Lately I’ve been feeling a little disillusioned with the video game industry as a whole - between share buttons and always-online and crackdowns on used games and the rise of microtransactions and the myriad other issues plaguing the industry, it’s easy to feel like the medium is a dying one. Currently, the corporation that I easily have the greatest amount of trust and respect for is Valve - and any fan of that particular company will often find their thoughts turning towards the mysterious Half Life 3 and the fate of Valve’s flagship franchise, particularly when that mirage of a game seems a hundred times as quality as most titles put out in these days of overpriced triple-A games and moneymaking schemes by distributors. Since the disastrous Xbone announcement, I’ve spent a great deal of time pondering what the game’s fate might be.
Long story short: I believe I’ve come up with a plausible theory as to why Half Life 3 is taking so long, why Valve has been so quiet on the matter, how long the game has actually been in development, and - most importantly - when it will be released.
It’s actually surprisingly obvious why HL3 is taking so long when you think about it - so obvious that I’m hesitant to even say this because I’m wondering if I’ll just be preaching to the choir. We know from the storyline in the two episodes that Episode 3 would have focused on traveling to the Arctic in search of Dr. Mossman, and ultimately on trying to find and destroy the Borealis (and the mysterious technology contained therein) before the Combine beat them to it and used it to reopen a portal to their home world. And we can infer from the few scant pieces of concept art that have leaked or been released that a great deal of the gameplay would involve trekking across the Arctic.
The thing is, that sort of gameplay would be completely unlike anything seen in the HL series before - up until Episode 2, one of the franchise’s few flaws was the linear and almost hallway-like level design; a very twisty and cleverly-disguised hallway that was fun to play through and very well put-together, but a hallway nonetheless. There were no expansive environments and big open-world areas until Ep2, which was specifically designed for the purpose of showing those environments off (and which still had a great deal of linearity in its level design). With its long flat stretches of snow and sea, the Arctic is a very different sort of environment than a big forest, and one of the challenges of designing a game that takes place there would be simply filling it up with enough stuff for the player to do; especially considering that a great deal of the Half Life franchise’s classic enemies and puzzles wouldn’t fit in with the frozen terrain. For example, headcrab zombies - Valve likes to use them as filler enemies because they’re slow, relatively easy to take out, and only a real threat in groups; but because of their design and how they’re created they’re also one of the more unsettling enemies in the game. A zombie and a headcrab or two can be found in almost any area of the current games, and it makes sense, because 90% of the settings in Half Life thus far have been old, decaying, once-lively human structures and settlements. But would those hairless little buglike fellows be capable of surviving in subarctic temperatures? Even if they were, considering that the Arctic is one of the least populated areas of the planet now, how many hosts would they possibly be able to find up there when the human population has been decimated by alien overlords? Likewise, antlions would have a hell of a time in freezing weather, seeing as how they’re basically giant bugs; and barnacles have to leave their mouths gaping open in order to catch prey, which would freeze their innards in minutes. As for Combine foes, you’d likely come across quite a few of them at some parts of the game, but since the entire goal would be to reach the Borealis before they do it stands to reason there would be large sections of game where you wouldn’t see any of them. And there’s even a few problems with them - we know that Hunters can operate in Arctic conditions, but would Striders be able to balance on the ice? Would there be any turrets or mines if you’re traveling through frozen wilderness? Could a gunship navigate a blizzard, especially considering that it’s partially alive?
And the necessary changes to gameplay don’t stop at cutting out a huge percentage of possible enemies, either - in the Arctic wilderness, it makes no sense for there to be crates of health and ammo scattered about the world for your perusal, when you’re likely to be traveling areas that haven’t seem human contact in decades (if ever). So any weapons besides the crowbar and gravity gun become useless - a scenario not exactly unheard of in the games, but one that would be difficult to imagine Valve forcing on the player for the entirety of the game. And the lack of plausible health replenishment is an even bigger problem. Add to that the fact that the level design would have to be completely reworked to account for a flat, treeless, frozen environment and that there would be few man-made structures and materials to design puzzles with; and you essentially have a game in which almost nothing from the previous installments could be reused and everything has to be programmed anew from the ground up - new enemies, new level design, new puzzles, new weapons, new ways of refilling your health and ammo, new character designs and models for the humans.
