Episode Three as vaporware. Valve eventually abandoned episodic development as they wanted to create more ambitious games. According to the level designer Dario Casali, "We found ourselves creeping ever forward towards, ‘Well, let's just keeping putting more and more, and more, and more stuff in this game because we want to make it as good as we can,' and then we realized these episodes are turning more into sequels." Walker said Valve used Half-Life games to "solve some interesting collision of technology and art that had reared itself"; when working on Episode Three, they failed to find a unifying idea that provided a sense of "wonderment, or opening, or expansion". Additionally, Valve had started developing a new game engine, Source 2. As developing Half-Life 2 and the original Source engine simultaneously had created problems, Valve delayed development of a new Half-Life until Source 2 was complete. Before his departure from Valve in 2016, Laidlaw led a virtual reality project on the Source 2 engine, Borealis. Its story would skip between the time of the Seven Hour War (the period in which the Combine conquered Earth before Half-Life 2), and a time shortly after Episode Two. A minigame in which players would fish off the bow of the ship was also proposed. The project was canceled after a year. Legacy Laidlaw's "Epistle 3" story led to a fan backlash; some players review bombed Valve's game Dota 2 on Steam, believing that Valve had forgone the Half-Life series. Project Borealis, an attempt to create a fanmade version of the episode in the Source engine that would be based on and expand on the short story, was announced. The team decided to switch to Unreal Engine to modernize the game, due to the lack of updates to Source. Another team, Keep Away from Fire, began development of their own Episode Three project, Boreal Alyph, which did not follow "Epistle 3" as closely, and was initially set in Northern Russia before following Gordon Freeman across the globe. They stated their commitment to using the Source engine, describing it as a "constant fight" to modernize the graphics due to the engine's lack of user-friendliness or documentation. After canceling several further Half-Life games, Valve released a VR game, Half-Life: Alyx, in 2020. Walker said the team saw VR as a way to return to the series. Phil Iwaunik of PCGamesN wrote in 2021 that the cancelation