Half-Life 2 Episode 2 Will Be Longer
For all the Half-Life 2 fans out there that are bummed about the next installment of HL2 Episodes being delayed until the fall, I have some news that might cheer you up a little: you’ll get more content and gameplay in Episode 2.According to Doug Lombari, director of marketing at Valve, the next Half-Life 2 episode will be noticeably longer than the first. “Episode 1 was about six hours of gameplay, and Episode 2 will be closer to eight hours of gameplay,” Lombardi said. Valve also said that despite the delay of Episode 2, the development cycle for the episodic content was getting shorter.
“Episode 1 took 18 months to complete and Episode 2 will end up being about 13 to 14 months, so we’re trimming it down,” he said. “I think we’ll get closer to a year and be on a 12 month cycle. We’ll see how it goes after this trilogy is done.”
In other Valve news, Lombardi said Steam will be getting some enhanced community features such as personalized stats and scores rankings for player profiles. “The idea is to add features so that people can build a community in Steam,” he said. “We’ll be rolling out the changes some time this spring.”
This is good news for people who are looking for ward to this game (ME), and although Episode one had only 4 - 5 hours of game play it was probably some of the best first person game play of all time.
Valve has made statements in the past that it’s developers don’t want to spend six years making another engine, which seems to be the reason why the are trying to get the most out of the source engine.
When this trilogy is over, my guess is they should state heading toward the third Half-Life, which would complete the series with a bang. The natural progression (and valve is full of surprises) would be for Gordon Freeman to travel into the combines home world and fight…
Only time will tell where they will go, but with gaming being what it is I’d say that the third half-life with a new engine is inevitable.
Source: Fringe Drinking
March 11th, 2007 at 8:08 am
[...] post by gundampilotspaz and a wordpress plugin by [...]