But Ep3, like its sister episodes, would likely have only been a few hours long - nowhere near the length of a full-fledged game. So why put all that work into programming new everything for a game that short, only to have to do it all over again when you were done? I believe the Valve-made Half Life title that was supposed to come after the planned episodes were done was always supposed to be made in a new, updated engine; whether Valve was going to continue the episodic model or make another full-sized title, the Source engine was definitely starting to show some signs of age by 2007. Don’t get me wrong - it’s a good engine, and Portal 2 (the most recent proper Source game I’ve played) is great. But part of that is because it was made by some incredibly talented animators and programmers who pushed their relatively outdated engine to its limits and used more of its potential than other games with more recent engines do. And in fact, we know Valve is working on a new engine - Gabe Newell said as much when some folks from /v/ visited him for his birthday last fall.
Fan: Is Valve potentially already working on a new engine? Source 2? Could or… could not be?
Gabe Newell: We’ve been working on Valve’s new engine stuff for a while, we’re probably just waiting for a game to roll it out with.
Fan: Is it going to be more than just an extension to Source? Is it an entirely new engine?
Gabe Newell: Yeah!
Valve is a company determined to put out content that’s as high-quality as it can be, and Source isn’t the best of the best anymore… but when HL2 came out, it was. One of the things that made HL2 so fantastic is that it took almost everything that made its predecessor great - the gameplay, the physics, the graphics, the interesting mob design, the engaging story - and did them better, to the point where the game was lightyears ahead of others released at that time. If Valve wants to repeat that success and that improvement with the next full-sized Half Life title, they need to build a new engine, and that takes time.
So in that case, if you’re facing the prospect of building a brand-new gameplay experience from scratch in one engine (a gameplay experience unlike anything else that you’ve ever done) for a game only three hours long, and then doing it all over again in a new engine for the next, why not just scrap the snack-sized episode and work what you were planning to do with it into your next full game? HL2 improved on a lot of things its predecessor did, but it was also a very different game. Where Half Life took place in a single (albeit massive) underground research facility, HL2 took place over miles of territory and had levels in a city, a village overrun by zombies, a former prison, a beach highway, etc; Half Life was all about the rush to escape from overwhelming chaos and HL2 was about fighting against powerful totalitarian alien overlords; Half Life had little characterization or story to speak of and HL2 was a much more plot-heavy game. They share more similarities than disparities, but playing Half Life is a different sort of experience than playing its successor, not in the least because of the integration of new gameplay experiences like driving and the Gravity Gun. And it’s likely that Valve would want HL3 to be just as interesting and engaging and distinct as its predecessors. Therefore, when faced with an episode that would require a monumental amount of rethinking and reprogramming, I am convinced they found it only logical to scrap the smaller game and move on to developing a new engine for Half Life 3 so that they could use that necessary rethinking to make the game unique.
I can make a pretty good guess as to when that changeover happened, too - and therefore, how long Half Life 3’s development time has really been. To explain this, I’ll need to go over a brief account of the history of Ep3 and its march towards delay; most of my information has been taken from this wiki page and the sources it gives. I’m only pointing out the facts I feel are important, not everything there, so feel free to scan the page itself as well.
In May 2006, Episode 3 was announced for a release date of Christmas 2007. All signs pointed to the game being released on time and few people suspected anything - in fact, at one point that month an Episode Four was hinted at. Episode One came out a month later, in June. Throughout the remainder of 2006 and all of 2007, Ep3 was brought up in multiple interviews and press releases with no indication that the project was barreling towards what would become one of the most notorious delays in video game history. Episode 2 came out in October - unlike Ep1, it featured no trailer for the next game at the end; a Valve employee explained in a November interview that a trailer was omitted so the mood of Ep2’s downer ending wouldn’t be ruined, and (most importantly) to avoid showing a trailer that wouldn’t match up to the final product, as they were trying to do “something pretty ambitious” with Ep3 and things were susceptible to change. As far as I can tell, this was the first indication since its announcement that Ep3’s development wasn’t progressing smoothly.
Later in November, the first piece of Ep3 concept art was released - this image of Advisors near the Borealis.
Christmas 2007 came and went with no sign of Ep3.
