Valve Applies for Half-Life 3 Trademark
Valve has applied for the Half-Life 3 trademark.
Just days after revealing its Steam Machines initiative, Valve Software has reportedly filed for the registration of the Half-Life 3 trademark in the European Union. The application was registered on September 29, and is currently under evaluation.
The company already launched a Half-Life 3 group on its bug tracking website some time ago, seemingly confirming that the game is in development, but a second newly-created group named Half-Life 3 Core just recently appeared. The site is now offline, but revealed that 46 developers are involved with the project's debug process. Does this mean the next engine could be named "Core" instead of Source 2? Probably not.
Last week a supposed Valve Software employee claimed that the company would reveal Source 2 last Friday. That didn't happen of course, as Valve introduced the new Steam controller with dual touchpads and a touch screen. Now there's speculation that Half-Life 3 may be announced this month on October 10, the six-year anniversary of the Orange Box and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Yes, it's been that long.
Back in June, evidence of Half-Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3 and Source 2 surfaced in mailing lists found within the JIRA project management and bug tracking software. At the time, a group of 42 employees were on a single Half-Life 3 list, a significant number given around 300 individuals are employed by the studio. Three project folders were dedicated to Left 4 Dead 3, and the Source 2 engine had 14 different working groups.
Back in August, John Patrick Lowrie, the actor who has worked on Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and DOTA 2, claimed on his blog that Valve wasn't even working on Half-Life 3. He said one of the reasons is due to Valve wanting to perfect motion-capture technology. He explained that Half-Life 2 didn't use motion-capture, so the team was able to create non-player characters that look directly at the gamer no matter where they go and stand. Currently you can't get that kind of one-on-one interaction using motion-capture in games.
"With mo-cap you can’t do that, at least not yet," he said. "Once you film the actor doing something and capture that motion, that’s what the character is going to do. This works great in movies, but when you make something interactive it gets way less interactive with mo-cap. So that’s one of the things they’re working on. Still nothing definitive, but I hope this helps you understand at least one of the reasons why they haven’t brought out HL3 yet."
A year ago there was talk that Half-Life 3 would have open-world and RPG elements. The team has reportedly been so inspired by Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series that they want "quest"-giving NPCs. This will likely be similar to Rage, staying true to its FPS roots while dishing out missions in a vast environment.

Wow that's a big library. Or do you mean Valve?
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/10/02/cautious-hooray-half-life-3-being-actively-developed/
You insinuate that I'm just one of those young CoD whipper snappers who doesn't know a good FPS from a hole in the ground, but the irony of this is that, between some of your claims as to what Half-Life did and your jump to throw insults at me, even if you hadn't dated yourself I'd have guessed you were quite a bit younger than me and hadn't been gaming nearly as long. I'm guessing you don't realize that Duke 3D had a far more flexible engine than Half-Life did years before, and the things which the 3DRealms fanatics did with it easily rivaled what was done with the Half-Life engine for destructibility and scope? And did you realize that Quake had an active modding community well before Half-Life was released - and yet you attribute Half-Life with having "sparked the idea that games could be customized and lead to mods and other." Just sentimental nonsense giving it kudos which it simply doesn't deserve. And I'm guessing you also didn't know that Team Fortress was a Quake mod before Half-Life was even released, yet you listed this as one of Half-Life's big accomplishments?
This is the OoT effect. I'm guessing you're familiar with Legends of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time? THAT is the game most widely considered to be the "greatest game of all time" I'm sorry to say. Don't agree with it, perhaps? Pity for you - since you've already cited some sort of consensus to say that "Half Life 2 was and still is considered one of the greatest games of all time" and more people consider OoT to be the best. The thing is, when you get these popular games that were the big things when someone was a little kid, they are almost always looked at through rose coloured glasses and all of the sudden they're leaping tall buildings with a single bound when, in truth, they were really good games. OoT is *constantly* dubbed as the first big open world game when EQ came out on the PC before it and had larger open worlds. What's more, it is constantly credited with being the first game to include the "revolutionary" z-targeting when a host of wrestling games were doing precisely that two or three years before its release. People who loved it as a kid gloss over its flaws and load it up with accomplishments that it did not actually achieve, and then it is forever "the best game ever made" and blah blah blah.
I remember when I was first told about Half-Life, my nephew, who largely a Super Nes gamer was ranting on and on about it, telling me about how it was the very first game to do this and that and the other thing, so I tried it... And all the while I was playing it I was thinking "Uh, Duke 3D did this better two years ago." The game itself was awesome, as was the second, and I'll be getting the third very shortly after its released... But these games are the definition of overhyped, and your post is a stunning example for that overhype, heaping praise on the games for things other games did better years before.
Granted, I think Half-Life brought far more to the table than CoD does now, but go figure, it was busy being credited with things other games had done first and arguably better by people who didn't have a clue. Kind of reminds you of how a lot of kids are about CoD these days, eh?