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Half-Life 2 Going Gold on Monday? [updated]
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."
Probably. What personal information (apart from your email address) has Steam taken? What personal details did you have to give up to install Steam? Answer: Nothing!
I have to go now, I think Doom3 is stealing my credit card numbers...
Tip for you: Retailers are the last to know when the game is going to ship.
But also, stop fucking whining, and go on with your life.
It won't be as bad as Doom 3 -- just watch the videos.
The real question however is; how scripted will the "interactivity" be. There's nothing I hate more than games that try to give the impression of freedom and "reality", but where no matter what I do, I will always find myself in the exact same situation in the end.
"Medal of Honour" being a prime example of such scripted game.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
If Valve would just give a simple update on the release time-frame, they could avoid sending their POTENTIAL customers into fits again. They left the door wide open for a hoax like this by starting the pre-loading without any direction as to when people will be able to play. Now I am going to have a new(well it was new a year ago) graphics card AND a gigabyte of data wasting away on my PC.
I guesss I'll be putting my $50USD into DOOM3. I'll see you in the dark!
The Fat Man Walks Alone
The only content on steam are things like textures, sounds and maps (things that wont change before the release). No executibles download. The point of this is so that when the game comes out, people can get it really quickly because they will only need to download maybe some scripts and the executable.
The OP is talking about an in intrusion into his computer activity, not necessarily his privacy. (Although it does associate specific computer activity with an email address and IP address, which should be cause for concnern...) In this regard, Steam is extremely intrusive: It requires you to authenticate yourself to the game's manufacturer every time you start the game.
I've never seen such a thing with *any* retail application. Even XP only makes you do this when you first install it, not every time you fire it up.
Of course you are missing the small detail that all Doom 3 cutscenes are rendered in realtime.
"How many times can people fall for the same marketing trick. Infinite."
Yeh, first it was "Half-Life 2 will work x times better on an ATI card than nVidia," but that has proven to be BS. There are some rumors floating around that the 5x00 video cards are having some DX 9 problems with CS:Source, but I haven't read them yet, and it doesn't affect me anyway.
Then, it was "DOOM 3 will work x times better with an nVidia 6800 GT/Deluxe than an ATI card." Once ATI fixed their OpenGL support in their drivers a little, this point was moot.
THEN, you have all of these game saying "Best played with ATI" or "nVidia, the way it was meant to be played." I find these annoying, particularly when the nVidia ad plays every time you start a certain game.
However, I think Valve's "statements" and ATI's Half-Life 2 coupon helped them a LOT more in sales than any of nVidia-based card companies. Not saying they were true, just saying TONS of people bought 9800XT's because HL-2 was supposed to "run great on it," and it came with the free STEAM coupon.
In the end, it SHOULD all come down to 2 things:
1) Price
2) Company experience
Personally, my recent venture into ATI left me feeling a little wanting. My driver experience wasn't the best, and other things bugged me. So, when I built a new machine, I went back to my good old nVidia-based cards.So far, their quality has remained true.