Valve Talks Half-Life 2 Episodes 2 And 3

With the fall release of Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal growing ever closer (check out the new trailer), Valve is finally beginning to release some information about what actually happens in Episode 2 and some information about Episode 3's progress. From the Episode 2 preview: "Looking down the mountainside reveals a scene that immediately demonstrates one of the key elements of Episode Two: expansiveness. Far off in the distance is the semi-destroyed Combine headquarters, with mighty plumes of smoke rising into the sky amidst a shattered cityscape. Arcing up towards the sky from the imposing edifice is brilliant white stream of energy, meeting the cloud layer in a turbulent maelstrom--a 'portal storm,' Alyx notes."

Comments

Re:Allocation of Resources

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Different skill sets for different things. I suspect episode 2s models and most of the maps are done. Only minor tweaks left, which don' t require 24/7 mappers, so they move onto episode 3 while the rest finish off episode 2. Simple logic tells you this.

Re:Copy protection?

[Ford Prefect]

Did enough people accept all this that it didn't matter for their sales? Does this mean Episode 2 will have all of the above copy protection techniques? Obviously I won't drop any more money on such software.

You mean you actually spent money on buying a boxed copy of a computer game? Come on, it's 2007 - digital distribution has been around for years!

Boxed versions of Valve games now (for the PC, anyway) just contain compressed, encrypted data files to save you a big download. Once installed, they're the same as versions of the games purchased online - they need to be decrypted and authenticated once, and after that you can run Steam in its offline mode if you're that paranoid. The only reason I can think of buying stuff offline now is when market forces conspire to put the boxed version on super-special offer. I believe the boxed Episode One was available very cheaply in the USA - but was astoundingly expensive in the UK, so we got a much better deal buying online over here.

But then, you're just the usual troll whingeing about Steam whenever Valve is mentioned. Carry on!

Re:Copy protection?

[Fweeky]

"How about people actually TRY it and see that it works excellently"

I've bought plenty via Steam, but this is going a bit far; it works (mostly), but it's not exactly the most well written of applications. It takes ages to start up (~10s) and authenticate (another ~5-15s), it eats massive quantities of CPU for no apparant reason, bits of it break and remain broken for extended periods of time (all my third party Source mods just say "Sorry, this game is unavailable" unless I launch them from desktop shortcuts now), there's no opportunity to accept/reject patches or roll back when things go wrong...

Stardock Central is rather more friendly; it actually looks and feels like a real application, starts in a second or so, asks me nicely before installing patches (while giving me useful changelogs for them and letting me install betas without fiddling with obscure command line arguments and restarting), lets me roll back to previous versions, uses about 1/3rd the memory or less, doesn't occasionally dead/livelock, and doesn't leave daemons running as SYSTEM all the time even when you close it.

Re:Copy protection?

[rsmoody]

That's a valid concern, however, you can still run Steam without internet access, it just runs in an offline mode. They don't FORCE you to connect to play the games. Also, since the HL1 stuff was pre steam, if you bought it back then, you can still install from CD. So, I think you are still OK if Valve shuts down, just run in Offline mode.