Half-Life 2 and E3 2004

Jynx_77 said:
Are you joking? It was all just a huge conspiracy to delay it further, if there was a source code leak then all the software companys would of knon about it and tried to get it.

Next thing you know they'll try to bring some more tales up and say that it'll be delayed on account of the programmers playing it too much and not making it. I know I would
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...is this a joke? The top paragraph, anyway.
 
I'm at the point where I won't be incredibly disapointed if it is release even a year from now. Don't get me wrong I still am looking forward to playing it (maybe frag some of you guys too ;)), but it's been so long since we've had any exciting news from Valve.

Of course I'd be overjoyed if it did come out soon.... who knows, maybe they'll blow us away with an E3 presentation :)

Anyways, don't hold your breath until it is released (for 1 u'll die) and for 2: any time is fair game now ;)
 
I've been "meh" about HL2 lately, but, I went back and played the HL Uplink demo.. and suddenly I feel all nostalgic and I'm looking forward to HL2 again :)
 
Onya Shuzer.

Y'know that things have been a little down on these boards when I haven't "onya"d anyone for a while...
 
I need to play through Half-Life... and finish this time.
 
I agree with some of the above - he didn't say Half life 2 :D
 
Yup, I bet he wasn't talking about HL2!!


... My optimism-reserves are running out. I wonder where that SDK they mentioned went.
 
theGreenBunny said:
Yup, I bet he wasn't talking about HL2!!


... My optimism-reserves are running out. I wonder where that SDK they mentioned went.
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Oh, we should be getting it any minute now, after all they did say it was going to be out 'soon' and that was what? 3-4 weeks ago?
 
hehe that would be bad.
to quote Steelhead (that arrogant forum troll we all loved to hate): "mark my words, September 30th 2004, you wont see Half-life 2 before then and not after then" (lol)

the good news however, is that Im taking my HL2 pre-order money and slapping together with another fistful of cash and purchasing my first Airsoft gun... and then slowly getting the other tac gear I need....

goodbye Hl2 ... helllooooo Tokyo Marui HK 51!! :D
 
i think we should just move on and forget about HL2... yeah its hard really, but after what valve is doing to us? they deserve it :angry:
 
Striker, relax m8, valve are doing a great job.
 
Really, they aren't... I do not doubt their ability to make quality games, but they have a real problem with their PR department!
 
Uh, just because valve is going to e3 doesn't mean they're showing half life 2. They could just show counterstrike: CZ again. Or maybe even show TF2 or CS2. Once again, the community is jumping to conclusions.
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And once again, the community jumps at the first possible bit of optimism whenever they get some bad news. Why on earth would I be talking about any other project? Next to DNF, TF2 is the biggest vaporware we've seen in the last 6 years; CS2 is pretty much unannounced and CS:CZ is having a simultaneous worldwide release planned with a ship date being announced in the next few weeks and advanced previews are being given to sites like Gamespy and probably IGN. Last I heard, DOD v1 is still being tweaked; and even if tehy have got the Source engine now, they won't have anything to show for it yet.

I meant HL2, he knew I meant HL2 and he responded as such. I've sent back a follow up reply.

As for Halo being shown at E3 years after release, I think you'll find that that was the PC version or Halo 2.

Steelhed could have been right, I hope he's not; but I'm not going to expect it before May 04 so I don't get disappointed again like I did in Sept 2003.

Keeson said:
Hmmm the seeds of doubt seem to be planted here all of a sudden.... :dork:

Slowly but surely, people will begin to realize and accept that HL2 isn't coming out till my oft predicted April 2005.

There is a secret Valve software doesn't want anyone to know and that is that the real HL2 (not the illusionary one shown at E3) sucks ass. Fixing it so that it is actually fun will take 2 years minimum. This parallels the development of HL1 except it won't be delayed for only one year, HL2 is a much more complex and ambitious game to make than HL1, so its going to take 2 years of delays before it is out.


"except for the fact that it's taken an unbelievably long time to do--Half-Life 2 has been a lot more fun for us than Half-Life" - Gabe Newell


The year 2003 in retrospect for Valve was a year of obtaining funds:
  1. engine sales
  2. video card packin deals
  3. showing the game to Hollywood execs in back in July looking to hawk the HL movie rights

all this to get cash in order to pay for the expensive HL2 development and the money draining failed CS:CZ development. All it took was pulling the wool over the eyes of a bunch of rabid fans with a phony release date (Sept 30) designed to create huge hype and awareness allowing them to obtain as much money as possible.

The year 2004 looking forward for Valve will be a year of silence mostly as they pull down the office blinds, ignore the world, and work hard on the game for its eventual 2005 release.

If they do eventually release a Ver 1.0 SDK for HL2 it will only be because they want to keep as much of the mod talent from abandoning them for Doom3 or Farcry. If you are working on a HL2 mod you really should consider jumping ship to a game that will actually come out this year. :imu:
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Jeez man, do you know who shot Kennedy? :O I don't know where you get your information or ideas from but Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington were pretty much millionaires when they left Microsoft and put in all their own money to buy office space, an engine and a team of about 20 people. That game they made then went on to buy them brand new offices, a lot more staff and quite probably even more money. Money's not the issue here.

