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Half-Life 2 Submitted to VU For Approval

Posted by Zonk on from the beware-of-flying-pigs dept.

Dreadlord writes "After years of rumors, leaks, and delays, Neowin reports that the release candidate for Half-Life 2 has been sent to VU Games for approval. Valve's director of marketing confirmed the story to GameSpot yesterday. "Yes, the release candidate went to VUG yesterday," he said. First words on the submission came from Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, "The RC went to VU yesterday," read Newell's one-line post on the hl2fallout.com forums."

6 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Wow.... by Vaevictis666 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So they might actually scrape in at under a year delay? (IIRC the initial release date was Sept something, forget exactly what)

    1. Re:Wow.... by u-238 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is a hard truth to ignore.. when the first Half-Life was released in 1998 the gaming industry was drastically different than it is now.

      Engines, graphics and abilities extend leaps and bounds in a matter of months, not years. As someone who's played the counter-strike source beta, I can verify to its lacklusternesss relative to modern games. Even Battlefield 1942, a 2 year old game. That's not to mention BF: Vietnam, Doom 3, UT2k4, and on and on. The ragdoll physics have been around since the original Hitman 2000. It really doesn't have much ground to stand on aside from its laurels.

  2. Who knows? by RogueyWon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Another 1 line forum post? Perhaps I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but I'm hardly going to treat this as the gospel truth. As far as I'm concerned, I'll believe Valve's statements on release dates the day I have the game in my hand (or my steam cache... I'm open minded on these things).

    Valve may have some great talents on their staff. Half-Life was a shockingly good game and Half-Life 2 may well continue the tradition. But by god do they need some decent project managers and PR people. Since the announcement of HL2 last year, they've managed to make themselves objects of anger, frustration and sometimes plain ridicule for much of the gaming world. I'm sure a lot of this is unjustified morally, after all, nobody has a "right" to have HL2 by any given date (except possibly the people who got vouchers for it with their graphics cards *cough*), but that's not to say that any sane company should have behaved in the way that Valve have. If HL2 wasn't ready for release before the leak last year, and I don't think anybody now believes that it was, then Valve should have made this clear and been relatively open about the progress of the game all along.

    Hell... even an ID-style "when it's done" would have been better than this endless succession of missed release dates.

  3. delicious irony? by Scott · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember one of the things said to have given away the HL2 going gold hoax a couple weeks back is that Gabe Newell doesn't make short, one line posts to web forums. Am I the only person who finds it funny that he has now apparently made a one line web forum announcement? I say apparently because the site be down, Cap'n.

  4. I agree by johannesg · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Maybe it's just me, but I always thought the real star of Half Life was Black Mesa. It's just such a gloomy, depressing, yet realistic and intriguing place. I cannot imagine getting quite that same "help I'm all alone under a kilometer of rock and concrete with just monsters for company and noone cares and the only ones that do want me dead" feeling when playing a game in a city, under the open sky.

    I always thought the best parts of Half Life were the earlier levels, before you get out into the light of day. You start descending into darkness. Pretty quickly after the game proper starts you are teased with being on the surface, but you are forced back down. Then you get the long trek through the missile silo with its nasty yet excellent monster. After you get back to the surface it is still a good game, but it no longer reaches the lofty heights it had reached before.

    I agree that Doom 3 was not as spectacular as we could hope for. I think it was the pacing (too regular) and predictability (far too predictable). Real horror works best when you _don't_ know what is in front of you. In Doom 3 you are guaranteed to have two monsters teleporting in and another one appearing from a sliding panel behind you.

  5. Re:Show some appreciation! by AndyChrist · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They've been working on Team Fortress 2 and Half Life 2 concurrently, probably should have made them one project a lot sooner. And they've been constantly updating the original Half-life since it came out.

    They haven't done nothing. They haven't RELEASED anything NEW. But if they hadn't done nothing, playing Half Life online would be like playing the original Diablo is now. (If you don't cheat, don't bother.)