Half-Life 2 Going Gold on Monday? [updated]

Warrior-GS writes "According to GameSpy, Gabe Newell has announced that Half-Life 2 is going gold on Monday. Numerous retail outlets have Sept. 1 or Sept. 2 as a shelf-date for the game, so a gold announcement now seems to mean those dates are fairly close to reality." Given that HL2 is already available on Steam, this doesn't sound too far-fetched. Update: 08/28 19:27 GMT by T : Kraiger writes "According to HL2 Fallout the announcement of the futuristic FPS, "Half-Life 2", going Gold is a complete hoax! According to HL2 Fallout, the announcement from Gabe Newell, a Valve Software employee, was created by someone who was able to guess the simple password of "gaben" for Gabe's forum account."

Hoax

As seen on the forums " UPDATE
After a close scrutiny of Gabe Newell’s account history on the forums, we've come to the conclusion that the gold post is a fake. While we can't be 100% certain at this stage, all indicators point towards someone hacking the forum account. That said, all Gabe's previous posts on these forums are quite legitimate.

We apologize for the confusion and will be investigating further. Theoretically, an IPB forum account should be very difficult to hack. Well, that was the theory at least. We'll keep you updated. "

Re:Hoax

what exactly are they loading up from the network

All the textures, graphics, etc. That's what takes up most of the space, and most of them will have been finalized by now.

The game engine can come along at the last minute, when they do go gold - it's probably only a few hundred megs at most.

Re:Hoax

Bah!

If Valve would just give a simple update on the release time-frame, they could avoid sending their POTENTIAL customers into fits again. They left the door wide open for a hoax like this by starting the pre-loading without any direction as to when people will be able to play. Now I am going to have a new(well it was new a year ago) graphics card AND a gigabyte of data wasting away on my PC.
I guesss I'll be putting my $50USD into DOOM3. I'll see you in the dark!

This appears to be a hoax...

The admins of HL2Fallout have already stated that they feel this is a hoax. The "Gabe Newell" post came from an IP which Gabe has never posted from before. For right now, they're erring on the side of caution.

Re:This appears to be a hoax...

Wait, you mean.. The same Gabe Newell that uses Outlook Express, the same Outlook Express that supposedly contributed to the security breakdown a few months ago, which allowed the theft of th Source source code theft? IMPOSSIBLE! We all know that after that horrible incident, Gabe switched to using 3 letter passwords instead of 2.

Re:This appears to be a hoax...

You're so close it's scary. It was five digits, which might be ok, were it not "gaben." Right. His first name and last initial. All lowercase. The guy doesn't learn after getting haxored? From here:

An anonymous imposter guessed Gabe's password, "gaben", and made the false claim. Valve has confirmed that this is was a hoax on the Steam Forums.

Update: After one crazy night of theories, server mayhem and IP tracing, we've finally gotten to the bottom of this mess. In a twist of hilarity, it seems that Gabe Newell's account password was set to 'gaben'. Person x guessed this and made the "going gold on Monday" post which we've heard so much about. The user (who we believe is the same person x) then made this post just minutes ago using Gabe's account [announcing that he guessed Gabe's pass as "gaben"]

After a quick double-check, it seems that this was exactly what happened. Reminds me of the good old days. For an official response concerning the hoax, see Chris Bokitch's post on Steampowered. I think Gabe is going to need to start using slightly better passwords on accounts he uses to make public announcements on.

And the hardware to run it...

... will go "gold" in December... 2008.

You got it wrong

You can already get the hardware - it just _priced_ like it's weight in gold. ;)

Re:And the hardware to run it...

You just reminded me of a story... one that took place six years ago, on a dark and stormy night. Well I don't think it was dark or stormy, but it was involving hardware that would make anyone shudder. Half-Life had just been released, and all the gaming sites were raving about it... so much so that I decided to buy it when I saw it on a shelf at a local Best Buy. I sorta glanced at the min requirements, and I thought I was close enough.

I was very, very wrong. I inserted the Half-Life disc into my 4x CD-ROM and started to install it to my PC... It had 24MB of memory, a "PR233" Cyrix Processor, and I believe the video card at the time was a 4MB card with "pretend" support for Direct3D.

