Valve may be finally getting ready to release a new title to the popular Half-Life franchise after some long 13 years. Although the Half-Life: Alyx sequel is nearly launched, fans keep asking about the third game in the series.
In its latest issue, Edge magazine managed to get a few hints from Valve boss Gabe Newell, but one thing is definitely clear: Alyx is not a one-timer as single-player titles are still a part of the gaming studio’s plans.
“People have seen us sort of step away from immersive single-player experiences for a while,” the CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell stated, “and a lot of that was that we saw more tractable opportunities elsewhere. I mean, a typical gaming company would just keep cranking out sequel after sequel – but the reason people value Valve is that we’re supposed to be the ones picking interesting problems and solving them.”
AI Technology Could Change the Future of Single-Player Games
Newell hints at the OpenAI bots that have qualified to play Dota 2 to such a level that they can win over almost every Dota human player in the world.
“That’s actually a surprisingly narrow challenge for artificial intelligence,” the CEO explains.“Beating humans is easier than entertaining humans. But over the next several years – and if you ask me, my little spreadsheet calculation is it’s about nine years – we’ll have artificial general intelligence that can do anything a smart person can do.”
Newell also said that it would perhaps take about a billion dollars to design “one of these silicon humans, but then they’ll just keep getting cheaper, and it’ll get cheaper really quickly, and eventually reach the point where you have ten or a hundred people living in your computer all the time. Harnessing that will mean single-player games get a lot more interesting,” he concluded.
Overall, according to Newell, the hypothesis is that AI could mean that the single-player titles of the future will develop and evolve in a manner that, at the moment, is only feasible in games with massive player bases, such as MMOs, battle royales, and so on.
