The way Alyx ended, it was clear that Valve would continue the Half-Life series in some sort of way. HLX has been brought up numerous times over the course of this past year in game files and datamining, as well as by a recently retired Valve engineer named Chris Green who responded in an AMA to someone asking about HLX with, “Can you give any info on the HLX project? wink wink.” to which Chris Green responded “I think you know the answer to that ”

Nothing too major by itself as Green was working on an undisclosed project and obviously couldn't say anything about what he was working on, but the hopium started to die out until......today!

During a Q&A Mike Morasky accidentally slipped the existence of HLX in the clip below. He's in the middle of pointing out that Deadlock had its own version of HDR, but then mentions that HLX has its own version of HDR. Apparently, after he made this comment, someone next to him said "Nice Work"

The hopium has returned!!!

Oops lol. Yeah that confirms it.

To be honest, I've thought for a long time that Valve experiements with a lot of things all the time, which probably includes Half-Life as well much of the time. I wouldn't read too much into this because of that. I guess this would be a kind of interesting way to semi-announce the game intentionally too, although that wouldn't be my first guess on what this is about...

That said, I have been thinking they've been working on new Half-Life after Alyx, and this would line up very well with that.

According to Kotaku, Mike has previously let it slip that he was working on more than one Half-Life game, even though so far, he's only been credited for working on Alyx lol

Yeah, but it'll be made using AI so... meh. Everything from now on is tainted, as far as I'm concerned. The time of looking forward to new games is over for me.