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Half-Life Episode 1 Gold, Details on 2 and 3

Posted by Zonk on Wed May 24, 2006 05:58 PM
from the joy-in-city-17 dept.
Entertainment Games
Gamespot has the word that the first of the Half-Life 2 episodes has gone gold. They also have details on the upcoming Episodes 2 and 3. Episode 1 is to be released on the 1st of June. From the article: "In addition to two new multiplayer modes and the Lost Coast tech demo, Episode One will sport a preview of its sequel, Half-Life 2: Episode Two. The expansion, the existence of which was revealed in February, will add another four- to six-hour mini-campaign to the Half-Life 2 saga when it is released later this year. Previously, the game had no official release window or date. Today's gold announcement also was the first official confirmation that a third Half-Life 2 episodic update is in development. Like Episode Two, Valve divulged little in the way of information about Episode Three, saying only that it was the last 'in a trilogy ... that will conclude by Christmas of 2007.'"
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[+] Review of Episodic Content, Half-Life 2 Episode One 330 comments
Half-Life 2 was worth the wait. Great story, beautiful graphics, and inventive gameplay made the game a worthy successor to Valve's 1998 classic. Last week gamers were finally allowed access to the next part of the story. Half-Life 2: Episode One is a fast-paced and entirely worthwhile continuation of Gordon Freeman's tale. It also raises some really good questions about the very idea of charging for small chunks of content. Read on for my review of this $20 experience, and a few comments on the episodic content debate.
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  • Unfortunately, I won't be playing this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by republican gourd (879711) on Wednesday May 24 2006, @06:01PM (#15398034) Homepage
    ... because Steam forces an update that causes HL2 to freak out and crashs on my machine. Older versions were fine, more recent ones are absolutely unplayable. Since you basically can't only run *some* updates, its impossible to get the old version of the game back, so I'm screwed out of my $80 or whatever I paid on zero day. I will never suggest to anyone that they buy anything under this business model, its rape city.

    • Re:Unfortunately, I won't be playing this... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SpecBear (769433) on Wednesday May 24 2006, @07:39PM (#15398455)

      I decide that HL2 would be the last Steam game I purchased the first time HL2 refused to run because too much time had passed since the last time Steam had updated. I wasn't permitted to play a single player game on my local machine until I allowed the software to phone home and "update".

      The sad part is, the online content delivery system has the potential to be a great business model. But it seems like the entertainment industry looks at every technological advance as an opportunity to screw the customer.

      On a side note, Valve offers a pretty compelling refutation to the idea that piracy drives up the cost of games. Steam practically eliminates the cost of piracy as well as physical production and distribution. So why does it seem like the games are even more expensive?

      • Stopping Piracy? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Sparr0 (451780) <sparr0NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday May 24 2006, @07:45PM (#15398476) Homepage Journal
        Steam does no such thing. I downloaded HL2 from a torrent, installed it under Cedega in Linux, played the single player story, installed a couple of mods, decided I would rather just wait for UT2007 or Savage 2, deleted it.

        Linux Gaming ++
        Warez as Demo ++
        Steam --
      • HL2 refused to run because too much time had passed since the last time Steam had updated.

        Interesting. It's been 6 months since I last started Steam-- last week I fired up Steam to download The Lost Coast. Steam updated in less then an hour, and experienced no problems whatsoever.

        I think Steam is a pretty good idea. Sure beats having to drive to Best Buy when I just want to play a game during the evening.
        • Steam is a good *optional* idea. Easy, automatic upgrades are nice. Being able to download the game to any vacation PC so long as I have my login is great!

          What sucks is knowing the game probably won't run in 10 or 15 years time when I want to trigger some nostalgia, due to Steam going under or simply losing interest in supporting older games and not offering the download anymore.

        • To clarify:

          I didn't have a functional internet connection at the time. When tried to start HL2, Steam tried to run an update and failed to make a connection. It hadn't updated in a while, and decided that it wasn't going to run the game until it had.

          I was locked out of the single-player game because Steam couldn't phone home. I find this to be unacceptable. I won't be purchasing any more games that use Steam until this changes.

      • Not to mention it requires administrative priveldges for stream to run. Not good since my laptop is locked down

    • Re:Unfortunately, I won't be playing this... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2006, @07:55PM (#15398520)
      Have you talked with Valve customer support about this? We have a pretty aggressive track record when it comes to addressing customer complaints... at least the verifiable kind. Believe me, we don't want our updates to cause problems with existing legitimate installations. That wouldn't serve our purposes any more than yours.

      A.C. (anonymous Valve employee; opinions above are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the company, etc.)
      • No, I haven't. It didn't even occur to me as something that would be a likely solution.... what would Valve do, give me a *special* patch for special customers? If I had called at all, it would have been to demand my money back... but since this happened quite some time after purchase I didn't think it was particularly worth it.

