever have a non cliffhanger ending if even the main writer, freed of all development concerns, writes a cliffhanger ending.
Kind of, but he later publicly regretted doing so cause he said that for all the previous HL games, the story was built by him and the dev team in tandem, so it was more like an absolute first draft just by him, and he thought it was unfair that he decided to just abandon their previous collaborative way of working to announce himself as the authoritative voice on Half Life.