The pain.

The horror.

You know those Houndeye creatures I think they're called, the ones that create a blue circle of hurt? One of those would bring that computer to a complete standstill when it did its little attack.

The poor Cyrix also over-heated often, so often that I renamed the short-cut to the game "Crash-Life" and felt better somehow.

This story does have a happy ending though. After a few days of suffering, I got myself a Celeron 366 and clocked that baby at 550 MHz, I got a voodoo2, and i think a massive 96 MB of ram. If it hadn't been for Half-Life, I likely would not have upgraded for months, maybe even years. Behold the Power of a Computer Game!

Of course, the question is, will HL2 be good enough to cause people like me to run out and do the same thing we did six years ago? Perhaps that will be the true measure of its success; not that it is hardware hog, any game can be that, but that a game can be good enough for folks to plunk down three or for figures worth on hardware to play it.

I'm looking forward to this

Its been on preorder for me for a month now. I'm not a big gamer but HL was such a gripping game to play and the mods are so good they definitely brought a new dimension to gaming for me. Heres hoping its as good as its predecessor.

Re:I'm looking forward to this

You may want to do a bit more research about Steam before you decide to pass up on Half-Life 2. First off, a lot has changed in the nearly a year since the article you linked to was written. For starters, Steam now features a "Start in offline mode" option. When Steam starts up, if it's not connected to the internet, it lets you do that. Then, you have access to all your single player games just fine. I imagine you can also play all your LAN games just fine as well, but I haven't had an oppurtunity to try that.

Did Steam have an awful lot of problems when it was first released? Yes, it did. But, believe it or not, the people working on Steam at Valve are not some kind of evil sadists who enjoy making people jump through hoops to play their game. They've created a rather nice system for making sure your games are always updated, and giving you an easy way to purchase new games from them without having to run down to the nearest Gamestop. Problems do occur, and they try to fix them as soon as possible.

And, I certainly doubt Valve is going to make it hard for mods to be created. They aren't stupid - they know that one of the big reasons Half-Life has sold so well over the past 6 years is because of fun mods like TFC and CS. How many other 6 year old games do you see with thousands of servers running right now? Currently, they allow really popular mods to be listed in the Steam gui, with a screenshot and a short writeup. Other mods can still be played (I remember at least once getting in a game of Pirates, Vikings, and Knights [pvkmod.com] over Steam) just as they always could.

Gold, perhaps, but not yet retail

The latest [amazon.co.uk] from Amazon UK is that it will be available from 1st November. It was being reported as 3rd September up until yesterday. (Needless to say, I've got a pre-order in with them).

-MT.

Zero Sales?

There are so many coupons floating around, Do they really expect to sell any copies of this game? Seems to be they've already "sold" it when they took the money from ATI.

I, for one

While I'd been looking forward to Half-Life 2 for quite some time now, am I the only one that thinks Steam represents an unprecedented level of intrusion in my computer activity?

I may be a bit sensitive to this because one of the other games I looked forward to (Battlefield Vietnam) had a set of conditions to use the online anticheat system (to my knowledge mandatory for Internet gaming) that were intrusive enough that I just shelved it. I just want to buy it and play it, not open my use of the software up to unwarranted scrutiny.

probably not

Info here:
http://www.csnation.net/comments.php?id=7475 [csnation.net]
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3 4798&page=1&pp=15 [halflife2.net]
http://www.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php? threadid=132122 [steampowered.com]
All the info you need to know this is probably fake.

Last September

Gabe also said that the release date for HL2 was going to be September 19, 2003.

Steam

I think it will be interesting to see how long it takes for the release to be availiable on Steam once the game does go gold. Concievably, once they make the final build it could be up in a matter of hours. Since many people already have most of the game downloaded, this could mean that they could also be playing the game within hours of the final build being made.

Yes, but did you ask if ...

... that was Sept. 1 of this year, or next year? Just wondering.

For a minute there I had my hopes up

Finally I could go install that central heating control system in hell since it had started freezing there, and then the lord of lies calls me to cancel the order

And in related news...

Pigs have just flown. Details at 11.