        Customer support always assumes that the customer doesn't know what you're doing. I'd rather not spend an hour or more having somebody walk me through a re-install just to see the

        • what would Valve do, give me a *special* patch for special customers?

          No, not if they are sane.

          Consider: Many programs are not 64-bit safe, and thus break when they're merely recompiled. However, making them 64-bit safe does not break the program for 32-bit users, unless done in an extremely stupid fashion. In fact, testing on other architectures can reveal bugs that you wouldn't see otherwise -- for instance, a crash that happens very rarely on x86, but every single time on (say) SPARC.

          I'd rather not

          • Now, contact them and report the bug. Really, you do sound like a crank and a zealot because you refuse to do that. Have you actually called their customer service, or filled out a form? If not, everything you believe about their service is baseless.

            It takes quite a bit of time and effort to properly document and prepare a *useful* bug report, even had I known at the time where to submit it or that they would be amicable to reading it. Its not like I had any packaging with the customer service number o

            • It takes quite a bit of time and effort to properly document and prepare a *useful* bug report
              Probably a lot less time than it takes to write several lengthy bitches to Slashdot about the problem.


              P.

              • Not entirely true. If you haven't preemptively disabled online mode *before* it starts updating one of your games, you're out of luck. From a game in the 'Update Paused" state:

                ---
                Game unavailable

                "This game is not ready to be played in offline mode."
                ---

                Steam doesn't give you any warning that its about to do an update, it just goes ahead and does it when you start. I don't ever remember having a chance to change my mind and retreat to offline mode.
              • >> Last time I ran into this it happened in series... first an update of the steam service
                >> itself for 20 minutes or so, and then another half hour of HL2. By the time it was done,
                >> I didn't feel like playing anymore anyway.

                i completely agree with this.

                i have so little time to play games, when i DO have the chance, i will go for the ones that are an easy, quick pickup & play version, instead of launching steam, waiting for it to decide that it's ready to let me play, etc.

                steam as a w
        • No, I haven't. It didn't even occur to me as something that would be a likely solution.... what would Valve do, give me a *special* patch for special customers?

          Or maybe they'd learn about and fix the bug that's biting you in the ass? You're the architect of your own misery, buddy; help is there for the asking, but you're too busy nailing yourself to a cross to consider that Valve maybe isn't out to fuck you over.
          • I don't believe they are out to screw me, I just believe that their centrally controlled delivery system is a poor value. In the future, I will be avoiding such systems as much as possible. I'm bothering to post this here because I hope that people who design and implement these systems might pick up on the negative feedback and do things differently next time.

            As for the bug report: I don't feel that its worth my time. I'm not 'nailing myself to a cross' or anything, I just don't feel like playing HL2 a
            • The exact same thing can (and does) happen with patches to normal store bought games with update patches. My friend had it happen on his system with a patch to Star Wars Battlefront. After the patch he suffered crashes and server disconnects after playing for 5-10 minutes. Consistently. He tried all the support recommended stuff (upgrade video, audio drivers etc.) which didn't improve things. The only "remedy" LucasArts would give him was another copy of the game - which would be fine if there was something

        • Re:Unfortunately, I won't be playing this... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jchenx (267053) on Thursday May 25 2006, @02:33AM (#15399768) Journal
          Customer support always assumes that the customer doesn't know what you're doing. I'd rather not spend an hour or more having somebody walk me through a re-install just to see the problem recur. (I had already done this). Further, I had already verified that it was a HL2 update issue (rather than a change of a machine) because it literally changed from working -> broken within a single Steam update. I had played some time before, shut it off, turned it back on, watched Steam update itself, then watched it not work anymore. All my other intensive games, (Doom3, FarCry)... working perfectly.

          The game was simply fucked, which turned me off as a customer permanently. I'm sure you guys offer great customer service or whatever, but I'm one of those people that doesn't want to waste hours of my life talking to you over a problem that *may* or may not be resolved to retain me as a customer for a delivery system that I have grown to absolutely despise.
          As someone who works in QA for a living, and whose customers are end-users just like you, I wanted to give my two cents regarding customer service. (This applies to pretty much ALL software, not just Steam)

          You are correct that customer service does NOT make up for a crappy experience. If software had no bugs, there'd be no need for customer service. As a QA engineer, it is my job to ensure that our product is bug free as much as possible.

          The problem is that it is nigh impossible to create bug free code in this day and age, with the complexity of programs nowadays, and also how open the PC platform is. Then you also have to consider things like ship dates and costs. From the QA perspective, we're supposed to find the bugs and only allow release when the product meets our quality bar. Unfortunately, that bar can never be at the "perfect" rate, because that would mean nothing ever ships. (For example, we'd spend years alone testing every combination of hardware, drivers, network configuration, etc.)

