Half Life 2 Episode 3 (Discussion)

[imperial1scout]

An episode taking four years and counting to develop is a sign of incompetence. Since Valve don't have a history of that, especially looking at the time line of Half-Life 2 - Episode 2, I strongly suspect we will get a Half-Life 3. It is alarming how silent they have been about the Half-Life series during these years, either they are preparing something really big or they are acting incredibly dumb by putting stuff like DotA or L4D at the top of the priority list.

 

I don't think it's a sign of incompetence. Look how long it took them to make TF2, was that incompetence? Maybe, but sure was a damn good game in the end.

 

On another note, maybe they are having trouble with some new feature(s) not working the way they want. A Half-Life 3 would surprise me, honestly.

[Bjossi]

I don't think it's a sign of incompetence.

 

It most definitely is. But Valve are not incompetent developers, so either they're doing something huge in secret or they got the priorities handled by a monkey.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Considering the development time of Half-Life 2, does it really come as a surprise to people? Stop expecting another episode already. With this kind of development time it's obviously going to be a whole new game.

 

I find it likely Half-Life 3 will be using a brand new iteration of the engine, one that surpasses Portal 2 and L4D2 by lightyears.

[Bjossi]

But that is the whole silence thing. How do you know that they aren't just incredibly slow?

 

With Ep3 becoming HalfLife 3 it would hopefully put the final nail into the coffin of episodic releases.

[jumpyed]

Well, this is still episodic if you compare it to the other HF releases and valve time.

[imperial1scout]

Okay, I'm a bit of a research whore, but I don't remember where I get information, so take this with a grain of salt:

 

I read (somewhere) that Valve was put off by how much changes in their trailers they release, (like the episode 2 trailer) and what actually comes out, so they are not releasing trailers until they are very close to being done.

 

If I had to guess, not putting out any news makes them feel like they have more free range to change things, so they change more things, which takes more time. Then add on to the fact that they want to add new features to episode 3 (or half-life 3, whatever) like the deaf character that I read about (again, somewhere). That may not be going well, and they want to get it right, so they take more time.

 

And then, top that all off with the time it takes to make Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, TF2 updates, and Left 4 Dead updates and we might have an explanation of why its taking so long. Plus, the said (somewhere...) that Ep. 3 will be darker and feature "the death of your children". Whatever that means. That's gotta take a while to get right.

 

So, all speculation? Yes. Is it wrong? Most likely, seeing that I can't even verify the sites where I heard this information, but I am not surprised nor even put out by the long development time: I trust them. (Not saying anyone doesn't) And while I wish it would hurry up, I'm not annoyed that its taking so long.

 

...And I'm not trying to insult anyone either. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Obviously it's gonna come out eventually, so I would advice everyone to just remain patient. We know Valve really cares about giving us the best games possible.

[jumpyed]

Obviously it's gonna come out eventually, so I would advice everyone to just remain patient. We know Valve really cares about giving us the best games possible.

 

Patience is a virtue, so practice it.

[Darkorth]

I knew i've read about the matter this month (IDK if the source is older) but here it is

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-13-valves-half-life-dev-hampered-by-steam

 

I agree with this theory, it makes sense, if steam has problems valve has to put devs to solve problems (if valve had an outage like sony probably ppl would kill themselves, knowing that the disconnected mode only works if it's set while connected to steam network, a sudden outage would make most of people unable to play anything SP or MP on Steam) Also I think this is a theory from a manager of another company, so we don't know if this is the problem, but it makes sooo much sense

[Alyxx Thorne]

It might be very likely, yes.