Game Hype

Let's hope that it's not as bad as Doom 3 in matters of interactivity. Do you remember that, after the first Doom there was Duke Nukem, where you could interact in a lot of ways with the 3D environment. There were more things to do, special weapons, cameras, holoduke etc. That was then. But now, in 2004, the level of interactivity hasn't increased at all. With some exceptions, like Deus Ex and System Shock, it's still the same game as 10 years ago. Has gameplay been replaced by hype [feisar.de]?

Eh? Going Gold?

Just what does "Going Gold" mean?

Pre-sold x copies?
Code ready so CDs can be mastered?
Available in shops to buy?
Cracked and available on bittorrent? :)

Re:Eh? Going Gold?

going gold means it's being mass produced, master version exists, and all remaing bugs will be dealt with via patches, not original distribution.

Satan says:

"Brrr! It's getting cold down here!"

Gold?

I could see it going Gold on Monday to be honest...

I mean, if you're looking at a November 1st release date, and about a month of making the retail boxes... Assuming the Nov. 1st release date is accurate of course...

Even if it was real...

CounterStrike: Condition Zero went gold twice before it came out. HL2 is gonna be so much better, it'll pry go Gold 3 times!

CS2?

Yeah but I think more people are really waiting for Counter Strike 2 (Whatever it is called).

Tons of people play Counter Strike, and they all complain about how outdated CS is. I think everyone really wants to know if CS2 is going to be ready at the same time as HL2, because thats where the real market is.

-----
Yep another Free IPods Link [freeipods.com]

It would help to NOT make Half Life too intensive

I think the key to the success of CounterStrike & Half Life is that these are not Ultra new age , system hogging games.
They run on moderately powered PC's as compared to Unreal and other system heavy games.Thats what created the mass apeal as a larger amount of people can play them.If they follow the same principle i think It should do better than the first part.

Half-Life 2 Isn't availible on steam!

The only content on steam are things like textures, sounds and maps (things that wont change before the release). No executibles download. The point of this is so that when the game comes out, people can get it really quickly because they will only need to download maybe some scripts and the executable.

Well obviously its a hoax...

"Going to go gold Monday"?

Uh, clearly written by somebody who has never had anything go gold... Before something is going gold, you have release candidates. You test the release candidates intensely, and if you find no bugs, then it goes gold. So you can't say on Friday that you are going gold on monday, unless you already know you have no bugs, in which case you already should have gone gold...

If this were real, he would say that they had a release candidate. The difference between an RC and Gold is testing, which is what will be happening between now and Monday...

It's a fake

somebody guessed his extremely obvious password
http://members.lycos.co.uk/lemmingzappa/Post.JPG
http://www.hl2fallout.com/forums/index.php?showtop ic=4221&st=360

Oh my god, I can't feel my legs

No, not my legs, the other thing - I can't feel anything from the tiny shrivelled part of my heart that still cared about HL2. It just doesn't look that great, and the sneak peek previews haven't exactly been raving. That, plus the near total silence from the developers other than the gfx card 'bundling' debacle, and it's two thumbs meh from me.

Pirates? Yarrr!

I have the preload already. It was only about 1 GB, but I can see where that's large enough to be at least the core game. As far as the game note being ready, there are a bunch of torrents floating around that are supposedly *not* the beta, but the final release. Those are almost 1.2 GB is size, so I'm doubtful that those are the real deal. But what I'm wondering is: Have any of you scurvy dogs grabbed the torrent and tried it?

Quite obviously a hoax..

From later on in the "gold" forum post..

Gabe Newell
Valve Software
Posted: Aug 28 2004, 10:35 AM
Maybe he shouldn't have used 'gaben' for his password. Come on Gabe, you could of thought of something better than that

Collector's Edition?

I haven't been able to get a clear idea on exactly what you get with the Collector's Edition. I've heard that it may contain HL1 redone on source engine and TFC redone as well. But no confirmation on that. I certainly would love that if they were included though.