          So at some point, we have to ship. After that point, then we have to rely on things like customer service to get a gauge of what we did right, and what we did wrong (bugs that slipped, etc.). There are always new things that popped up that no one had any idea it would be an issue, most often due to external dependencies.

          One example I'll give ... we got a user report complaining that our website was not working at all for him. There was lots of cursing, how we must have been incompetent, etc. Although we could have just ignored him for rudeness, we took the time to investigate. It turns out the issue was due to a piece of malware that had infected his machine. His issue actually had nothing to do with our site code, and there's nothing we could do about it, other than coding some bizarre one-off that detected this peculiar piece of malware and handled it with an appropriate error message. But that's obviously easier to do after the fact, and arguably not something that's a priority. (If you compare a feature that would affect a handful of users, versus working on a new feature that would affect a much larger number ... what would you choose?)

          I guess what I'm trying to say is to cut customer support some slack. Any decent QA department WANTS to fix your problems, and we're not out to just "screw you over" with a bad product. Chances are that your issue is very specific to your configuration, for whatever reason. Yes, your experience does suck, and I completely understand that for a game, you DON'T want to spend hours on the phone walking through your support issue. But doing so may fix your problem, and make the product better overall.
      • I apologize for the off-topic nature of this comment, but on the off chance that these words may reach someone within Valve I have to say something.

        I love the Half-Life franchise. The gameplay, graphics, and above all STORY are extremely compelling to me. I've had dreams about headcrabs, and have looked into building an HEV costume for science fiction conventions. My co-workers and I used to stay late at work and have HL deathmatch tournaments after hours, and I kept a crowbar hanging on my cube wall.

        I hate
        • Ordinarily "me too" posts are dumb, but in this case I feel compelled: Valve, please port Half-Life (1 and 2) not just to Mac OS, but to standardized technologies like OpenGL and SDL so that you can make them work in Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and other OSs with just a recompile.
    • Contact Steam support. Ask about a refund. Otherwise, I dunno what to tell ya. Most people aren't going to experience the problems you're having. Steam/HL2 works great on three of my PCs here, and two are custom built.

      Also, if your machine is "crashing", it's most likely due to:

      1) Drivers (kernel mode)
      2) Lame power supply
      3) (very unlikely, but hey) The "bad capacitors" problem

      None of which are Steam's fault.

  • Hooray! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jgbishop (861610)
    While I'm not certain that the "episodic content" model will work in the long run, I'm very excited about these new chapters in the Half-Life universe. Half-Life 2 was an excellent game and I'm looking forward to playing through Episode One (an odd name if ever there were one). Hopefully the content in this expansion will match HL2's quality.
    • ...and I'm looking forward to playing through Episode One (an odd name if ever there were one).

      It could be worse. They could've called it something really ridiculous, like The Phantom Menace.
  • Didn't I already play episode 1? Does that mean that HL2 was "Episode 0"?
  • What the hell are they?! I searched everywhere for the answer and can't find it - everywhere has nothing but hype about the HL2 singleplayer plot being advanced, how exciting!
    HL2DM is suprisingly fun and well balanced so I might be willing to blow the $20, be nice to know what the hell multiplayer content is being added first though... The marketing on this is really crappy, it's all based on "find out what happens next in HL2" - I just want a simple feature list!
    • One of them is the indescribably wank* HLDM:Source, the other I'm guessing is a gametype I already have from one of my packs or the back catalog. episode 1 can be standalone, so it'd make sense to have HL2DM in there as well but that's speculation on my part.

      *
      remember how big a letdown HL:Source was? with exactly the same low-poly everything, and only new shiny water and breaking glass as the improvements? HLDM:Source is worse.
  • For the price of two of these, I could've bought new and got much more than 10 hours of play from it.
    • I haven't really checked (and I'm on dialup for the next few days, so doing so would take forever), but what's the current pricepoint on regular HL2 in boxed vs steam format. Has it gone down substantially?

      I'm expecting the fanboys to do the initial payout, and while I'm a big HL2 fan I'm not such a diehard that I can't wait awhile especially since I'm rather busy at the moment for it or other games (and I've other games which I need to finish when I find time). $20 for 5h is somewhat iffy and subjective.

  • Money Grab (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord_Dweomer (648696) on Wednesday May 24 2006, @06:35PM (#15398206) Homepage
    And thus begins the great money grab. What started as "Expansion Packs" became "Blister Packs" and finally we're at "Episodes". Less and less content for more and more money. Then they start skimming content from the initial release of the game to sell to you later at a ridiculous price.

