Episode 3 is supposed to feature ice weapons from a “Silver Surfer-like mode,” and Valve just released the footage

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Half-Life 2’s third DLC episode was never completed because Gabe Newell and company didn’t just want to finish Half-Life 2’s story, but to do something big and innovative with the game’s design, and Newell put it into a new documentary, he was “killed”.

But also this documentary, released for the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, has footage of some pretty cool stuff in Episode 3, including an ice gun that can be used to create transparent barriers, and “kind of like the Silver Surfer.” mode, which lets you run down ice ramps as you build them. Details about the presence of an ice cannon have been known before, but as far as I know, this footage is the first to see the light of day.

There were also some neat enemies that used Portal 2’s gel technology and could absorb headcrabs, split apart, and pass through gratings with their amorphous bodies — if you want to see them, the segment of the documentary covering Episode 3 starts at about the hour and 53 minute mark. You can watch it in the player above or on YouTube here.

I guess I shouldn’t be Valve dev material, because if they released Episode 3 with ice weapons and drops in 2010, I’d probably be fine. Sure, it wouldn’t blow my mind the way Half-Life 2’s Striders and Gravity Gun did back in 2004, but you know: ice gun, blobs, and the rest of the story. I would be into it! That wasn’t enough for them, Newell said in the documentary.

“You can’t be lazy and say, ‘Oh, we’re moving the story forward,'” he said. “This does not meet your obligations to gamers. Yes, of course they like the story. They like many, many aspects of her. But to say you’re doing it because people want to know what’s going to happen next, you know, we could have shipped it, it wouldn’t have been that hard, my personal failure was confused, I couldn’t figure out why do Episode 3.

However, not everyone at Valve agrees: “We could definitely go back and spend two years making Episode 3,” said engineer David Speirer.

But hey, who said the window is over? Half-Life 2 got it right get a big update for its 20th anniversary: Along with the documentary, Valve added in-game commentary and made a bunch of fixes. It now also includes Episodes 1 and 2 and is free for a limited time. Maybe this big idea will come to Gabe one of these days.