Valve just rolled out a major Deadlock update, completely overhauling the map to focus on three lanes rather than four. But that's not the headline. Nestled within the update are strings of code referencing the elusive "HLX", which is strongly believed to be Half-Life 3.
What sets this discovery apart from all the other HLX references over the last few years is that it specifically relates to FSR3, which is AMD's alternative to DLSS, the upscaling technology designed by Nvidia to boost performance. That means a couple of things, a) Half-Life 3 made it through the recent round of playtests reported by Gabe Follower, and b) it appears to be in the optimisation stage.
FSR3 was implemented in the Deadlock update, so it looks likely that "during its implementation," Valve "accidentally included the HLX-specific code."
These references, which is just scratching the surface of what has been found over the last 24 hours, indicate that HLX is in "late stage development", as noted by u/Stannis_Loyalist, who shared their findings on the Half-Life subreddit.
On New Year's Eve, G-Man and Barney Calhoun actor Mike Shapiro posted a cryptic video on Twitter with the hashtags...
