Valve continues to tease Half Life 3 in VR: 'We're not saying no'

Half Life 3 may yet be coming to Valve and HTC's virtual reality (VR) headset Vive, but everyone is still being very vague about it.

Earlier this week after the Vive was announced at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), HTC chairwoman Cher Wang said her company was "co-operating with Half Life" but later retracted the statement and apologised for the confusion.

Her words had to stem from somewhere however, so Kotaku spoke to Valve programmer Jeep Barnett about whether Half Life is coming to VR. "We're not saying, 'no' but we don't know what the right thing is [yet]," he said.

"Is Half-Life a good fit? Is Left 4 Dead a good fit? Is a new franchise a good fit? I don't know yet. We're really trying to cover the broad spectrum of what we could do, and then we'll start focusing on spearheading that.

"We've said, 'Let's take some existing art and see how it fits,'" Barnett continued. "So yeah, we'll grab some headcrabs, we'll grab the machine guns from Half Life, the rocket launcher - all those different fun things - and see how they play in VR. But right now, it's a tool for exploring the different kind of game designs we want to do.

Later he adds: "Our most precious resource is time, and we don't have enough time for people to do everything. Would we like to make all of our franchises in VR? Absolutely. But we don't have enough time or people. So we have to figure out what's the best fit, what plays to the strengths of VR."

To us that certainly sounds like other Valve properties are in the works for Vive, and one of those properties may well be Portal – which was the basis of a tech demo for Vive and Valve's new 3D engine Source 2 at GDC.

While Valve stressed that the tech demo wasn't Portal 3, it does sound like Portal is the likeliest series to be heading to Vive.

"The modular things, these concepts of containment and giving you rules you have to follow in Portal - all of those things fit the type of demo we wanted to make," said Barnett, who added that the Portal demo would launch with Vive when in November 2015.