Half-Life 2 Ship Date Confirmed

An anonymous reader writes "Worthplaying has the scoop on the official going gold of Half-life 2. According to their information it has a confirmed ship/store date of November 16!" Gamespot has details on the ship date as well.

Comments

Taking the Steam out...

[SIGALRM]

"Half-Life 2 will go down as one of the best-selling PC titles, and we are thrilled to deliver this ground-breaking title to the worldwide gaming community this fall."

I'm excited about this game... don't get me wrong, but you have to wonder about the effect of Doom 3 getting several months of play in advance of HL2's release and the mod community has been very active so far on Doom. I'll get the game when it comes out, but I've already been wowed by the graphics in Doom 3, so it's taken the Steam (pun intended) out of my thrills for HL2. That said, however, I'm really excited to see the physics (I've played CS Source and as a taste--it's very cool).

Re:Taking the Steam out...

[PhrostyMcByte]

From what I've played in Doom 3 and CS:Source and what screenshots I've seen of HL2, it looks like Doom 3 already has superior graphics. However, I suspect HL2 will have much better gameplay because its physics will allow us to interact with the environment. I guess we'll see soon enough.

Nice to hear....

[Nos.]

Of course CS is the most popular mod, but more people are awaiting other mods such as Natural Selection (my favourite) and DoD, as well as many others. I'm not in a rush to buy since I'm mainly a multiplayer gamer. Though it would be nice to play the game and experience the new engine. I'll probably end up purchasing it in the next little while, though I'll still be playing a lot of Natural Selection on the original HL.

Brings tears to my eyes...

[orevo]

As Half-Life 2 sits on my computer preloaded, it brings tears to my eyes to hear this. Finally! Anyway, for the curious, if you preloaded from STEAM you still can't play it until Nov 16th unfortunately. You can thank Vivendi for that one, but at least you don't have to go to the store on the 16th, you can just wake up and play after a small download. I know I'm staying up till midnight.

Better than DNF I guess

[TRS-80]

Only released more than a year after the original release date of September 30, 2003. Now to buy a new video card (good thing I didn't get a 9800 Pro back when they were released, hey?).

before i RTFA

[Tibor the Hun]

does anyone know when the steam downloads will be unlocked/available?
the same day?

Half-Life 2 vs. Doom 3

[cablepokerface]

Boy, I really hope this game delivers, cause months after the doom 3 release people finally dare to admit that the game simply did not deliver without being called a troll. And that's an understatement; big parts of the game were simply no fun at all. Just an ordinary shooter with nothing new and different aside from the fact that it just looked damn pretty.

I can't wait for HL 2, Carmack has left allot of open territory.

Re:Half-Life 2 vs. Doom 3

[incom]

Unless HL2 comes out for a console, I sure won't be playing it. Doom3 is atleast multiplatform, and thus I can play it on my Linux PC(although I was sort of expecting near simultanious release like ut2k4, but its here now). Honestly , half-life wasn't that great, it was the fluke of counterstrike that helped it out.

Re:Half-Life 2 vs. Doom 3

[Sgt York]

I think I expected too much from D3. I got it a few weeks ago, (I really can't afford to buy them as they come out) and I'm playing it now.

It's scaring the crap out of me at every turn, but it's not engrossing. D3's great to look at, but I can remember playing Doom2 starting after dinner and, after what seemed like a few minutes, blinking at the window, wondering why the hell the moon was so bright. Remember shutting it down, and seeing the "playtime" number? That was depressing sometimes. Same thing happened with HL.

Anyway, that doesn't happen with D3, and it's not just that I'm older. I've done it recently, too. It's a personal preference, but I don't lose track of time when I play it. It's fun. It's a lot of fun. But it doesn't come close to the original, and that disappointed me.

I hope HL2 lives up to its predecessor, but I'm expecting just a prettier version. That way I may be pleasently surprised.

Re:Nov 17...

[superpulpsicle]

Actually it's better to wait till you know for sure that your video card drivers can handle the game.... THEN call the sick day.

