Episode 2, TF2 & Portal - Expected Summer 2007

Formaldehyde said:
I like it. Because, you know, before they were all like "Yeah, steam and episodic content is the greatest mother****ing invention of all times. We are the most bad ass company in all game industry. We are going to bring a REVOLUTION to the whole game industry. Instead of waiting years for new games to come out, we'll be able to release a new episode every six months."

And now they're proving themselves wrong and full of shit. Ep.2 will come out more than a year after Ep1. And you know what's the best part? When it comes out, you'll get 3 hours of gameplay and then it's a whole another year of waiting for the next 3 hours of gameplay from Ep3.

Plus, it'll be beautiful when Ep3 comes out in Q4 2008 (optimistic guess), by then on a 4 years old engine. No matter how many "graphical updates" they add to the engine ("Hey, look! Now the HDR lightning reflects off of things at a slightly different angle!!! Plus now thanks to our new facil animation system the characters will be able to blink their eyes one at a time, besides the usual both at the same time. IT'S ANOTHER REVOLUTION!!!"), I doubt it'll look that great against engines 2 years in the future. It's starting to look outdated already anyway.

I, like most, always loved valve for the care and attention and quality they put into their games, and always hated EA for the exact opposite ("Christmas is coming along, it doesn't matter if the game doesn't even run for more than 2 seconds without crashing, it's going to be released!!"). But you know what? Now I hate them both for similar reasons (although at different ends of the spectrum), and I actually think EA may be on to something when they rush their releases. I mean, everyone likes a polished high quality product and all, but uh, I'd rather have like 4 games a year coming out that are 70% quality compared to valve's, than having to wait more than a year for 3 hours of 100% quality valve gameplay. I know you can't compare valve to EA, but still, you know what I mean.

And I bet all this waiting has something to do with the new revolutionary slightly different angle of HDR lightning reflecting off of things.... bleh, whatever...
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Yeah, because they said all that. Wait, no they didn't. You know, they are taking a risk when it comes to Episodic content - trying something new. But only that, they are juggling with Portal, TF2, and console ports. Get a grip on life and settle down until summer.

Why is it such a big deal? I'm sure I'll enjoy it all the same, and it isn't like there is a big gap of nothing to do until then.
 
This kind of thing is pretty much expected with Valve but I still wish they'd stop doing it. Don't speculate on release dates when you really have no idea when it will be done... it just ends up disappointing people who get their hopes up (though we should know not to do that by now :p). I honestly wish they'd just say "it's done when it's done" and only hint at release dates when it's very close to being finished.

Oh wellllllll..
 
Release TF2 Before all this. Release it now.

But you guys all know that, when it comes summer 2007, some hackers will decide to leak there new MASSIVE 3 HOURS OF GAMEPLAY and then it will take Valve another year to fix ALL THE PROBLEMS that suddenly happened to the game when this happened...

Dopes.

But its OK! We have Fortress-Forever coming soon yay!
 
This is getting annoying, so much for getting the episodic content in regular time intervals. Summer 2007 begins May-June time, jesus, what could they possibly need an extra 4 months to do?

Episode 2 was being worked on before even Episode 1 was released. That means by then they'd have been working on it for over a year. That's a year to do a few graphical updates and a few new environments. I doubt they'd push the release date back that far for portal, which is basically just a test of the feasibility of using "portal" technology in future games. The only thing I can think of is TF2.
 
Formaldehyde said:
Plus, it'll be beautiful when Ep3 comes out in Q4 2008 (optimistic guess), by then on a 4 years old engine. No matter how many "graphical updates" they add to the engine ("Hey, look! Now the HDR lightning reflects off of things at a slightly different angle!!! Plus now thanks to our new facil animation system the characters will be able to blink their eyes one at a time, besides the usual both at the same time. IT'S ANOTHER REVOLUTION!!!"), I doubt it'll look that great against engines 2 years in the future. It's starting to look outdated already anyway.
Click to expand...

You've shot yourself in the foot with that one - not only is what you've said just a bunch of speculation, Valve's still on the cutting edge two years after their 'outdated' engine was released, and four years after it's core engine features were locked down.

Features already coded for next gen source titles include IBR, soft particles, dynamic shadowing, new, scalable AI and particle systems using multi-core (a first in gaming), not to mention the new shaders they've been rolling out - extending phong shading, parralax occlusion, motion blur - and the cinematic physics work, another gaming first that looks ****in' incredible. Source is way ahead of the game.

Oh, and ****ing delayed again. ****sake.
 
