Valve do however have the disadvantage of (largely) being their own publisher, so they give themselves leniency with deadlines. However EA is their console publisher and I think they've had some impact on them, what with L4D2 coming out exactly a year later.

I wouldn't compare them to 3D Realism with DNF either. They did release Team Fortress 2 eventually, even if it took 9 years.

[Octillus]

Valve has time and time again, with the Half Life series, produced top notch games that have a compelling settings, characters, and a pretty decent story. I just kind of hate that they end Episode 2 with a cliff hanger ending and now, well over a year after it's release have not given us a single shred of anything.

Make that 2 years honey.


My house has been engaging in an audio tug of war between addicted and Dragon Age: Origins.

Or rather two of us are. The other two hide upstairs and read comic books.

I said well over a year didnt I?

Total side note: I'm so glad they took out some of the cheap perks in Modern Warfare 2. So many people in CoD4 are running around with Juggernaut and Frag x3. Hope they enjoy it while they have it because they are both GONE in MW2!

I said well over a year didnt I?

Total side note: I'm so glad they took out some of the cheap perks in Modern Warfare 2. So many people in CoD4 are running around with Juggernaut and Frag x3. Hope they enjoy it while they have it because they are both GONE in MW2!

Nooooo! Frag x3

Yup!

And Martyrdom is a deathstreak, so no more of that all the time! Sounds like it's gonna be way better.

MW2 is gonna be siiiiick.
thank god they took out Jugg, fuckin pissed me off.
EVERYONE USES THE SAME PERKS

It is most definitely comparable to Duke Nukem Forever. They are using an engine that they should know all too well by now. Yet they cant even crank out a single screen shot.

Please do not get me wrong, I love Valve's work. The Half Life games have been some of my all time favorites, but between Gabe Newell's out right PS3 hate and the fact that they are more focused on Left 4 Dead than Half Life makes me a little concerned.

Valve has time and time again, with the Half Life series, produced top notch games that have a compelling settings, characters, and a pretty decent story. I just kind of hate that they end Episode 2 with a cliff hanger ending and now, well over a year after it's release have not given us a single shred of anything.

Sorry, but it's not even remotely comparable to Duke Nukem Forever. It's perfectly normal for a games company to develop a product for this long without releasing any screen shots, regardless of whether or not they know their engine. In fact, they went about 5 years between Half Life and Half Life 2, without releasing anything. Games take time to develop, whether or not the company is familiar with the engine.

The development of Duke Nukem Forever on the other hand, was a complete clusterfuck. They restarted development about two or three times on different engines, for example. Not to mention the fact that they licensed the Unreal engine, and then proceeded to rip the vast majority of the code out of it.

Developing for 1-2 years without releasing any information is pretty standard.

My friend, we're not talking about the next blockbuster smash, Half Life 3...we're talking about an episodic expansion to the Half Life 2 mythos.

I'm just a little agitated that Valve has been taking so long with "episodic" gaming. The whole point is to release shorter games, at lower prices, in a shorter amount of time. We definitely know they have the first two down.

Total side note to the Episode debate, but still on the topic of Half Life 2; is anyone else a little mad that they never released the HL2 they kept showing? I understand they had some problems programming the sewer creature to act correctly, but the original build they showed at many an E3 looked like it could have been a lot more interesting than HL2 was.

Episodic content or not, it's not even remotely comparable to the development of Duke Nukem Forever. The fact that it's episodic content, doesn't imply anything about the length of the game, or amount of content it's going to contain. It's pretty reasonable to keep a project under wraps for that length of time.

Given that it's supposed to be the final episode in the original story arc, it's not unreasonable for them to make it a bit longer than the first two.

I'd really really like it if they made it the longest of the episodes. I'd also like to see a few new weapons introduced.

I just think Valve needs to say something other than "It's being worked on" is all.

Freeman needs to learn the dark side of the force !

I'm certainly interested to see what they do with Episode 3. I've yet to play a Valve game I didn't like

(though I was always more of Team Fortress kind of guy, as opposed to Counterstrike)

Hopefully L4D2 will see a new style of development at Valve.

I'm pretty certain Episode 3 will be the next game out from them. I also expect news on November 16th to coincide with HL2s 5th anniversary.

Speculative but we can hope

Oblivion hasn't entertained me yet either, but it took me a long time to get into Fallout 3.

F3 took me a very short time to get into and I loved it to the bits. Weird, they say it's Oblivion with guns, so why it doesn't suck?

Episodic nature of HL2 is a bit crap, it's like waiting ages for the next part of your favourite book series. I hate it, most of your emotional attachment to the previous part vanishes during waiting.

[EphelDuath666]

Let me know when you hit 50, could probably hook you up with a few weapons that are damn good! At least you're close to 48, that's when you start finding the better weapons.

finally am at level 50! That sure took a while all by myself but it was sweet when the achievement popped up I found a volcano sniper too now with close to 700 damage plus 4x fire damage (if I remember it correctly). Such a sweet weapon! So now I only need the multiplayer achievements and the 3 remaining skill achievements with the other character classes.