A Valve Developer Just Mentioned HLX in Public. What We Know About Half-Life 3
On October 21, 2026, Valve composer Mike Morasky said “HLX” during a panel at GameSoundCon in Burbank, California. HLX is the internal codename the community has long linked to Half-Life 3. Valve has not announced the game, and there is still no release date, platform list or price.
What was said
The session covered Valve's approach to game audio, including HDR audio, a system that decides which sounds stay prominent in a busy scene and which ones get pushed back. Comparing projects, Morasky said that Deadlock has its own version of HDR and that HLX has its own version. He then stopped mid-thought.
Fellow Valve sound designer David Feise, seated next to him, appeared to whisper “nice work”, and viewers report that he later joked that Morasky had only said HLX once. Outlets transcribe these remarks slightly differently because they come from a recording rather than an official transcript.
It is not the first near-slip. In an earlier interview Morasky referred to “both the Half-Life games” he had worked on before correcting himself. His only official credit in the series is the Half-Life: Alyx soundtrack.
Confirmed vs. rumored
HLX references have appeared in Counter-Strike 2 and Deadlock updates for years. The right-hand column below comes from dataminers; Valve has never commented on those findings.
| Confirmed | Not confirmed |
|---|---|
| A Valve employee named HLX publicly | That HLX is Half-Life 3 |
| HLX strings appear in Source 2 game updates | Development since 2021 by the Alyx team |
| No announcement from Valve | A single-player shooter focused on physics and AI |
| No release date or price | A “very late” development stage |
| No system requirements | Any specific hardware prediction |
What it means for your PC
For now, nothing concrete. There are no system requirements, so any hardware prediction would be guesswork. The closest reference point is Half-Life: Alyx, released on March 23, 2020. Its Steam page lists Windows 10 64-bit, a Core i5-7500 or Ryzen 5 1600, 12 GB of RAM and a GTX 1060 or RX 580 with 6 GB of VRAM, plus a SteamVR headset. A new flagship release will likely ask for more, but the real figures will arrive only with an official store page.
Valve's most recent hardware news was its own compact gaming machine, covered in our story on the Valve Steam Machine mini PC. Any link between that device and HLX remains speculation.
Once Valve publishes official requirements, we will break down which current graphics cards can handle them.
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