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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."
I remember being really pissed about this "feature" at first. Up until I realized that all I needed to reinstall the game, was a username and password and the Steam client. It would download everything for every game I had on my account. This included the Half Life 1 series which only required that I enter my valid serial number one time. Now, as far as copy protection goes, I would much rather have something check the internet once in a while than have me pull out the CD/DVD every time I want to play. Give it a try, you may find that you don't mind it as much as you would think. I have never noticed the Steam client doing anything out of the ordinary. Also, you can still play the game without it connecting, just either firewall Steam, or disconnect just before running Steam. It will try to connect, then go to offline mode and will not, that I know of, try to connect again later. I like this copy protection WAY better than the other forms and never thought that I would. I would think that you could sell it, but the next owner would need to have the username and password to your Steam account and all your games are lumped together, it's all or nothing. So, that would be a negative to you I would think. One more positive is that it will check for updates and get them for you, that's nice to me. My .2
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There are some other advantages to the Steam platform that helps Valve out if you can get over the paranoia of them "spying" on you. One example I can think of was that, through Steam, Valve was looking at the load times for HL2 on different users computers and noted that the time was highly affected by the fragmentation of the game files. As a result, they now defragment the game files in the background without the user noticing or having to run Disk Defragmenter on their own. They also use the system to identify parts of maps where players get stuck for long periods of time to help them in designing levels. All of these sorts of things are "good" for the consumer.
I also agree with another child post that the ability to enter your game key once and never have to touch the CD's/DVD's again is a major plus. Now each time I switch computers or upgrade, I just log on to steam and it downloads and installs all of my games overnight.