They never even started HL3. They’ve said so themselves in multiple interviews. I’m not even sure where the rumors about it started unless somehow HL2:Ep3 was just called “HL3” by someone once and it caught on, since the episodic DLC was supposed to be a trilogy but they only ever released 1 and 2.
Both the headline and the comment you replied to only mentioned episode 3.
…Which they did do a lot of work on, then abandoned to work on HL3. HL3 was very specifically a thing and a different thing
But the context here is EPISODE 3 which had a fair bit of development.
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Half-Life 3 was in development between 2013 and 2014, but dropped because Source 2 wasn’t ready, according to Geoff Keighley’s The Final Hours Of Half-Life: Alyx. It sounds like it never got further than an early gameplay concept, but saying that it was never even started is incorrect.
web.archive.org/…/half-life-3-left-4-dead-3-detai…