Valve’s Marc Laidlaw On Scrapped Return To Ravenholm Project

Valve’s Marc Laidlaw On Scrapped Return To Ravenholm Project

It emerged on the Steam forums a few weeks ago that there was a mysterious project known as ‘Ravenholm’ or ‘Return to Ravenholm’ that was being worked on by Valve and Arkane in 2006/2007. To put a stop to any wild theories about what this game was, Valve’s Marc Laidlaw spoke to Lambda Generation to clear a few things up about the title. Read on for more details.

Marc told Labmda Generation that “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.”

Of course, this wasn’t the only Valve/Arkane project which didn’t see the light of day, The Crossing also failed to make it out of the development stage back in 2009, with Arkane CEO and co-creative director Raphael Colantonio revealing at the time that The Crossing was put on hold due to financial difficulties. At that time it was known that Arkane were working on a new FPS/RPG which more than likely turned out to be Dishonored, a title which immediately reminded me of Half-Life 2 when images for it were first released.

If the scrapped Ravenholm project in turn led to the development of Dishonoured, I don’t think we can be too disappointed, even if it meant we missed out on more titles in the Half-Life series.

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