Portal 2 News

Portal co-writer Erik Wolpaw: "We've gotta start Portal 3"

"We've gotta start Portal 3. That's my message to... whoever." Those words from Erik Wolpaw, who co-wrote both Portal and Portal 2 along with such titles as Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2, Half-Life: Alyx, and Left 4 Dead, will no doubt whip fans up into a frenzy. However, Wolpaw is quick to constrain expectations. "I can't do it by myself," he says to Kiwi Talkz host Reece Reilly.

"I could advocate for it," says Wolpaw, "It might help a little bit, but the problem is with 300 employees there's a lot of opportunity cost to taking 75 people and getting a game made." He goes on to speak about the workplace at Valve and explains that getting a new project spun up isn't easy. "As much as it seems like Valve often is just a bunch of people sitting around sipping gin and tonics by a pool, everybody's working."

Wolpaw says that while Valve's employees are constantly working on a variety of projects, people don't always see the results - either because they end up not coming out, arriving years down the line, or are turned into something else entirely. He says that "everybody is accounted for... you'd have to stir up a bunch of people to leave what they're currently working on and come work on something else. In this case it'd be Portal 3."

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Portal 2 mod overhauls the graphics to Half-Life: Alyx level

A Portal 2 mod "in development for several years" plans to overhaul the adventure game's graphics to make Aperture Science look as good as Valve Software's most recent game Half-Life: Alyx made City 17 look - and Portal 2: Desolation will get a new story, too. So, Portal 3, right?

While we wouldn't necessarily call it an old game, Portal 2 is both an all-time classic and, well, nearly eleven years old at this point. Not only does Half-Life: Alyx look much better than it, so does a free game set in Aperture Science that Valve released to promote the Steam Deck.

The ambitious Portal 2: Desolation mod aims to change all that, on top of a brand new story. It's already been in development for a few years - we last heard about it in 2019, where it promised a more "unsettling" story in the Portal universe along with 40-50 test chambers of moderate difficulty and an average playtime of roughly six to eight hours.

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Portal 2: Desolation is giving the classic puzzle game a huge graphics overhaul

Portal 2: Desolation is a fan project that's currently in development, a whole new singleplayer campaign in the Portal setting. It's basically a community-made Portal 3, or at least Portal 2.5, being made "in tribute to Valve's Iconic series", as Emberspark Games puts it. The developers have spent the last year getting Desolation's graphics to look slick, which has meant totally replacing the Source Engine's rendering and lighting pipeline...
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Portal 2 - Update

An update has been released for Portal 2.

- Updated controller support
- Fixed a crash in controller vibration
- Fixed a crash in a sound mixer
- Fixed a stale material pointer crash

Portal and Portal 2 are coming to Switch in one collection

Coming to Switch later this year is Portal: Companion Collection which features Portal and Portal 2 from Valve.

Originally released as part of The Orange Box, Portal was heralded as a ground-breaking puzzle platforming game that changed the way players could approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment.

Throughout Portal, which is played from a first-person perspective, players must solve physical puzzles and challenges by opening portals and maneuvering objects, and themselves, through space. The game also features a humorous narrative as players adventure and puzzle their way through the Aperture Science Laboratories.