If they're delaying it, it's for a good reason, so I say let Valve take as much time as they need to finish this. There are other games that warrant our attention.
 
Want... Team... Fortress... 2!
 
valve you suck

so much time to make a short 3 hour episode and you have to delay it even more?

Science damn it!
 
If you think about it , only 3-4 months are added to the possible time we have to wait. It was Q1 but now it's summer , so only 3-4 months.

Still , having it released a year after Ep1 is neat , not forgetting we are getting 3 games and they are going for a simu. release for all platforms. We have waited alot more to Ep1 after HL2 than we are going to wait for Ep2 - I think they starting to get the hang of it!
 
I wonder if the delay is because of the dual core support they are adding.
 
Its a sad day to be a Halflife fan...

Come on guys lets all hug and cry!

(hugs everyone and crys uncontrollably together)
 
NeoNight said:
I wonder if the delay is because of the dual core support they are adding.
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure they want to roll that out as a 'class leading' feature... I've a suspicion we'll be seeing those sexy weather effects in source before long. :O
 
If you want my opinion - i work for a games company- and if they recieved the same PS3 devkits as us, you turn them on and they do NOTHING - our programmers have spent months trying to get them to output anything - its SONY and well VALVE for releasing console at same time as PC - It will prob be ready for Q1 2007 - but PS3 wont.
 
This had to be expected, with Valve touting the simultaeneous PC & console release. For god's sake, why not just release them two months apart??
 
Everyone keeps bitching about the game being only 3 hours. Bullshit.

Average completion time 5h 38m

And that's with only 6.5% of people playing on Hard.

I don't see how someone can beat the game in 3 hours unless they've played it before, or they went through it not taking time to look at anything.

And it will probably be a quicker release than Episode 1. And it even comes with 2 other games (which I've heard nothing but good things about from play testers). And it's also going multi platform.

Hopefully this delay means we'll get that multicore stuff. Now you have a few more months to upgrade your system.

If you play Episode 1 with commentary, they talk a lot on how parts of the game were different before, and they saw how it wasn't that much fun, and they remade the area. I know there has been some people that have been play testing the game, and I'm sure they're going to be reworking the levels and story around.

Anyways, quit your bitching. Valve delayed basically every game they've released, and they have all been great. Maybe there's a correlation.
 
whatever, im over it. Got GoW and getting COD3 soon
 
NeoNight said:
I wonder if the delay is because of the dual core support they are adding.
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That and Vista optimisation I expect. The game is probably 95% locked down, they are undoubtably looking at adding new features.
 
Oh gah. This sucks.

Well at least I can play it for the holidays, I guess.
 
Ok, this is gay. This just totally murdered my interest to Ep2 and Portal.

I really can't see myself waiting eagerly and faithfully over 6 months for short episode of HL-gameplay, neat & clever but yet play-once-and-fugheddabouddit-Portal and multiplayer only TF2. Episodic content ain't bad idea, but 1 year between episodes which have less than 8 hours (everyone agrees?) of gameplay in the maingame... kills the concept.,
 
I don't think the modular argument is as important. Look at cryengine, had great graphics for the time, produced alot of games with quick turnover, and has already been upgraded to cryengine two, producing the best looking game ive seen to date. Source hasn't shown anything near the level of Crysis in that amount of time.


If valve really only has 104 people, producing steam, episodic content, producers, tf2, etc etc etc. thats a tiny staff, and no wonder everything is getting delayed.


If their team really is that small, they need to put all their eggs in one basket, esp with episodic content. Its so important for episodes to come out regularly, with consistant quality. When ep 3 comes out, of source is gonna grow with the rest of the industry, then it will look like an entirely different engine then hl2, and polycounts will be WAYYYYYY higher.


are you sure its only 104 employees?
 
TheMastahC said:
I don't see how someone can beat the game in 3 hours unless they've played it before, or they went through it not taking time to look at anything.
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Most people just brag about completing it quick.
 
I assume you guys already know that Valve said that EP2 will be larger then EP1 right?
 
What's the point of episodic content if they delay it so much? It's a good idea, but they executing it horribly. The plan was to give us small parts of gameplay frequently, but it's not frequently at all. We'll have been waiting over a year for an episode that most of us will finish in a weekend. Then we wait all over again.
 
I never realised hl2net forumites were so bad at maths!

Half-life 2: 6 years development for 12 hours gameplay.
Episode 2: 1 year wait for 6 hours gameplay.