    Yes, I realize I can vote with my dollars, and I fully intend to. However I want to point out to everybody here that if you purchase this, you are essentially telling Valve "Yes, I buy into this episodic spiel and I love being bent over and taking it repeatedly in the ass as many times as you can release a new episode."

    Enjoy.

    • That's american business for you (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sterno (16320) on Wednesday May 24 2006, @06:49PM (#15398274) Homepage
      There seems to be very little appreciation anymore for the notion of having a stable business. You must always be growing and raking in more and more money. There's little room for a company to just keep delivering what they've been delivering consistently.

      So if you sell a million copies of a game this year you have to sell two next year. Then four, then eight, then you have to start having upgrades and expansions that have lower productions costs but cost nearly as much to improve your margins and increase your growth.
      • Yes, this is how the sharemarket leads to the destruction of companies. Grow and grow until you can only do it by hurting your customers, then they all leave and the company implodes. The smart investors see it coming and take off with vast profits, while the unlucky ones see their money dissappear.

    • Re:Money Grab (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Doytch (950946) <markpd@gmailFORTRAN.com minus language> on Wednesday May 24 2006, @07:07PM (#15398330)
      How can you possibly say that a 6+ hour single player mode and more multiplayer options are a money grab? Hate to break it to ya, but this is an expansion, and just because they're calling it an episode doesn't change that.

      Anyone care to name five recent expansion packs that feature more content than this?
    • Hey if you have more fun with sanctimonious flaming of a company trying to break publishers' stranglehold on gaming than you do the Citizen Kane of gaming, your loss, and Valve really won't miss you.
      • I'm actually pretty disappointed with the new SiN. I know that I'm not paying the 40-50 bucks for a full blown retail game, but I expected more than what I would get from a demo disc. What makes this more disappointing is that Ritual leaned on the game engine AND delivery model that Valve developed, thereby significantly reducing the costs of development and testing. Unless they a) reduce the cost or b) make the episodes longer, they won't be getting any more from me. I'll also avoid the HL2 episode unt

      • Re:Money Grab (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Snowmit (704081) on Wednesday May 24 2006, @09:26PM (#15398794) Homepage
        You got +4 Insightful for saying "I didn't like or understand the story in HL2"?

        Lots of people enjoyed the story + gameplay and will happily pay to see it continued. You didn't and so won't pay. That's certainly your perogative.

        Did you think that the story in HL 1 was gimped because the man in black was never properly explained? Did you think it was a rip off when they released two expansion packs and then (gasp!) a sequel? Did you refuse to see Lord of the Rings because they couldn't fit the whole story into a single movie? I'm going to assum that you don't like Lost either. I mean, they gimped the story in that show so hard that it's been two seasons and we STILL don't know what the fuck is going on.
            • Here's the thing, at least the way I see it. Maybe you'll agree, maybe not.

              Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are not FPSes. Well, they are first person games, and they do involve shooting, but primarily I think of them as story driven games which happen to be in first person for greater immersion.

              If you're looking for a "pure" shooter, Doom or Far Cry are probably better suited. Ravenholm stands out as a high point because it shows what Half-Life does best. It immersed you in a creepy, very atmospheric world.

  • Oooo (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Konster (252488)
    4-6 hours of gameplay? Great! It rivals HL2 for content! I hope this thing sells for $8.99. or perhaps $9.99 if they include a storyline that was omitted from HL2. HL2 was shockingly short and utterly devoid of a storyline, and attempting to milk me for "expansion packs" for what should have been included in the original release is offensive.

  • Steam (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Since I can read /. on my internet connection, but I cannot play any steam games with it, I have no intention of investing in any more of their products.
    This culture of distrusting end users is absurd, and it only hurts the legitimate users. The pirates always find their way around security.
    Now the rumor is that Sony is maneuvering to license PS3 games and not actually sell you the game disc. ( http://www.gamesradar.com/gb/ps3/game/news/articl e.jsp?articleId=20060524153157765035&sectionId=100 6 [gamesradar.com])
    I've be
  • It's probably only worth 50-60 silver.

  • Nothing new.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by cluke (30394) on Thursday May 25 2006, @03:27AM (#15399918)
    Half-Life 2 was episodic as well. You would play through one 'short' episode, and then have to wait a month or so until the next one was released. Oh no, wait, that was the loading screen.
  • *sigh*

    Would have loved to play this. I liked HL2 when it came out. A lot. Played it completely through. Enjoyed every moment.
    Won't touch it again: STEAM.
    Hell of a lot of trouble initially, and then I need to allow the system to Phone Home at every game start. Even when calling the editor - thus, no maps from me.
    And I will never, ever, buy anything using STEAM again. Not even the add-ons to HL2. No support from me, no money from me, and I've convinced quite a few nearly-customers of the same.

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