Newell On Half-Life 2 Delay

Thanks to GameSpot for their brief interview with Valve's Gabe Newell, in which he discusses when the ravenously-awaited Half-Life 2 will finally come out. He laments: "I hate release dates because no matter how hard we try, we screw them up. We held back talking about our release date going into September 30th because I wanted to have a much clearer idea of what day we were going to ship on." As for an actual day, he offers: "Right now all we can say is holidays of this year, which to me feels really unfortunate." Elsewhere, Newell refuses to elaborate on the little-known multiplayer modes for the game, saying they're "...something we're not talking about because we want to keep it as a surprise for our customers as we roll into our launch cycle."

Comments

Wrong questions

[Pentagram]

They missed asking the basic question - why was the game delayed? - and the supplemental: how did you not manage to realise that the game would require another 3 months development until only a week before the supposed release date?

Re:Wrong questions

[The Munger]

I think this post a little further down adds a lot to this argument. Keep in mind that they never publicly stated that that would be the release date until (as you say) about a week before hand - The only reason people thought it was Sept 30 before that was leaks from other sources. They've been working on this project since the end of the last decade. You can't claim that a few weeks off in a schedule that is a few years long is really that bad.

And then there's the other question, do we care that much? There are other things to do with your life for a couple of weeks. I'm glad they're taking their time - the game will probably be more stable. For that extra 1% of enjoyment from not getting blue screens, I'm willing to wait a little.

Phew - I can delay the upgrade a little longer...

[quinkin]

Phew - I can delay the upgrade a little longer...

Seriously though, my upgrade cycle is dictated far more by games than anything else. Despite the fact that I rarely have time to play them...

Q.

Project Management

[SandSpider]

Yeah, there's this thing, it's called "Project Management." It's where you figure out how long things are going to take to do, and you make sure they happen in the right amount of time.

I know, sometimes it's tough. Usually it's the most difficult when you have someone telling you that you have to have something done by X time, and you know that time is clearly impossible, but they make you plan for it anyways. That's not the case here, though.

The case here is more likely that they don't know how to plan for QA. I would be willing to bet that they think that Quality Assurance means "Testing the game at the end and fixing the bugs."

Good project managers know that QA is planned for from the beginning, and that you know, from experience and extrapolation, how longs things will take to do. Most importantly, be able to know when you're done. Usually the answer is and ideal, "When we test a couple of times and there are no bugs," though that usually works out to be, "When we test a couple of times and there are no bugs we can't fix by the first or second patch." There are other, better ways to know when you're done testing, if it's part of your complete project plan.

=Brian

Re:Clearly the multiplayer modes

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I believe our good friend Gabe has confirmed that TF2 will not be a free add-on for HL2.

Re:Lets not forget to mention

[Anonymous Coward]

5c1a7237251aa3329f8b9a50ffc20841 hl2_src.rar