Newell On Half-Life 2 Delay

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Posted by simoniker on Wednesday October 1, 2003 @01:41PM from the bated-stinky-headcrab-breath dept.

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."

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Wrong questions by Pentagram · 2003-10-01 13:59 · Score: 3, Insightful

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?
1. Re:Wrong questions by Babbster · 2003-10-01 14:17 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  You've stumbled onto the state of gaming "journalism." The hard questions don't get asked and every upcoming game is exciting and interesting.
  In this case, though, they did ask your first "why" question and Mr. Newell answered by citing play-testing. Still, like virtually all game industry "interviews," it's a [very] thinly veiled advertisement for Half-Life 2.
  It's too bad that real journalism school graduates cost more money to hire than people with BAs in English Lit who've always dreamed of a job in the video game industry...
Phew - I can delay the upgrade a little longer... by quinkin · 2003-10-01 14:20 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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Re:Project Management by bfandreas · 2003-10-01 18:55 · Score: 3, Informative

Good point. But you can only plan for a test phase. The outcome of it is not plannable. Experienced programmers can estimate how much time they need for a task. Experienced project managers know how to put these estimates into a plan. And yet many release dates slip. Quite a few books have been written about this subject. Many of them are propably older than you.

In my experience a project plan is a sequence of things that are most unlikely to happen. One more MS Project plan exported to an Excel spreadsheet with my name on it and I'll go postal. Nobody likes release dates. Only marketing and management do. To us it means overtime. And you don't even remotely know about the quality of the plan in the first place. Any plan that involves people and how they work together is bound to fail from the beginning.

Hope I don't sound too bitter. Still got all of my annual leave. And part of my 2002 leave. And enough overtime. I could leave my desk now and not return till the end of january 2004.

The techies and artists at valve have my smpathy.

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Lets not forget to mention by gedanken · 2003-10-01 20:11 · Score: 4, Informative

That the source code to the freaken game was just leaked to the public!

Yeah that could lead to some delays.
1. Re:Lets not forget to mention by ymgve · 2003-10-02 01:28 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Why would a source code leak mean delays? It's not like somebody stole the source and they don't have it anymore..