Let's take a break from all the Half-Life 3 leaks, speculation, and disappointment for a second, because a batch of never-before-seen Alyx concept art was just revealed in a new Russian-language interview with contracted concept artist Vasili Zorin.
As broken down by Valve specialist and reporter Tyler McVicker—best known these days for his exhaustive HLX deep dives—the artwork gives us our best glimpse yet at what the game looked like before hitting the cutting room floor. For context, Alyx underwent major rewrites, delaying the game by roughly six months, with the two-hour intro through City 17 being trimmed down significantly.
The most pivotal change is how Eli gets arrested. In the retail build of Alyx, he's accosted by Combine soldiers in an apartment while we watch from the elevator, while in the original version of the game, he would have been arrested in his manor by Combine soldiers and a shadowy scientist named Hahn.
Hahn still exists in the current build, but she is only seen briefly towards the end as an unnamed scientist talking to Combine advisors, a scene that originally misled players into thinking that Gordon Freeman was the one imprisoned in the...