Hm, doesn't really seem that bad a deal. To everyone whinging about how it's taking "so long" for them to get episodic content out, I suggest you take a step back and look at how long it takes for anyone to get a game out: Take a look at Prey, Crysis, STALKER, Fear, these games all took ages. The only games I've played recently that didn't take several years to develop were Need For Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142, both of which were carbon (arf!) copies of their precedessors, and had several thousand people behind them, and in the case of NFS were buggy as hell too!

Next person to draw unfair comparisons about episodic content gets slapped so hard they won't wake up till Episode 2 is out.
 
welp this is where they are going to shoot themselves in the foot. If the amount of time it takes to release an episode is on barely under the time it take another company to make a sequel, then there really isn't any point... they've been saying from the beginning that this whole episode idea was more like a test, and i think they are going to find out it fails. I much prefer getting a whole new game, then bits and pieces of it over a span of 6 or 7 years. What are you talking about ZoFreX? Half life 2 was about 20 hours of gameplay for me and episode one was about 3, not 6
 
Wow, you improved a lot in such a short time. Maybe you need to take those rose tinted glasses off? HL2 took me 12 hours, I know people who did it in less. Steam proves that average time for Ep1 is 6 hours, so calling it a 6 hour game seems fair. Name one decent game that's come out in the last year with a 1 year development time. Just one.
 
theroadtonowhere said:
welp this is where they are going to shoot themselves in the foot. If the amount of time it takes to release an episode is on barely under the time it take another company to make a sequel, then there really isn't any point... they've been saying from the beginning that this whole episode idea was more like a test, and i think they are going to find out it fails.
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It makes a world of difference when the 6 hour game you spend two years on comes with two extra games, and all of them are by and large of higher quality than anything else to come out that year.
 
Lets not forget that releasing games in episodes helps them figure out what people liked, and what the didn't like, and working that into the next episode. If they were to spend 6 years on one huge project they would be less likely to try out something new. If they add a new game play strategy throughout the game, and it fails, there goes the whole game and the 6 years that they spent on it. Now if they release a smaller version and spend 1 year on it, and the idea fails, they can fix what was wrong with it in the next episode.

It's all about being able to get feedback from the players and using that in the next episode to make the game better. You can already see this from the game play stats. They are able to record and see what gun people use the most, where they keep ding at and all that junk…
 
polyguns said:
I don't think the modular argument is as important. Look at cryengine, had great graphics for the time, produced alot of games with quick turnover, and has already been upgraded to cryengine two, producing the best looking game ive seen to date. Source hasn't shown anything near the level of Crysis in that amount of time.
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CryEngine wasn't designed to run on mid-to-low-end systems like Source was.
A lot of games? I can't think of any aside from Far Cry that used it.
Also, it hasn't been "upgraded to cryengine two" - that's like saying that the Quake engine was upgraded to Quake 2. They're totally separate. The Source engine upgrades have been done in situ, with the benefits frequently being retroactively applied.


If valve really only has 104 people, producing steam, episodic content, producers, tf2, etc etc etc. thats a tiny staff, and no wonder everything is getting delayed.


If their team really is that small, they need to put all their eggs in one basket, esp with episodic content. Its so important for episodes to come out regularly, with consistant quality. When ep 3 comes out, of source is gonna grow with the rest of the industry, then it will look like an entirely different engine then hl2, and polycounts will be WAYYYYYY higher.


are you sure its only 104 employees?
Click to expand...

No, what they need to do is stop giving out release dates.
 
polyguns said:
If valve really only has 104 people, producing steam, episodic content, producers, tf2, etc etc etc. thats a tiny staff, and no wonder everything is getting delayed.


If their team really is that small, they need to put all their eggs in one basket, esp with episodic content. Its so important for episodes to come out regularly, with consistant quality. When ep 3 comes out, of source is gonna grow with the rest of the industry, then it will look like an entirely different engine then hl2, and polycounts will be WAYYYYYY higher.


are you sure its only 104 employees?
Click to expand...
The Mythical Man-Month said:
Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.
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And if you don't know what The Mythical Man-Month is, then you can't talk about project management. FACT.
 
ZoFreX said:
I never realised hl2net forumites were so bad at maths!

Half-life 2: 6 years development for 12 hours gameplay.
Episode 2: 1 year wait for 6 hours gameplay.

