Now, you’re getting this third-hand from me, from a rumor posted in IGN that originated in a French site called Journal du Gamer. Mon Dieu! Therefore, take it with a big grain of salt.

According to our French friends, Half-Life 3 is being aimed for a post-2013 release after a “very chaotic” development with “several revivals”. Supposedly, the game will be an open-world affair with quests, NPCs and all the cool stuff from today’s more-than-FPS games.

Now, my opinion? Frankly, I’m not really buying it. Sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t fit either with what we know from the planned plotline of the sequel to Half-Life 2: Episode Two (going to the Borealis, probably visiting Xen along the way) or, frankly, Half-Life as a whole. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be okay with an open-world Half-Life game – heck, I can even imagine the coastline of Half-Life 2 serving as a Borderlands-esque hub for “kill X antlions” missions and working with Odessa Cubbage or the Shorepoint characters -, but the Half-Life series has been traditionally linear and the proposed plot of the next game seems like an epilogue to the Combine saga more than anything. It just feels like it’ll be more a blockbuster action game set in the Arctic than a big, expansive environment to explore… but I could be wrong.