In April of 2008, a few fans discovered three files in a folder called “Episode 3” in the Source SDK package. The files were for a heavily armored Combine soldier not seen in earlier games (npc_combine_armored), a new kind of scanner that shot bolts at the player (npc_weaponscanner), and code for some new kind of weapon (weapon_proto1), though we don’t know what sort of weapon it was or what it did. These files are important because they prove that Valve was trying to develop new enemies and weapons for Ep3, which supports my theory that they were attempting to rework the gameplay model to adapt to an Arctic setting. Additionally important is that a Valve employee stated the files were “leftovers” from old material - this indicates that Ep3 had undergone some cuts at this point and that the project was likely already different from what Valve originally envisioned. The files were later quietly removed from Source SDK and are no longer accessible.
July 2008 saw the release of two additional pieces of concept art, each bearing a great deal of similarity to the first, although they feature the Advisors and the Borealis in much greater detail. One of them also features a silhouetted Gordon Freeman, who appears to still have his HEV suit and crowbar handy.
And it’s here, sometime between April and July of 2008, that I believe the decision to scrap Ep3 once and for all was made.
As most Half Life fans are aware, last year over thirty pieces of confirmed HL3/Ep3 concept art was leaked onto the internet through the website ValveTime. The vast majority of it consists of outfit studies, depicting cold-weather fashion for Alyx Vance and a few unrecognizable male characters (at least two may be Kleiner, but the man featured in most of the art is an unfamiliar character), but some of the art gave some important hints as to the possible plot of the game. Three pieces of art depicted different versions of a crashed helicopter in front of a crumbling tower in a snowy wasteland, significant because you and Alyx prepare to board an Arctic-bound helicopter at the end of Ep2…
…one piece of art features a parka-clad man who is presumably Gordon Freeman traversing an area that bears a remarkable resemblance to Xen, from the first game…
…a single image depicts a figure in a strange suit of armor not unlike the tech used by the Combine…
…and strikingly, a great deal of the art features unusual creatures who consist of glowing light orbs for heads and curling clothlike tendrils for bodies (creatures that I believe to be the full-grown forms of the larval or pupal Advisors, though I have nothing to prove this with beyond my own gut feeling and some slight design similarities between the two.)
But how does this art, leaked in the summer of 2012, indicate when Valve decided to scrap Ep3 and merge it into a full-sized game? Simple - the art was drawn in “mid-2008”, presumably sometime in the summer.
As I stated above, I think that Valve realized the scope of the project they were aiming for was far too vast an undertaking for a single brief episode. This art depicts a vision of a game with an impressive range - one that takes you from being stranded in a frozen desert to the eerie and unnatural geography of the Borderworld, and one in which you come face-to-face with a highly unusual creature that almost seems to be made of energy. It’s difficult to imagine a game in which all of that happens seamlessly in only four or five levels. Additionally, the concept art stage is one of the earliest in the design process, and the fact that they were working on concepts in summer 2008 - roughly half a year after the game was supposed to be released - makes it fairly obvious that the project was scrapped and restarted at least once. My evidence to support this is admittedly mostly conjecture, but I believe this is the first publicized concept art of Half Life 3, not Episode 3.
Another important leak - one that occurred just days ago - also leads me to believe that mid 2008 was when Episode 3 was cancelled and Half Life 3 began development. Last Monday (June 3 2013), ValveTime uploaded eight model renders of objects from the cancelled Return to Ravenholm, a game developed by Arkane Studios for Valve sometime between 2006 and 2008 that was also referred to interchangeably as Episode 4. Ep4 was first mentioned in an article in May 2006, so we know roughly when it started development, but until this most recent leak we didn’t have a very good idea of when it was cancelled - all we had of the game were these early screenshots leaked six months ago and some possibly relevant animations included in an Arkane employee’s video portfolio, one of which includes a headcrab (though the animations may not have anything to do with the game and could just be something the employee made on their own time). Most people agreed that the evidence pointed to sometime in 2007 and went on with their lives. However, these new model render leaks in fact suggest the game was still being worked on in 2008, as that’s the date on the copyright data, and the high-texture models suggest a game that got much further along than a few alpha screenshots. But why is this important?