Doom III sat on my shelf to collect dust for a month until Catalyst 4.9 was released.

Get hl2 out of my system

[jlefeld]

Luckily I will be able to play this all thanksgiving break, and beat it before finals :)

ATI Coupon

[DeadBugs]

I wonder if anyone has the ATI coupon for HL2 but no longer have the ATI vid card?

Re:Oblig Quote

[Ba3r]

Except that it has been stated over and over again that originally they were just doing the CS port to Source to prove how easy it was to port, and then they realized how much the community wanted the same old CS but with bodies that tumbled down stairs and pretty water, and thus they gave it marginally more polish and presto, you have the Pre-release CS:Source.

Its a nice little token of appreciation to their audience and customers, why can you not be happy with that?

The fact that they realized most were not interested in a HL2 multiplayer, but rather a great mod scene and a bangin singleplayer just shows how responsive to the community they are, and in todays far more corporate big studio electronic entertainment industry, this is a major show of good faith.

STEAM and release dates

[Mean_Nishka]

I realize there are reasons for delaying the steam release until the physical copy is out, but I do hope that future electronic releases will be available the minute they've gone gold.

The entire promise of electronic distribution is that you don't need to wait for manufacturing and distribution to get the product available nationally (or internationally). Having to wait for 'release dates' is silly..

I care!

[SuneSpeg]

Team Fortress still holds!

It was the first multiplayer shooting game i ever played. I played it first time as a quake1 mod on my Amiga1200 (using the ppc version on the stunning 603cpu.),and i still play it under steam ~ 10 years after.

Im willing to trade CS:source to TFC:source.

2fort5 for president !

Re:Oblig Quote

[Ba3r]

They charge you 50 dollars for Half Life 2. Thats a normal price for a pre-release great game. In addition, you get CS:Source.

Wallhacks are not a defect of the engine (its a tweaked video card driver, something impossible to stop), and Fullbright skins can only be prevented if you verify all the resources on the person's computer prior to connecting, something that the hordes of impatient CS players would not tolerate.

Find me a single game in all of computer game history that has had a cheatless (hah!), flawless (hah!^2), "Final" Final Release. Don't kid yourself, Valve did a superb job here.

btw,thx for the console cmd, will try thatand see if i get a better framerate.

Re:Oblig Quote

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

"Wallhacks are not a defect of the engine (its a tweaked video card driver, something impossible to stop), and Fullbright skins can only be prevented if you verify all the resources on the person's computer prior to connecting, something that the hordes of impatient CS players would not tolerate."

Not in this case.

r_shadowwireframe 1 will give you wireframes around all shadows that show through walls.

r_flashlightfov 120
r_flashlightfar 1000 will give you a flashlight that lights up the whole screen, r_flashlight constant 100 if you want to make it even brighter.

(for the record, the only reason I have no problems releasing these so publicly is Valve is like microsoft as far as refusing to fix things until they're exploited badly.)

As for more tweaks.. try the command "cvarlist mat_" and just look through and play with those. You can lower the quality pretty far with those, and easily raise the framerate. Just changing the directx level to 7.0 (again, mat_dxlevel 70) was enough to give me a 50fps boost (up to >100)
Depending on your card and such I'm sure you could get other good boosts by disabling bumpmapping, diffuse lighting, antialiasing, etc. (some of this can be controlled by the "advanced" video settings window, but not to this extreme).

And for all you quake3 lovers out there, theres everyones favorite picmip settings to give you walls that look almost entirely untextured because theyre so low. Personally I can't stand playing like that, but I forsee it becoming the new standard for leauge play since you can change to it after you take your pregame screenshots.

I don't mind that you can cheat, I just mind that it is so easy. I'd atleast like to have had to write some custom hacked shader, or maybe a directx hook. Instead, its all in the console for you. Not that I cheat online, I just treat it like any real hacker would -- break it for the fun and challenge. Maybe thats why I'm so dissapointed at the ease of cheating..