Something, something Half-Life 3 is confirmed!

Well, it might be. Erik Wolpaw, a writer whose credits include Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead and both Half-life 2 episodes has returned to Valve.

That's according to Reddit user Trenchman and Valve guru Tyler McVicker who spotted that Wolpaw is credited as a writer on the recently-released Artifact. This has seemingly been confirmed by an email from Valve boss Gabe Newell simply saying: "He's back".

Wolpaw left Valve in February 2017, one of many departures from the Seattle PC games giant around that time. Other leavers included Chet Faliszek, who has since joined Bossa, as well as Marc Laidlaw and Jay Pinkerton, who has since also returned to Valve.

While pure speculation, it's possible that these writers and narrative designers didn't see the point in being at Valve while it was largely focused on developing VR and making hardware than games.

The firm has switched direction, however, with Newell last year saying that Valve was making games again. The first of this new wave of projects was the aforementioned digital card games Artifact.

That title had a healthy start to life, but its active player base has dropped off somewhat. Furthermore, the title seems to be rather aggressively designed when it comes to monetisation, so it'll be interesting to see how Valve approaches this in the future.