Hm, doesn't really seem that bad a deal. To everyone whinging about how it's taking "so long" for them to get episodic content out, I suggest you take a step back and look at how long it takes for anyone to get a game out: Take a look at Prey, Crysis, STALKER, Fear, these games all took ages. The only games I've played recently that didn't take several years to develop were Need For Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142, both of which were carbon (arf!) copies of their precedessors, and had several thousand people behind them, and in the case of NFS were buggy as hell too!

Next person to draw unfair comparisons about episodic content gets slapped so hard they won't wake up till Episode 2 is out.
Click to expand...

QFTMFT.

BTW, can you slap me? So that I don't have to wait.
 
ZoFreX said:
I never realised hl2net forumites were so bad at maths!

Half-life 2: 6 years development for 12 hours gameplay.
Episode 2: 1 year wait for 6 hours gameplay.

Hm, doesn't really seem that bad a deal. To everyone whinging about how it's taking "so long" for them to get episodic content out, I suggest you take a step back and look at how long it takes for anyone to get a game out: Take a look at Prey, Crysis, STALKER, Fear, these games all took ages. The only games I've played recently that didn't take several years to develop were Need For Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142, both of which were carbon (arf!) copies of their precedessors, and had several thousand people behind them, and in the case of NFS were buggy as hell too!

Next person to draw unfair comparisons about episodic content gets slapped so hard they won't wake up till Episode 2 is out.
Click to expand...

If the episodes had new gameplay you might have a point but basically they are serving as pretty much just single player mappacks. They are reusing a ton of content: enemies, weapons, gameplay concepts, so them churning out a 6 hour addon in 1.5 years seems to most people to be a bit on the extreme side.
 
ZoFreX said:
I never realised hl2net forumites were so bad at maths!

Half-life 2: 6 years development for 12 hours gameplay.
Episode 2: 1 year wait for 6 hours gameplay.

Hm, doesn't really seem that bad a deal. To everyone whinging about how it's taking "so long" for them to get episodic content out, I suggest you take a step back and look at how long it takes for anyone to get a game out: Take a look at Prey, Crysis, STALKER, Fear, these games all took ages. The only games I've played recently that didn't take several years to develop were Need For Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142, both of which were carbon (arf!) copies of their precedessors, and had several thousand people behind them, and in the case of NFS were buggy as hell too!

Next person to draw unfair comparisons about episodic content gets slapped so hard they won't wake up till Episode 2 is out.
Click to expand...
Well HL2 at 6 years isnt a fair comparison due to the fact they spent about 3 or so years building an engine from the ground up.

Prey too is a ppretty unfair comparison. Sure it took 10 years or whatever if you take it from the original announcement but obviously that game got put on the side and was picked up by another developer. From the time that Prey was actually announced last year as being back in development there wasnt that long a wait at all for it. Crysis too hasnt been that delayed, its had 1 delay and besides that its schedule has more or less been for next year since it's based of tech that largely isnt out yet (DX10).

Stalker yes, thats a long wait.

But then again Valve did say with episodes they could push content out faster and they havent really. Also every episodic game I have played hasnt really made me go "wow". Being 6 hours its over far too over and I'm left unsatisfied and waiting for 12 months for a new title. A full game may well take 3 years and have a longer period in between but at least when I finish that full game I feel I have achieved something and been a part of something somewhat epic. I mean cmon, EP1 was just you guiding freeman to a train station and then it ended. The in between parts were good but in the end there was no real conclusion...nothing to really satisfy you for another 12 months.

Fingers crossed.
 
So, can we forget "episodic content" now, and go back to expansion packs please?

I'm only pissed because I want TF2 and, possibly Portal.
 
poo? said:
If the episodes had new gameplay you might have a point but basically they are serving as pretty much just single player mappacks. They are reusing a ton of content: enemies, weapons, gameplay concepts, so them churning out a 6 hour addon in 1.5 years seems to most people to be a bit on the extreme side.
Click to expand...
EP2 looks very different gameplaywise to HL2 IMO. They are using the same enemies but in different ways. I imagine fighting the chopper on foot in a trainyard is a bit different from fighting it in the airboat.
 
I've read through all the replies & clearly people are a bit peeved at this news. I suppose it's inevitable seing that we're on 'Valve time' here.

I wonder what the reason is for the delay? Given the HL2 fiasco & the ensuing bulls**t that Valve engaged in to try & smooth things over, I would take any reason given with a pinch of salt. What are people's views about the nature of the delay? Could it be something to do with the console market?

In any case as far as us PC gamers are concerned it's not really good news for episodic content is it. Whatever the reasons for this & however good the final product is, lets be straight here, we were all hoping for episodes more often than this, right?
 
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