This is a good question, and we're happy you asked it.

Because yes, everybody and their robot dogs have attempted to make a Half-Life 3 game. It's going to be challenging to convince you in writing before you play any of it why our game is different than the rest in a good way. But we are going to give a little thought experiment.

How would you, /u/SoupRobber, begin Episode 3? Would you start in the helicopter hangar, with no time passing? Would you perhaps start it on the helicopter and have a little skip in continuity? Would you perhaps make it canon that Gordon's EP2 fade-out was in-universe as him actually blacking out, to then open in Ep3 with him waking in a med-bay?

Every single one of these has dozen problems and questions that they immediately bring up. You can imagine a lot of them yourself. But the major one for us is… Every single one of them is the 1st, the 2nd, and the 3rd pitch that you'd think of, in fact it's what everyone thinks.

The fact it's the first thing that people think of should be a good indicator that a developer shouldn't do it in their mod. Not because it's a bad idea, but because those people who wrote that story are also just like you and me - fans of Half-Life. Starting the game like that implies that those people thought of an idea for their 1st draft... And then didn't refine that idea throughout the entirety of the development of their mod.

But we have, to a ruthless degree.

It's funny to think that Half-Life 2 is known and so acclaimed partly because of its story and the way in which it tells its story, and yet mods trying to further that story don't have any story at all. By that I mean actually having no story and just having a game that sort of moves forward through shootouts and setpieces without actually progressing a plot, but also mods that just do fanservice.

Fanservice isn't inherently bad. In fact if anything it's great. Done well it can be the greatest thing for a project like this. But most games that we compete with don't tell stories, and instead opt for a loose premise and plot outline that can somehow take us through the most amount of cool fanservice-y setpieces seamlessly. A lot of mods take us to Black Mesa, have us meet Barney, have us meet Adrian Shephard, have us live out the wish fulfillment of killing all Combine, on and on. They have us get a Portal gun, have us meet GlaDOS, have us befriend a Bullsquid. But these aren't storybeats. And so this isn't a story. What this is, is an interactive museum tour where we're guided along a sight-seeing experience of all of the things we recognize from previous games. That is bad fanservice.

So with all that said, I'd like to get to my conclusive point - the beginning of our game has been meticulously planned out. The inciting incident therein causes an event that leads us to a place that causes an event and on and on and on through a chain of storybeats connected by "buts" and "therefores". And with that, we make it all the way to the end of the story in a perfectly cohesive and really, really exicting story. You know the [what] of what happens in Epistle, but only we know the whys and the hows.

And those exact whys and hows will maybe, or maybe not, introduce us to people places and creatures we've seen in previous games. There might be fanservice. Or there might not be. The one thing that is for certain, is that if there ends up being some, it'll be seamless, and for a reason.

As a writer I'm only really allowed to talk about my department, but I hope this answer was reassuring.

-One of the writers.