Because the leaked resume of another former Arkane employee includes Return to Ravenholm, with the reason for the game’s cancellation being that “Valve decided to put their episodic efforts on hold”. Now that the project’s existence is no longer a secret, other reasons have been put forth - last year, a Valve fansite emailed Marc Laidlaw (a writer for the Half Life series) and asked him about Return to Ravenholm. This is how he responded:
Hi, Vic, there was indeed a project called Return to Ravenholm. We are big fans of Arkane and wanted to come up with a project we could work on together. We threw ideas around, they built some cool stuff, but we eventually decided that it didn’t make sense to pursue it at the time. As I recall, we felt like a lot of the staples of Ravenholm – headcrabs and zombies! – were pretty much played out, and the fact that it would have to take place sometime before the end of Episode 2 (so as not to advance beyond where Valve had pushed the story) was a creative constraint that would hamper the project…and Arkane.
So on the one hand, the project was cancelled because Valve felt it wouldn’t go anywhere. On the other, it was cancelled because they felt the episode model wasn’t working. And of course, it’s entirely possible that both of these reasons apply - and that one of the several reasons Return to Ravenholm was cancelled is because Valve decided to scrap the episodes and move on to a full-sized Half Life 3 sometime in early to mid 2008, which is around when we now know they pulled the plug on Ep4. How can you release an Episode 4 when Episode 3 will never be made?
A few months later, in October 2008, Doug Lombardi (Valve’s marketing director) publicly stated that news about Ep3 would possibly be announced towards the end of the year. That announcement was never made, but I think that it was going to be about the fate of Ep3. Valve was planning to announce that it had been canned and that they would now be focusing on a full-sized Half Life 3, but for whatever reason, they didn’t go through with Lombardi’s hint and decided to keep quiet.
This means that Half Life 3 has been in development since the summer of 2008, which would put its current development time at roughly just around five years.
Five years is the length of time it took to make Half Life 2.
At this point in the timeline, the available information begins to dry up, since 2009 marked the point at which the fans began to realize the game wasn’t coming out anytime soon and that they were in for a long and indefinite wait, with no word from the developers - and also because I believe that by this point Valve was beginning to get deep into development of Half Life 3 and were no longer concerned with reassuring fans it was coming, since it was years away. It’s hinted at a few times over the next few months that Valve is still working on a Half Life game, but nothing definite pops up - the most significant of these hints is in March 2010, when Gabe Newell makes his now-famous quote about returning the Half Life franchise to being more of a psychological horror game and remarks that he wants to exploit fan fears of “the death of their children” and “the fading of their own abilities”.
Throughout 2010 and 2011, files that appear to have been programmed for a Half Life game are found in new SDK content from Alien Swarm and Portal 2. Some of them, like the NPC “Combine Advisor - Roaming”, are explicitly Half Life and are quickly removed once they come to light, indicating that they’re still planned to be used in the final product or could hint at the current status of the game. Others, like the hint nodes “Ep3 Brain Cover Position” and “Ep3 Brain Regenerate Position”, are (to the best of my knowledge) left in the SDK, which could mean they’re merely leftovers and have little relevance to the game in production right now. The most important of these overlooked files comes from the Dota 2 game client, leaked by a Vietnamese beta tester in September 2011 - hidden among the many things leaked is a folder titled “ep3” that contains what appears to be code for new weapons: “weapon_icegun”, “weaponizer_concrete”, “weaponizer_liquid”, “weaponizer_metal”, and “weapon_flamethrower”.
If I were going to design new kinds of weapons to be used in Arctic terrain, an ice gun would be one of my first ideas - perhaps it would fire icicles that could be collected around the universe in the same way the crossbow from the current Half Life titles fires bolts, or it would have a space that needed to be filled with snow or water so it could convert that raw material into a thousand shards of ice that spray at foes in a deadly mist. Another possible idea would be a weaponizer of some sort - something you could use to take materials from the world around you to use as weapons or ammo, in what could be seen as a more refined and technical variation on picking things up with the Gravity Gun and throwing them at enemies. Concrete and metal would be very common in Arctic settlements and the latter could be taken from the guns and armor of dead foes; liquid would surround you at almost all times. And yet another possible weapon idea would be a flamethrower - it could be used to quickly melt ice and snow in order to solve puzzles, it would easily take out any local enemies with thick fur and large amounts of fat or enemies that are somehow derived from actual ice, and it would run on kerosene and/or gasoline, which is sure to be found in great abundance among camps and outposts in the Arctic - though it would need to be used sparingly when traversing unsettled terrain.
