A team of enthusiasts from Icebreaker Industries has released the first numbered development diary in five and a half years for Project Borealis, an unofficial version of Half-Life 3 based on the plot of former series screenwriter Marc Laidlaw.
Image Source: Icebreaker Industries
According to the Postulio project manager, despite the complexity caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and the peculiarities of development, the team is making “exciting progress” and meeting new internal goals.
One of these tasks was the release of the Project Borealis demo – Project Borealis: Prologue. Its release on Steam took place yesterday, November 11th. The 10-minute prologue takes place in a transformed Ravenholm before the start of the main game.
Working on Project Borealis: Prologue allowed the team to prepare gameplay features, recreate the main elements of Half-Life 2 in Unreal Engine 5, update the snow deformation system and decide on the features of the visual style.
Postulio added that thanks to the use of Unreal Engine 5 in Project Borealis there will be no loading between parts of levels familiar from the Half-Life games. The team is also working on rope physics, AI logic, and gravity gun behavior.
As part of a four-minute development diary, viewers were shown footage from the prologue and new concept art for Project Borealis. The team is working hard on their vision for Episode Three. There is no release date.
Let us recall that in the framework of the Epistle 3 story published by Laidlaw in 2017, Gordon Freeman and Alix Vance go to Antarctica in search of the research vessel “Borey”, which hides technologies desired by the Alliance.