"Episode 3 is hard to make; let's make L4D2"

[i_liek_shootan]

In my opinion Valve bit off more than they could chew with Ep 3, at least initially.

It's supposed to be the zenith of the Half-Life series, their #1 piece of IP. The culmination of 14 years of game development.

They want to make it a Meta Score 96 game, PC GAME0r "Best Game Ever" Award, but they're worried that it might not be.

Therefore they're taking their time over it.

The worry with this is that a dev gets cold feet like 3DR did with DN4EVAR and keeps fussing over the game willing it to be perfect because they themselves are perfectionists and everyone is expecting godlike genius from them. It's a lot of pressure to handle in a job.

Analogy is somewhat disingenuous given that Valve have a trackrecord of success under pressure (HL2 was the biggest release I'd ever seen on PC at the time) whereas 3DR had a great hit with DUKE3D but unfortunately couldn't follow it up.

 

[Captain M4d]

Remember when they released the first EP2 trailer and it showed a part that was cut out of the game?

 

[Noodle]

The worry with this is that a dev gets cold feet like 3DR did with DN4EVAR and keeps fussing over the game willing it to be perfect because they themselves are perfectionists and everyone is expecting godlike genius from them. It's a lot of pressure to handle in a job.

Analogy is somewhat disingenuous given that Valve have a trackrecord of success under pressure (HL2 was the biggest release I'd ever seen on PC at the time) whereas 3DR had a great hit with DUKE3D but unfortunately couldn't follow it up.

How hard could it be to "perfect" DN4ever? There are only so many fine-tunings for blowing stuff up. It's not like they were frozen over the story...

 

[i_liek_shootan]

I think they suffered from massive feature creep as I understand it.

If you think back to Duke3D, for its time, it was revolutionary in terms of how many different ways you could interact with the world.

They had interactive CCTV, Toilets, Washbasins, Reflective Mirrors, Pool Tables, TV Sets....of course Strippers, among many more.

I think Broussard is OTR as stating that their aim in Duke 4 was to bring about a "step change" in interactivity for First Person games.

Feature Creep in these sorts of things can be very hard to control and probably delayed them a bucketload.

 

[JUL3]

I would much rather see Episode Three than L4D2, I mean L4D is cool, but to most VALVe IS Half-Life, without Half-Life VALVe wouldn't exist.