Date of release

The date of release at this point really depends only on two variables. When Vivendi Universal would lie to release it vs. when Valve would. VU would like to release it in november to pad their quarter 4 earnings report. Valve and by this I mean Gabe N.,would like to release it in September. When it is released is dependent on how much pressure Valve can put on VU. They actually have quite alot since I'm sure that they haven't signed anything regarding publishing of HL3 and can always offer to take their business elsewhere

Just what we need

I was just thinking the other day that we need another first person shooter about extra-dimensional creatures that break into our world due to a secret experiment and only one brave soul can save us.

That would totally rock!

Even though it was a hoax...

And proven false [steampowered.com], there are things in this story that still don't add up. Just look at the release dates, who here has heard of a game going gold on Monday, getting all the CDs pressed, games boxed, collector's edition stuff gathered together, shipped so that it will be in all the retailers hands so that there will be no unfair early selling advantages on/before the date, and then have the game 3-4 days later be released?

I sure haven't, from my understanding that it takes at least half a month to get to the point were the game has gone gold to shipping and in the stores. Doom 3 went gold on July 14th, and wasn't expected to hit the shelves until August 2nd. A 3-4 day window is a huge potential for disaster, and given the way Valve has been bitched at for missing and changing dates I doubt that they would announce it with that time frame.

Also while the game is undergoing pre-loading, from my understanding it is just the parts that are final (i.e. sounds, some textures, etc) and still leaves Valve open to sending out the final stuff. So while there is evidence of HL2 making some progress, it doesn't mean that the game will be shipping soon.

Anybody have the HL2 trailer?

I guess my HW specs are only good enough for trailers. Wait let me rephrase that. My PC is only good enough for LAN gaming, with all the eye candy set to low, and with 'monochrome' set to 'Y'.

Does anyone have the old trailer anywhere? (The one that was previewed in one a them Expos or E3 or QuakeCon or whatever).

September 13

from the story at Gamers.com [gamers.com]

...Half-Life 2 in stores around September 13th at the absolute latest.

Poor old Gabe

A password of "gaben"!! It looks like he hasn't even learned the basics of network security following Valve's network breach [gamespot.com]

Time Is Not On Our Side

This just means that the forums will be shut down for six months while they reconfigure it to only accept passwords at least six letters long, in accordance with Valve security policies.

Gabe! Why oh Why!

...the announcement from Gabe Newell, a Valve Software employee, was created by someone who was able to guess the simple password of "gaben" for Gabe's forum account.

What a dumb ass, you think Gabe would have learned at least something about security by now, espeically taking into account past events. Well, once a Microsoft employee, always a Microsoft employee.

Publicity 101

This is a textbook publicity tactic:

1. Create a hacked account
2. Post an outrageous claim
3. Wait
4. Retract outrageous claim
5. Profit

Note that the above sequence will get your product listed *TWICE* in most major gaming news sites. It's just a publicity stunt. We all know Half Life 2 will not be released for another year atleast. Move along, citizens.

I mean, seriously, you think with the huge number of script kiddie half life fans not a single one of them tried that simple password until now?

But anyway, there's always that question...

...DNF?

Half-Life 2 in the AM

I posted this story at 2am what happen?

Fake

> According to HL2 Fallout, the announcement
> from Gabe Newell, a Valve Software employee,
> was created by someone who was able to guess
> the simple password of "gaben" for Gabe's
> forum account.

Suspicions were raised when the same announcement also noted how much Gabe "loved to take a nice hard one up the @$$."

Wow, how surprising.

So Gabe had a weak password on his forum account. Hmmm. It's quite possible he had a weak password on his PC, and that's why he got "hacked" and we had to wait so long for HL2. Nice. I bet the combination to his luggage is 1-2-3-4-5.

Stupid password, stupid person

Doesn't it seem like a somewhat bad idea for HL2 Fallout to reveal Gabe's password to everybody? If he is the type of person to use the password "gaben" on one account, he is probably the type of person to use the same password "gaben" on all his accounts. Somebody should really advise him that the whole world now knows his password, and that he should change it immediately (preferably not to "gnewell").

Wonderful security.

So they use unpatched outlook, don't update their virus scanner's dat files and have easy to guess passwords..

I smell another delay with a silly excuse.

Re:Not looking so hot after Doom 3...