What’s important about these files is that they strongly suggest Valve was at one point attempting to design a variety of brand new weapons for the next Half Life game, which would correlate with my theory about Ep3’s design process and help confirm what a massive undertaking developing this game was… however, it’s also important to note that a few days after the files were leaked, a Valve employee (Chet Faliszek) had this to say about them: “Anything people get out of that rumour, they shouldn’t take it as meaning anything. I mean, I guarantee that if you went into the original Half Life source code now, you’d probably find mention of unrelated stuff labelled ‘HL3′ there already. It’s just the way it happens.” Fair enough, but since Faliszek didn’t actually say that the weapons weren’t developed for Half Life 3, and since there appear to be no prototype weapons resembling them in any of the beta material for Half Life or Half Life 2 that we know of, and since nothing in the Dota 2 leaks is likely to have been created before 2009, I can and will continue to put forth that these files suggest Valve was looking to develop multiple new weapons for the next Half Life game - and will write off his words as yet another attempt by Valve to shroud HL3’s development as much as possible.
We’re all painfully aware that Valve has been unbelievably tight-lipped on the issue. Half Life 3/Episode 3 is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of the video game industry - the game was supposed to come out six and a half years ago, and in all that time not a single screenshot has managed to leak out of Valve’s ironclad studio. The only things we have to confirm that the game even exists in any form at all are the few leaked bits of concept art and an array of discarded game files that only slipped out because they were buried among thousands of other files for other projects by the company, and Valve has repeatedly insisted even those mean nothing. Employee commentary is almost always along the lines of “We don’t have anything for you right now”, with no elaboration on when they will. So why the secrecy? Why are they so determined to avoid giving out information that it’s become newsworthy every time someone there simply hints the game is still being worked on?
Because Valve knows a lot about how the consumer thinks - a great deal more about it than quite a few much larger studios, in fact - and they know that expectations for the next Half Life game are sky-high.
In recent years, we’ve certainly seen how people react to a seemingly-quality game whose final product falls flat. Duke Nukem Forever was in development for eleven years and went through multiple different studios; the game’s notoriety was such that it needed to be unbelievably quality to get a good rating by consumers when it came out. And when it finally did, it was so consistently mediocre that it will go down in history as a shitty game. Aliens: Colonial Marines released an extremely impressive tech demo and trailer that had reviewers choking over their excitement for the game, and again, the final product was so numbingly bland compared to what people expected that it’s one of the most hated and reviled games of this generation.
The consistent theme between games that get the most anger from the people who buy them is that they were expected to be amazing. When a game looks shitty during development and reveals itself to really be as shitty as expected upon release, nobody is surprised - the title is entirely forgettable. It’s when the game was anticipated to be great that simple mediocrity is treated as a steaming pile of incompetence and misery that nobody will ever be able to leech enjoyment out of.
By staunchly refusing to show any content for the game, giving us an estimate of when it comes out, or even confirming that it’s a full-sized game and no longer an episode, Valve has done something very, very smart - they’ve ensured that the final product will have no amazing beta content it needs to live up to, and that a great deal of people no longer expect the game to come out. With absolutely no word on the game for six and a half years, people are losing hope. Consistently, on any Half Life-related article or video published in the last three years, you’ll find at least one despondent fan commenting on how they think the game will never be released. Nobody can speculate on the new game mechanics or graphics or writing, because we have no idea what it’s going to be like.
Thanks to a flurry of screenshots and announcements over eleven years that confirmed Duke Nukem Forever was still being worked on, people expected an extremely quality game to match up to the development time. Thanks to the impressive demos shown for Colonial Marines, people expected an extremely quality game to match up to the trailers telling them it was going to be great. Neither of those games ended up satisfying the consumer, and similar stories have happened in the industry over and over again for years. But by refusing to admit that Half Life 3 even exists, Valve has accomplished something remarkable: so long as the finished product is at least a good game, nobody will complain. Nobody will talk about how the beta was better, or point out that the game isn’t as high-quality as we were originally led to believe, or complain about features that were cut. Valve’s actions have ensured that simply releasing Half Life 3 someday will be enough to make sure it goes down in history as a great game, unless it completely sucks - and this being a Half Life game and a game made by Valve, we already know it won’t. Additionally, by pretending the game doesn’t exist, if they decide to postpone it (as Valve often does), they won’t have to announce yet another delay to an increasingly disillusioned fanbase. Add this to the fact that Half Life 2 was victim to a disastrous hack that resulted in the source code getting leaked online, and it only makes sense Valve would want to have as tight a control over information on the game as possible.
