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Halflife 2 Delayed Again?
erax0r writes "Gamespot reports that HL2 could be delayed yet again. "Court filings show VU Games has the right to sit on finished Half-Life 2 code for up to six months. Could it be deja vu all over again?"
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I swear, we spent a year hearing about how revolutionary it's gonna be, and now we've spent at least a year hearing about how it's gonna be delayed for different reasons, there was that whole source code leak fiasco, and now the friggin publisher wants to sit on it for a while too. If this game doesn't wipe my ass every time it makes me shit my pants, it's gonna be a huge letdown.
And the funny thing is, not being a subscriber, when I click on the "Read More..." button, I see a big ad "Are you ready? HL2" on the side, and I'm thinking to myself, yeah I'm ready, my computer's ready, Valve and VU games are the only ones not ready... c'mon people!
'The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age,' -Hamá, the doorward
I never understood why someone stealing the source code caused a delay before. It's not like they deleted the only copy. They just MADE a copy. I think they just like seeing their title in headlines all the time.
This game better not suck. What's funnier is a huge HL2 ad on the right when I hit read more.
Chris
i feel like a mule with a carrot being dangled in front of my face.
always so close... yet so far..
It blows my mind to think that VUG would "sit on" such a big game and not make any money off of it for 6 months when they certainly could use the cash. Does this make sense to anybody else? It doesn't to me.
It's a game of chicken, honestly.
Vivendi Universal Games is in poor shape financially, and they have been counting on Half-Life 2 to help turn things around. They can, of course, threaten to delay the game past the holiday season as a way to bargain, but it would seem to be suicide to actually do it.
Delaying past the holiday season hurts both them and Valve. Expect the game to come out this year (November 1st is looking likely, a whole array of retailers recently updated to that date when adding the Half-Life 2 Collector's Edition) and the issue over Steam to be settled later (i.e., if it is discovered that they did something underhanded, Valve may have to fork over a good chunk of change after-the-fact).
Neither Valve nor VU Games want this delayed, and there is no reason to expect it to be with the first release candidate already in VU's hands.
It seems to me that Vivendi is stuck between a rock and a hard place here. There's no doubt that they need the revenue, and I'm sure they have every intention of being able to put that revenue on their Q4 books. Q4 is what makes or breaks software publishers.
Their options right now are to either release to retail and see a significant amount of that revenue go directly in to Valve's pockets. Many, many people will be buying this game on Steam if that happens. This isn't the Sims we're talking about. A significant percentage of potential cusomers have high-end machines with broadband connections, and since Steam has been pushing content to its users for a while now, I suspect many of them will just click the button that says 'instant gratification' instead of trundling out to the nearest big box retailer to buy this.
On the other hand, if Vivendi delays release beyond the Christmas season, and somehow manages to prohibit Valve form releasing on Steam, they will not be able to post that revenue in Q4 and there's a real chance sales will be lower than they would have been had the game been released in time for Christmas.
The only way Vivendi can win this is by compelling Valve not to release on Steam and still getting the game out in time for Christmas. What they're doing now is simply attempting to buy some time for their lawyers to attempt to achieve this. I suspect that, if no agreement has been reached within the next six to eight weeks, Valve will have effectively called Vivendi's bluff and Vivendi will be forced to release in time for Christmas rather than risk missing the holidays and losing a significant percentage of potential sales to Steam.
I want the fire back.
This court thing that Vivendi Universal Games is pulling seems to me to be a very bad PR choice. If I were a developer and saw that VUG was willing to take me to court over its right to hold my game for up to six months before releasing it according to my desire, I would step past VUG and find someone else to distribute, or I would distribute the game myself.
But then, maybe it's just me...
In a weird way, I'd love to see both sides lose this.
In the red corner, we have Vivendi. The faceless media giant that sums up everything that we're constantly being told is wrong with the games industry. A soul-less money-making machine, with no interest in the quality or artistic merits of the products they put out, determined to grind the poor suffering developers into abject poverty.
In the blue corner, we have Valve. The developer which seems to be trying to set itself up as a rival to 3d Realms in the contest for the title of "biggest running joke of the gaming industry." They had one excellent hit over half a decade ago, which has been shamelessly miked since then through a series of mediocre expansion packs and "gold" editions. Their latest project is to force everybody who wants to play their games to use a creaking, occasionally-works (kind of) DRM client to run them. The service is erratic, the client is buggy and the only real benefit is for Valve's bank balance.
Sorry if the above sounds overly negative, but I do think that regardless of how good the end product turns out to be, the entire process of its development does little to cast anybody at all in the industry in a good light.
Won't someone please think of the gamers!?
They go off.
:)) but is anyone that interested when they have bad guys to blow away? Might be more relvant in future games made with the Source engine.
:P). The thing is, these advances are rapidly becoming old news - if they don't release soon - this carton of milk is going to start to smell. I'm sure Vivendi don't want it stinking up their refrigerator.
Games have a very definite shelf life. I watched the latest Halflife 2 video the other day (the one with yer man on a quad bike of some kind shooting some spiders that looked a bit familiar..) and whilst it still looked like a game I might want to buy, I had just finished Doom 3 and whatever you can say about Doom 3, one thing I don't think you can deny is that it looks damm fine. HL2 just looks pretty ordinary to me now.
It may have a more comprehensive physics engine that lets you interact with objects (You could knock stuff over in Doom3 and the swinging crane was very well done but that was about the limit of your interaction - kicking the office furniture about - although I did manage to get inside a barrel in MP, or at least end up in a barrel...
HL2 may also have a more interesting game behind the eye candy and certainly has more varied environemnts then Doom3 (although nobody does Hell like ID
This is already the case. The best comparison is Doom 3. From what I've seen in the HL2 videos, DOOM 3 has it spanked as far as lighting and shadows are concerned. This is very visible in the outdoor areas. HL2 will shine moreso with it's AI, and the interactivity of the enviroment. Hopefully the story will rock too.
Had HL2 released last year like it was supposed to, it would have blown away the competition by a wide margin. There was just nothing on the market that comes close. Now because of the delays, they've lost a huge advantage. Now it will be just another good game.
Both the psycis and the graphics of HL2 are already "we-have-seen-this-before". Doom 3 and FarCry have excellent graphics, in the same league of HL2, if not better. Games like Painkiller make excellent use of the Havok physics engine.
But that's not the point. The original HL wasn't either revolutionary in graphics or implementation (the sound though was quite good at the time), but the game itself. The story, the settings, the atmosphere. I'm EAGER to play HL2, and the reason it's not the graphics but the memory of the original HL.
Having said that, there's a few things on the Source engine that are quite impressive. The graphics, never mind being not original anymore, are excellent, same with the phyisics. Some game clips with characters talking, complete with facial animations, put to shame many actual games.
I just hope it comes out in time.
This is very visible in the outdoor areas.
Doom 3? Outdoor areas? Huh?
While it's true Doom 3 has a more robust engine, HL2 has much better looking textures and character models. This isn't as much due to the engine as it is the effort of the artists. Half Life 2 tries for photorealism while Doom 3 has blocky models with bland textures. Look at the Character Comparison Shot here to see the difference. And all Doom 3 has shown so far is that its engine can render dark laboratories and dark office buildings. We're going to have to wait for either an exceptional mod or a new game using the engine to see how pretty it is when the lights are on. I'm not sure if Quake IV is going to accomplish this, given the Quake series's tendency to take place in brown, gothic, industrial locales. Apparently, Quake IV is going to be rather dark as well. I hope it isn't a new trend.