If you're a mould breaking video game, you're gonna be approached by card developers so they can have help in promoting their cards. Both people benefit from the deal; but it was pretty inevitable.

The story about there being a HL movie was a complete rumor. Shortly after the rumor Gabe responded to an e-mail saying something along the lines that if they were to sell off the licence/rights for someone to make a HL movie then they'd be very careful that they had a lot to do with the production process.

Illusionary version shown at E3? I've played that version buddy, it's quite real. On retrospect, your above post is quite possibly a joke. At least I hope it is :)

But yeah; it's not looking great but we know the game's coming. People concentrate too much on the history of TF2 - but that doesn't matter. As apart from completely scrapping the project; HL2 is following the exact history of HL1. Appeared at E3, blew people away, yada yada, restarted it, E3, delay, E3, release. We know the rest from there.
 
Chris_D said:
I meant HL2, he knew I meant HL2 and he responded as such. I've sent back a follow up reply.
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I guess we're all waiting for that reply now :(

I suppose we better get it over with.

*BRACES SELF FOR RELEASE DATE THAT IS VERY FAR AWAY*
 
Well at the end of the day, the official release date IS TBC 2004. That's the date Vivendi have sent out; that's the date we have to go by.

I remember, back in the day (about 6 months ago) when there were all these doubts about Valve hitting Sep 03 that the only dates we would go by is what Valve would give us. Even when Vivendi came back and said it's delayed, even though games retailers were saying they were getting their info from the publisher - we still chose to believe it'd be out in September 2003. It wasn't. And all the information we were recieving from various sources at the time was all true. Everyone started saying April 2004; which was right because that's what Vivendi announced a few weeks ago. Then they changed their schedule and now it's TBC 2004. It's not out in April.


Chris "Fragmaster II" Deeming
 
The story about there being a HL movie was a complete rumor. Shortly after the rumor Gabe responded to an e-mail saying something along the lines that if they were to sell off the licence/rights for someone to make a HL movie then they'd be very careful that they had a lot to do with the production process.
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yeh Id hate too see a movie of half life made, and have it all not feeling proper, all hollywoodised. that would suck.. valve would have to get in on it if they wanted to ever make a decent movie,, lol they could do 3 movies. a trilogy. when all 3 games are done :p
 
since hl is probably the scariest game i've ever played i'd expect the movie to scare me....which would not happen, thus the idea of a hl movie blows
 
true, you cant really do it again, the game was like a movie in its self.. maybe they might think of another orgional story line for a movie,.
 
owned. Alright Chris_D. I'll write down a note to not question you again.

Do you think we'll see a glimpse of TF2 in 2004? That "TF2 is sort of an open issue for us" sounds like the game is on a backburner.... turned off. At this point, I guess even E3 2005 would be good.
 
"though nothing final to announce right now."
 
TF2 was originally put on hold so that Valve could create their own engine (i.e. Source). This was the same engine they were developing Half-Life 2 on; which was a secret anyway as the first real news we had about it was after 4 and a half years last May. If they'd carried on showing news and screenshots of TF2 we'd already have known what the Source engine looked like and is capable of. It would have got boring quickly.

They haven't necessarily put it on the backburner, but their main project is still Half-Life 2. If you think about it; Valve are working on a lot of projects in comparison to other developers. You've got Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike 2, Day of Defeat 2, Steam, and they're still maintaining Counter-Strike 1.6, Half-Life and so on. Last time I heard there was a small team dedicated to working on Team Fortress 2.
 
Last time I heard there was a small team dedicated to working on Team Fortress 2.
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Hmmm interesting. I would really like to see what TF2 has evolved into. I remember Valve originally saying the TF2 would not have any player controlled vehicles, but now that we have seen the fantastic buggy vehicle in HL2 I think we can assume we'll be able be seeing a whole plethora of military vehicles. Preferably equipped with real weapons, not DIY tools :E .
 
One of the rumors floating around about TF2 though, is that it's now set in a somewhat futuristic setting. I really really hope that one's not true.
 
Where would that information come from? Valve certainly wouldn't let slip information like that.
That'll be purely rumour.

Then again, you could say that TFC is in the future. Teleports, rail guns, ammo dispensers... no matter what they do to the game providing it keeps the good old sense of TF gameplay; we'll be happy.
 
