Valve has very much been in the limelight these past few months, due to the company unleashing its hotly-anticipated Steam Deck mobile PC device. Along with that, the developer also unveiled Aperture Desk Job, a sort of tech demo that exists in the Portal universe and is meant to show people how the Deck functions. As it turns out, this short game seems to contain a wealth of information about upcoming Valve projects, and one person has managed to datamine a lot of details about a rumored title that exists within the Half-Life world.
In a video uploaded recently, YouTuber and impassioned gamer Tyler McVickers has managed to pull some information from Aperture Desk Job, which contains some rather significant details about Citadel. He goes on to say that the game's story and mechanics could pit the Combines against the rebels of the second Half-Life entry, which will incorporate a "team-based, squad-based, class-based" style of gameplay.
Citadel is also said to be an RTS game, but with first-person shooter elements as well, essentially making it a hybrid entry. McVickers links to a series of Google Docs that outline a lot of details about this project. According to the data, there will be a single-player campaign, in which the player assumes the role of a commander and can view the map from the top-down with the ability to "deploy bots and teammates," similar to any other RTS game. On top of that, there are a lot of code comments that have been left in, which give a slew of ideas about what can be expected in Citadel. McVickers stresses that this information was directly written by Valve itself.
It must be stressed at this point that the company has yet to confirm what's happening with this elusive Citadel game. While the details have been pulled directly from Aperture Desk Job, and it all seems solid in terms of legitimacy, anyone reading this should understand that Valve has not officially made any announcements. Of course, some may even be disappointed that the datamined information doesn't contain anything about Half-Life 3, which has become one of the most long overdue threequels in video game history.
There's also no hints at a possible Left 4 Dead 3 or another game in the Portal series. However, what's been pulled from the Steam Deck game does appear to strongly hint at the potential gameplay of this Half-Life style game, so hopefully Valve will give some official details soon.
