Valve is reportedly working on an upcoming Half-Life shooter-strategy game, codenamed Citadel, that will be tailored for play on the Steam Deck.
According to reports by Valve News Network content creator Tyler McVicker, Valve is currently working on a project codenamed Citadel. As detailed in a video uploaded to McVicker’s YouTube channel, Citadel will apparently be an FPS/RTS co-op game based on the Half-Life franchise.
According to McVicker, Citadel is will have a style akin to what you might expect if “Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm, an RTS, and Half-Life [were] all having a baby.” While the project is yet to be officially announced by Valve, McVicker says that the game is being designed “with the Steam Deck in mind, due to how the game is supposed to be controlled.”
McVicker goes on to state that originally the game was supposedly intended to include a “VR asymmetric co-operative component” but that it’s very possible the studio might have decided to leave that component of the game behind during development.
While McVicker states that the game is reported to “best showcase what the Steam Deck is capable of,” he also estimates that a potential timeline for the game could be some time “within the next year-and-a-half to two years.” According to an article by PCGamesN, McVicker confirmed that he had received the information shown in the video through datamines of regularly-updated Valve software as well as his own research into Citadel, which he has been carrying out since 2018.
Valve’s last entry into the Half-Life series came with the 2020 release of Half-Life Alyx – a game that successfully allowed players to head back and fully immerse themselves in the Half-Life universe through its VR-based gameplay. Upon release, IGN reviewed Half-Life Alyx awarding it a 10/10 and stating that it had “set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design.”
Despite the endless calls from fans to make Half-Life 3, there is still little hard evidence suggesting that the studio is currently working on the threequel. In fact, last year, a list detailing multiple cancelled projects by Valve revealed that the studio had once been working on a game referred to within the studio as Half-Life 3 before it was dropped sometime in 2014.
McVicker himself says that a small team is still working on an idea for Half-Life 3, but that the bulk of Valve is focused on Steam Deck-related projects right now. For more on the Steam Deck make sure to check out this article detailing why Valve has delayed the console’s launch until early 2022.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.