I don’t mean to suggest that Half Life 3 won’t be an amazing game, or that Valve is trying to trick us into thinking too highly of it. What I am suggesting is that Valve, a company who is experienced at how people react to unexpected delays and games that undergo quite a few changes during development, is taking measures to make sure these people have nothing negative to react to. When Half Life 3 finally comes out, it will come out untainted by a long and messy development period - because no matter how hard it was to make and how many times it was scrapped and restarted, we won’t see anything but the finished product until long after we’ve all proclaimed the game a masterwork.
So, what do we know so far?
First, that evidence suggests Episode 3 never came out because it was too ambitious a project to be contained in an hour or two of gameplay, so it was cancelled and absorbed into a full-sized Half Life 3 made in a new engine. Second, that Half Life 3 began production in the summer of 2008, meaning the game’s development has just reached or is approaching its fifth anniversary. And third, that Valve is keeping silent on the matter so that people will be more excited and happy about the final product and to keep the game from being leaked or hacked. Knowing those three things, I can tell you when I expect the game to be released.
November 2014.
As stated earlier, Gabe Newell unofficially confirmed that Valve is developing a new engine and that they’re just “waiting for a game to roll it out with”. We also know that Valve is planning to make their own console to compete with the Xbone and PS4; though Valve is no longer involved with Xi3’s Piston, the device that we were originally led to believe would be the official Steambox, they’re still making their own console in-house. Newell announced in March that Steambox prototypes would likely be ready for testing “in three or four months” - now that it’s June, so long as Valve hasn’t fallen victim to yet another of their numerous delays, we should have more information on the console in a matter of weeks. Given that a large number of gaming fans have been enormously dissatisfied with the PS4 and the Xbone so far, all they need is a launch title for their finished Steambox to take the industry by storm. And if that launch title is the legendary Half Life 3, then there’s going to be very little stopping them from pulling the rug right out from under Sony and Microsoft. They don’t even have to worry too much about third party development so long as you can use Steambox to play any game you could play on your PC.
I think the Steambox launch and Half Life 3’s release are going to happen in November 2014 for a few reasons. The first is simply that November is a very good month for video game releases - it’s close enough to the holiday season that hundreds of kids will put it on their Christmas lists, but not so close that casual gamers have no time to hear about it until the holidays are long over, and if the game is really good it often outshines earlier titles released that year. Additionally, both of the two other full-sized Half Life titles came out in November (of 1998 and 2004, specifically.) It’s a solid time of the year for console and title releases both. The year comes from a few different factors - 2014 will mark Half Life 2’s tenth birthday, for one thing - but the primary reasoning behind my guess is that by 2014, the game will have been in development for six years (going by my theory that it began in 2008) and the Steambox will be completed and ready for retail, which is unlikely to happen by the 2013 holiday season. If Valve is on the cusp of testing Steambox prototypes right now, I’d say a year and a half is a good estimate for when it’ll be done. Additionally, Valve has made no plans to showcase at any of the recent or upcoming conventions, indicating they have nothing new this year.
So there you have it - the game started production in 2008 and will be finished next fall after six years of development time.
I leave you with the most recent semi-official word on the fate of the Half Life franchise. On May 17, 2013, Marc Laidlaw admitted to being the person behind the BreenGrub twitter account, roleplaying a possible scenario wherein Dr. Breen’s consciousness was transferred to the body of an Advisor at the end of Half Life 2. Laidlaw insists that the account isn’t the start of some ARG but in fact simply fanfic of his, and had this to say on the matter… “I personally cannot give the world a Half-Life game. All I can personally do, at least for now, is stuff like this.”
And if the game is almost finished, of course they wouldn’t need the writers for much anymore, would they? His emphasis on “personally” leads me to believe that this is in fact the case.
It’s been a long and hard wait for Half Life 3. The company’s had little to say on the matter and some days it’s hard to believe the game even exists. But I firmly believe we will hear official news of the game within the next year and a half, and I have faith I’ll be able to play it before too long has passed. Hang in there, guys - we’ll pick up the crowbar again soon enough.
(I should mention now that an exhaustive amount of research went into almost every aspect of this essay - though I unfortunately and unprofessionally neglected to save most of my sources - and I’m pretty confident there isn’t any information out there that contradicts my theories, but if there IS I’d be happy to hear it so I can make corrections. Thanks for taking the time to read this!)