Sai said:
since hl is probably the scariest game i've ever played i'd expect the movie to scare me....which would not happen, thus the idea of a hl movie blows
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Man, you obviously didn't play the Doom games back in the old days. Now THEY were ****ing scary. The AvP series is another one that makes you piss in your pants while "playing". At least my way of "playing" AvP is to scream a lot and try to press esc all the time while my friends force me to continue, laughing... them bastards). :x But anyway, a HL film would be great! Just as long as Valve would be there to make sure it would look and feel like HL, not some awful Hollywood "interpretation". However, it's not very likely that the Hollywood honchos would let Valve do this so we probably won't be seeing a HL film any time soon. :(

One of the main reasons I love HL so much is the fact that it isn't TOO scary, but instead scary in a good way, not in a piss-in-your-pants-while-playing way. I know I'm the biggest pussy this side of earth, but is there really someone who wasn't scared shitless while playing Doom or the AvPs? There are probably more games like these, but I usually try to avoid them as much as I can. Obviously, Doom 3 is NOT on my shopping list. :eek:

Anyways, OT... I'm usually not a very optimistic type of guy, but it *COULD* be possible that they are announcing CS2 at E3 this year. I'm not going rule out the option that they will do the same with CS2 as they did with HL2. You know, develop the game in more or less secrecy and then boom, show it to everyone at E3. But then again, Vivendi DID change the date from April to TBA so unfortunately it is more than likely that we won't be seeing HL2 for a while now. I just *wish* they'd get it out this year... HL is still my favourite game and I'm expecting A LOT from HL2 which is probably only a bad thing, because no matter how good a game they make, I'll still probably be dissapointed :/. Oh well, if anyone can do it, it's Valve. I still have a lot of confidence in them.
 
The thing that bums me out about all these delays is that the tech freeze was supposedly a YEAR ago now. That means that the tech will be two years old by the time the game ships: way behind those games trying to play catch up on features.
 
Apos said:
The thing that bums me out about all these delays is that the tech freeze was supposedly a YEAR ago now. That means that the tech will be two years old by the time the game ships: way behind those games trying to play catch up on features.
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Im pretty sure that they changed A LOT of things from the HL2 that we saw at E3. You can see this when you look at the DX9 vid.
 
I wonder.

I have this magazine that interviews Gabe dated July 2003.

PCPP:How long has Half-Life 2 been in development? And what stage of the process is the game at right now?

Gabe Newell: We started pretty much right after we finished Half-Life. With the excepetion of Yahn Bernier, whose working with Robin Walker on the Team Fortress 2 team, the Half-Life team switched to Half-Life 2 and then we added bunch of people like Mike Dussault (developer of LithTech), and Gary McTagggart and Charlie Brown (developer of Bioware's Infinity Engine). The engine functionality was frozen last September (September 2002), and we're planning on shipping September 30th of this year.
 
Valve added Charlie Brown to their staff?
... can't help it... must... not... laugh...... screw it. LOL

He must be in charge of implementing the "kick the football to the moon" physics.
 
It is pretty rediculous how late this game is coming out. In May 2003, Valve tells us to get ready for 9/30/03.

Now we can look forward to seeing what? More bink videos at E3 2004? LOL

They might as well just re-play the videos from last year and get a trained monkey to sit by the monitor and pick bugs out of it's hair.

By time HL2 comes out, 3 or 4 Direct X 9 games, including possibly Doom 3 will already be out.

And by time 9/30/04 rolls around, who the hell is gonna care anymore?

I REALLY feel bad for the ATI XT owners who are going to wind up waiting atleast a YEAR for the damm game to come out!
 
And what if they will release the game during e3 2004 ? is it possible?
 
OMG!thats right they could go there and say -

HL2 IS GOLD! TF2 WILL BE PRESENTED!

But very unlikely
 
on the film note, there's not really enough story to make a film conversion of Half-Life. They'd need to think up a cool storyline inbetween the experiment gone awry and the end with gman.
 
Well, to latch onto one further bit of optimism ^^

If HL2 wasn't done, they'd certainly show it at E3, whereas if it is some other game that may not be complete enough to show at E3 there would be a degree of uncertainty... hence the lack of surety in the email...


rofl... grasping at straws now ;)
 
From what I've seen; Halflife2 will be 3 levels higher in quality( gameplay, atmosphere, etc)
then any game coming out in the near future (by playing the demo of far cry, I can already say that that one won't be at halflife2's level..altough it's a cool game with nice graphics).
We don't need to 'fear' those "trying to catch up-games".

I have NO DOUBT whatsoever that, whenever halflife2 will come out, it will shake the industry.
Ppl get a bit negative about valve, because of their frustration about expectations of release dates..and some ppl tend to also take a negative stance when they see this :)

When you will see new media, or when the game is released..you will see that i'm right.

( and btw..it can't take any longer now i think, because if gabe said that they were planning on releasing 30 sept, it was obviously almost done. The reason it was delayed was: obsiously the hacking, and maybe a huge bug)
The only reason it would come out 30 sept this year, is when they have a cool new idea to add to the game, and they want to do that :]

I think it might just as well come out very soon.
 
Well, as I see it, we win either way. If HL2 is going to be released before E3, then we're going to get some info from VALVe on some new stuff. Or at least, new info on old stuff (TF2, CS2, etc).

If HL2 isn't released by E3, then we stand to get a whole load of new pics, and videos and information on its progress...
 
I will be very surprised if HL2 is released anytime before 2005.
 
So long as Steam is not ready for commercial use HL2 will be delayed. End of story.
 
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