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Valve might be currently working on a Half-Life related game, and before you start, it's definitely not Half -Life 3. The project in question is a mix between an FPS and an RTS, specially designed for the Steam Deck. The news comes via Valve News Network's Tyler McVicker, who is known for his reliable information on Valve.
In a recently uploaded video that explores the current projects being developed at the company, McVicker said that this new game is currently codenamed Citadel and will be an FPS/RTS hybrid co-op title that has been created to "best showcase what the Steam Deck is capable of”. It will reportedly be a “nostalgia fest” and was described as “Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm, an RTS and Half-Life all having a baby”.
In a conversation with PCGamesN, McVicker said that he got the information via regular datamines of Valve assets and has been following Citadel's trail for almost three years now. He further mentioned that Citadel is “still very much in development” and we could officially hear about it “within the next year-and-a-half to two years”. Of course, as with any and all datamined information, this must be taken with a grain of salt.
Earlier this month we learnt a bit more about the Steam Deck's architecture. Valve released a series of videos as part of its Steamworks Virtual Conference, one of them talking about the Steam Deck's AMD-sourced APU, which aims for consistency. The Aerith SoC is a four-core, eight-thread APU derived from AMD's latest Zen 3 microarchitecture and is paired with eight RDNA 2 compute units.
AMD and Valve have been working closely to ensure that the architecture provides consistent performance, rather than raw power. Along with the 40-watt battery that provides up to eight hours of play time, developers have been encouraged to optimize their games for battery life by using frame caps.
In other Valve news, Steam managed to hit its highest ever concurrent players number on November 27. Over 27 million players were online at the same time, playing things from CS:GO, New World and Apex Legends to MIR4, Naraka Bladepoint, and even Wallpaper Engine.