If nobody wanted to work on it, yes, it'd not get shipped. That's why there's no Ricochet 2. What good sources tell me that is happening at Valve is the curse

If nobody wanted to work on it, yes, it'd not get shipped. That's why there's no Ricochet 2. What good sources tell me that is happening at Valve is the curse of raising standards. HL2:E2 is much better than HL2 ever was, but it took forever to ship. Portal also raised the bar in many ways. So what they have in HL3 is a game that Valve employees have put so many high expectations on, that getting anything to a state that is good enough to ship is like pulling teeth. Let's also remember that HL3 runs on a different engine than everything else Valve has released in the last decade: Just the new version of Source, plus the updated toolsets to work in it, are a significant cost. It's not as if they are just licensing an engine built somewhere else and rolling with it. I've been paralyzed by success before in my own projects. I can only imagine what that does to a big organization that has had as much success as Valve has, and that has so much income they don't really have release a game in the next 5 years to remain financially stable.