If you are not familiar with Valve, Gabe Newell, Doug Lombardi, Half-Life and Ricochet, you might feel that we are overreaching in our conclusions here. So, we’ll start by putting some context first.
1 - First of all, it is a fact that Ricochet is Valve’s worst and least successful game ever.
2 - Gabe Newell is a bit of a blabbermouth but Doug Lombardi and the marketing team are prohibiting him under penalty of death by zombies from revealing anything about Half-Life 3.
3 - The Half-Life franchise is the crown treasure of Valve and Half-Life 2 is considered to be the company’s best game ever.
4- Ricochet was bundled with the original Half-Life in 1998.
With all that in mind, you’d sympathize with us when we refuse to accept Newell’s comments about the difficulties facing them while developing Ricochet 2. Specially, when he claims that it is taking too long to develop because "We can't figure out how to make it better."
"It's kind of perfect the way it is," he asserted. "so how could we possibly ever do Ricochet 2?"
Maybe we should’ve added "wink wink" at the end of Gabe’s comments to make his meaning more obvious. What do you think?
If you are still not convinced that Gabe Newell is talking about Half-Life 3, just remember that Ricochet consisted of nothing more than an empty space populated by floating neon-lit platforms that carry the players around while they throw balls at each other.