Half-Life Episode 1 Gold, Details on 2 and 3

Gamespot has the word that the first of the Half-Life 2 episodes has gone gold. They also have details on the upcoming Episodes 2 and 3. Episode 1 is to be released on the 1st of June. From the article: "In addition to two new multiplayer modes and the Lost Coast tech demo, Episode One will sport a preview of its sequel, Half-Life 2: Episode Two. The expansion, the existence of which was revealed in February, will add another four- to six-hour mini-campaign to the Half-Life 2 saga when it is released later this year. Previously, the game had no official release window or date. Today's gold announcement also was the first official confirmation that a third Half-Life 2 episodic update is in development. Like Episode Two, Valve divulged little in the way of information about Episode Three, saying only that it was the last 'in a trilogy ... that will conclude by Christmas of 2007.'"

Comments

Unfortunately, I won't be playing this...

[republican gourd]

... because Steam forces an update that causes HL2 to freak out and crashs on my machine. Older versions were fine, more recent ones are absolutely unplayable. Since you basically can't only run *some* updates, its impossible to get the old version of the game back, so I'm screwed out of my $80 or whatever I paid on zero day. I will never suggest to anyone that they buy anything under this business model, its rape city.

Re:Unfortunately, I won't be playing this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you talked with Valve customer support about this? We have a pretty aggressive track record when it comes to addressing customer complaints... at least the verifiable kind. Believe me, we don't want our updates to cause problems with existing legitimate installations. That wouldn't serve our purposes any more than yours.

A.C. (anonymous Valve employee; opinions above are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the company, etc.)

Re:Unfortunately, I won't be playing this...

[PhrostyMcByte]

Steam is a good *optional* idea. Easy, automatic upgrades are nice. Being able to download the game to any vacation PC so long as I have my login is great!

What sucks is knowing the game probably won't run in 10 or 15 years time when I want to trigger some nostalgia, due to Steam going under or simply losing interest in supporting older games and not offering the download anymore.

Re:Unfortunately, I won't be playing this...

[jchenx]

Customer support always assumes that the customer doesn't know what you're doing. I'd rather not spend an hour or more having somebody walk me through a re-install just to see the problem recur. (I had already done this). Further, I had already verified that it was a HL2 update issue (rather than a change of a machine) because it literally changed from working -> broken within a single Steam update. I had played some time before, shut it off, turned it back on, watched Steam update itself, then watched it not work anymore. All my other intensive games, (Doom3, FarCry)... working perfectly.

The game was simply fucked, which turned me off as a customer permanently. I'm sure you guys offer great customer service or whatever, but I'm one of those people that doesn't want to waste hours of my life talking to you over a problem that *may* or may not be resolved to retain me as a customer for a delivery system that I have grown to absolutely despise.

As someone who works in QA for a living, and whose customers are end-users just like you, I wanted to give my two cents regarding customer service. (This applies to pretty much ALL software, not just Steam)

You are correct that customer service does NOT make up for a crappy experience. If software had no bugs, there'd be no need for customer service. As a QA engineer, it is my job to ensure that our product is bug free as much as possible.

The problem is that it is nigh impossible to create bug free code in this day and age, with the complexity of programs nowadays, and also how open the PC platform is. Then you also have to consider things like ship dates and costs. From the QA perspective, we're supposed to find the bugs and only allow release when the product meets our quality bar. Unfortunately, that bar can never be at the "perfect" rate, because that would mean nothing ever ships. (For example, we'd spend years alone testing every combination of hardware, drivers, network configuration, etc.)

So at some point, we have to ship. After that point, then we have to rely on things like customer service to get a gauge of what we did right, and what we did wrong (bugs that slipped, etc.). There are always new things that popped up that no one had any idea it would be an issue, most often due to external dependencies.

One example I'll give ... we got a user report complaining that our website was not working at all for him. There was lots of cursing, how we must have been incompetent, etc. Although we could have just ignored him for rudeness, we took the time to investigate. It turns out the issue was due to a piece of malware that had infected his machine. His issue actually had nothing to do with our site code, and there's nothing we could do about it, other than coding some bizarre one-off that detected this peculiar piece of malware and handled it with an appropriate error message. But that's obviously easier to do after the fact, and arguably not something that's a priority. (If you compare a feature that would affect a handful of users, versus working on a new feature that would affect a much larger number ... what would you choose?)

I guess what I'm trying to say is to cut customer support some slack. Any decent QA department WANTS to fix your problems, and we're not out to just "screw you over" with a bad product. Chances are that your issue is very specific to your configuration, for whatever reason. Yes, your experience does suck, and I completely understand that for a game, you DON'T want to spend hours on the phone walking through your support issue. But doing so may fix your problem, and make the product better overall.

Hooray!

[jgbishop]

While I'm not certain that the "episodic content" model will work in the long run, I'm very excited about these new chapters in the Half-Life universe. Half-Life 2 was an excellent game and I'm looking forward to playing through Episode One (an odd name if ever there were one). Hopefully the content in this expansion will match HL2's quality.

two new multiplayer modes?

[Jett]

What the hell are they?! I searched everywhere for the answer and can't find it - everywhere has nothing but hype about the HL2 singleplayer plot being advanced, how exciting!
HL2DM is suprisingly fun and well balanced so I might be willing to blow the $20, be nice to know what the hell multiplayer content is being added first though... The marketing on this is really crappy, it's all based on "find out what happens next in HL2" - I just want a simple feature list!

Re:two new multiplayer modes?

[Guspaz]

Err, no, I don't remember HL: Source being a letdown. It was exactly what I expected; HL1 in the Source engine. The huge improvement in lighting quality was quite nice when replaying HL1.

I should point you towards Black Mesa: Source, which seems to be what you want; a professional quality full remake of HL1 in the HL2 engine.

Only 5 hours?

[Ant P.]

For the price of two of these, I could've bought new and got much more than 10 hours of play from it.

Re:Money Grab

[LoofWaffle]

I'm actually pretty disappointed with the new SiN. I know that I'm not paying the 40-50 bucks for a full blown retail game, but I expected more than what I would get from a demo disc. What makes this more disappointing is that Ritual leaned on the game engine AND delivery model that Valve developed, thereby significantly reducing the costs of development and testing. Unless they a) reduce the cost or b) make the episodes longer, they won't be getting any more from me. I'll also avoid the HL2 episode until I hear more from the those who bought/played it.

Re:Money Grab

[Snowmit]

You got +4 Insightful for saying "I didn't like or understand the story in HL2"?

Lots of people enjoyed the story + gameplay and will happily pay to see it continued. You didn't and so won't pay. That's certainly your perogative.

Did you think that the story in HL 1 was gimped because the man in black was never properly explained? Did you think it was a rip off when they released two expansion packs and then (gasp!) a sequel? Did you refuse to see Lord of the Rings because they couldn't fit the whole story into a single movie? I'm going to assum that you don't like Lost either. I mean, they gimped the story in that show so hard that it's been two seasons and we STILL don't know what the fuck is going on.