I'm not too bothered about the eye-candy side, I'm just hoping the gameplay and narrative sides of the game live up to the original Half-Life. If they do, then I'll be a happy camper.

-MT.

Re:Not looking so hot after Doom 3...

. If they do, then I'll be a happy camper

Oh no, not another camper...

Re:Not looking so hot after Doom 3...

Well how do you know that until you play the game? HL 1 was very immersive I can only guess that it will be that much better. In fact playing Doom 3 feels very much like HL1 story wise. And yes I know Doom 1 had the general idea first.

Regarding graphics its not D3 but it pretty darn good looking.
http://media.pc.gamespy.com/media/492/49 2830/img_2 133273.html

The thing is D3 is all about cramped indoor environments. Hallways and Offices etc. HL2 looks to be much more in the vein of cityscapes and outdoor areas which after D3 will actually be VERY refreshing. Don't get me wrong I'm still enjoying being scared by D3(and yes headphones are the ONLY way to play!) but I'm kind of over the whole walk into dark room, have imp jump out at me. The formula while still fun gets really stale 2/3 in. And fuck are those half-baby half fly things annoying.

Anyway while Valve has really pissed me off with the delays I'm still very much looking forward to HL2. That and hitting people in the head with a crowbar. HL2 is looking to be pretty different from D3 and that's a good thing. My nerves couldn't take another creep and get scared jump fest.

Re:s2games

Do you happen to work for s2games, or not realize that half-life and half-life2 do NOT share the same game engine. Or have i just been hooked by a troll?

The funny thing is.. I DO INFACT work for S2games. Well i DID. I was a senior artist as S2 on savage. Left on good terms, they're all great folks.

Re:Not looking so hot after Doom 3...

I have to say that after looking through the screenshots from the link there, the engine behind HL2 doesn't look a patch on the Doom 3 engine. In fact, closer to GTA2! The vehicles look pretty angular, and the characters more "cartoony".

You're confusing artistic interpretation with the ability of the engine. Either one could be used to render, for example, The Simpsons quite easily, but where it's limits lay are the real tests.

Re:Not looking so hot after Doom 3...

have you seen the facial detail and animation?

it blows Doom 3 out of the water and over the horizon.

Re:Not looking so hot after Doom 3...

Doom 3 environments looked good, but I wasn't really impressed with the characters.. Many suffered from a commic book look: tiny head big body syndrome.. And facial expressions were poor and cartoony.

Re:HL is great but what about Team Fortress?

There haven't been any updates on the release of TF2 in over a year.
I'm nearly certain that progress has stopped on this project.

Re:Who gives a crap?

-Come out with a decent game (Half-Life), and then do nothing. The price of the game drops to the usual discount prices and all of a sudden, counter-strike becomes popular. What does valve do? Jack the price back up to $40! Where it still sits, 6 years later! And they've done pretty much nothing in the meantime except sit back and grow fat off CS's popularity.

Oh my god!! A company that charges what the market will bear! How can they do such a thing?

That's not even true either. I bought the HL platinum pack HL + CS + OpFor + Blue Shift + TFC for $25

Re:Who gives a crap?

Half-Life gets my vote as buggiest game ever.

never played hidden and dangerous then..

Re:s2games

Sure it's a small market, but apples aren't. Lets say they sell 10k apple copies. 10k x $90 is a fair few programers

Computer games on the Mac cost $90?! Well, even if they do, $90K isn't even going to get you two developers with the talent to work on a project like HL2. Maybe not even one.

Re:let them burn in hell

They kinda have to focus on Windows... 95% install base and all that.

If HL2 on Linux would really sell enough copies to be worth it, why aren't companies tripping over one another to contract the porting rights?

Re:Not looking so hot after Doom 3...

GTA2 was top down sprites with a little 3d environment, what are you talking about?

Re:s2games

Ever heard of Direct3D?

Re:let them burn in hell

they have stated depending on the demand the will probably release it on linux. From there it could probably be ported to Mac relatively easily

Re:April Fools

"Sorry guys, our April Fool's joke wasn't ready in time,but we promise it'll be done by September"...

Re:let them burn in hell

Won't work, they'll just decide that they need to push out HL2 in the state it is in immediately and Hell would freeze over...