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Half-Life 2 Going Gold on Monday? [updated]

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the on-the-horizon dept.

Warrior-GS writes "According to GameSpy, Gabe Newell has announced that Half-Life 2 is going gold on Monday. Numerous retail outlets have Sept. 1 or Sept. 2 as a shelf-date for the game, so a gold announcement now seems to mean those dates are fairly close to reality." Given that HL2 is already available on Steam, this doesn't sound too far-fetched. Update: 08/28 19:27 GMT by T : Kraiger writes "According to HL2 Fallout the announcement of the futuristic FPS, "Half-Life 2", going Gold is a complete hoax! According to HL2 Fallout, the announcement from Gabe Newell, a Valve Software employee, was created by someone who was able to guess the simple password of "gaben" for Gabe's forum account."

12 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Hoax by carlcmc · · Score: 5, Informative

    As seen on the forums " UPDATE
    After a close scrutiny of Gabe Newell’s account history on the forums, we've come to the conclusion that the gold post is a fake. While we can't be 100% certain at this stage, all indicators point towards someone hacking the forum account. That said, all Gabe's previous posts on these forums are quite legitimate.

    We apologize for the confusion and will be investigating further. Theoretically, an IPB forum account should be very difficult to hack. Well, that was the theory at least. We'll keep you updated. "

    1. Re:Hoax by seizer · · Score: 4, Informative

      what exactly are they loading up from the network

      All the textures, graphics, etc. That's what takes up most of the space, and most of them will have been finalized by now.

      The game engine can come along at the last minute, when they do go gold - it's probably only a few hundred megs at most.

  2. This appears to be a hoax... by PimpBot · · Score: 5, Informative

    The admins of HL2Fallout have already stated that they feel this is a hoax. The "Gabe Newell" post came from an IP which Gabe has never posted from before. For right now, they're erring on the side of caution.

    1. Re:This appears to be a hoax... by Krunch · · Score: 2, Informative

      Since the HL2Fallout forum seems to have less bandwidth than all the CS players in the world (and thus is currently unreachable), here is a link to the Steam forum's thread.

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      No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
    2. Re:This appears to be a hoax... by randyest · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're so close it's scary. It was five digits, which might be ok, were it not "gaben." Right. His first name and last initial. All lowercase. The guy doesn't learn after getting haxored? From here:

      An anonymous imposter guessed Gabe's password, "gaben", and made the false claim. Valve has confirmed that this is was a hoax on the Steam Forums.

      Update: After one crazy night of theories, server mayhem and IP tracing, we've finally gotten to the bottom of this mess. In a twist of hilarity, it seems that Gabe Newell's account password was set to 'gaben'. Person x guessed this and made the "going gold on Monday" post which we've heard so much about. The user (who we believe is the same person x) then made this post just minutes ago using Gabe's account [announcing that he guessed Gabe's pass as "gaben"]

      After a quick double-check, it seems that this was exactly what happened. Reminds me of the good old days. For an official response concerning the hoax, see Chris Bokitch's post on Steampowered. I think Gabe is going to need to start using slightly better passwords on accounts he uses to make public announcements on.

      --
      everything in moderation
  3. probably not by Betaman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Info here:
    http://www.csnation.net/comments.php?id=7475
    http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3 4798&page=1&pp=15
    http://www.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php? threadid=132122
    All the info you need to know this is probably fake.

  4. Steam by dfj225 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think it will be interesting to see how long it takes for the release to be availiable on Steam once the game does go gold. Concievably, once they make the final build it could be up in a matter of hours. Since many people already have most of the game downloaded, this could mean that they could also be playing the game within hours of the final build being made.

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    SIGFAULT
  5. Re:Eh? Going Gold? by way2trivial · · Score: 5, Informative

    going gold means it's being mass produced, master version exists, and all remaing bugs will be dealt with via patches, not original distribution.

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    every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
  6. Re:Eh? Going Gold? by Edmund+Blackadder · · Score: 2, Informative

    It means that the CD is mastered. Apparently the master CD is all shiny and yellow, so that's why they call it "going gold".

  7. Re:I, for one by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You're not the only one.

    I bought CS:CZ for the single player missions. I had no intention of playing online. But lo and behold, while playing single player, my firewall pops up a notice that the game is trying to connect to valve's servers. WTF? why? So I block it with a rule. The game crashes frequently after that with a TCP error.

    Removing the rule from Tiny Personal Firewall and adding the block on my OpenBSD firewall allows the game to work.

    Fuck you Valve, you can't be trusted.

  8. It's a fake by fresh27 · · Score: 2, Informative

    somebody guessed his extremely obvious password
    http://members.lycos.co.uk/lemmingzappa/Post.JPG
    http://www.hl2fallout.com/forums/index.php?showtop ic=4221&st=360

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    http://ipod.fresh27.net/
  9. Re:I'm looking forward to this by Fryed · · Score: 5, Informative

    You may want to do a bit more research about Steam before you decide to pass up on Half-Life 2. First off, a lot has changed in the nearly a year since the article you linked to was written. For starters, Steam now features a "Start in offline mode" option. When Steam starts up, if it's not connected to the internet, it lets you do that. Then, you have access to all your single player games just fine. I imagine you can also play all your LAN games just fine as well, but I haven't had an oppurtunity to try that.

    Did Steam have an awful lot of problems when it was first released? Yes, it did. But, believe it or not, the people working on Steam at Valve are not some kind of evil sadists who enjoy making people jump through hoops to play their game. They've created a rather nice system for making sure your games are always updated, and giving you an easy way to purchase new games from them without having to run down to the nearest Gamestop. Problems do occur, and they try to fix them as soon as possible.

    And, I certainly doubt Valve is going to make it hard for mods to be created. They aren't stupid - they know that one of the big reasons Half-Life has sold so well over the past 6 years is because of fun mods like TFC and CS. How many other 6 year old games do you see with thousands of servers running right now? Currently, they allow really popular mods to be listed in the Steam gui, with a screenshot and a short writeup. Other mods can still be played (I remember at least once getting in a game of Pirates, Vikings, and Knights over Steam) just as they always could.