Half Life 2 To Appear At E3 499
MonsieurEvil writes "Valve announced today (http://www.planethalflife.com) that the long-awaited Half-Life 2 will be appearing at E3, and will be released this year. The NDA for press is supposed to end on April 28th, and quite a few magazines are already hyping their scoops. Hopefully all the teen-angst types that show their superiority through decrying this as vaporware can now listen to their elders..."
About Time (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Heavily mod'ed Q2^H1 (Score:4, Informative)
s/QuakeII/Quake/. Somebody always gets this wrong when Half-Life is mentioned. Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 engine. Yes, it heavily modified the engine (skeletal animation, better lighting and hardware acceleration, particles, etc), but in the end it's still based on the Quake 1 engine. Most people confuse this, since Half-Life was released shortly after Quake 2 (IIRC, Q2 was Christmas 97, while Half-Life was Spring 98 -- off the top of my head, so probably wrong). Of course, just thinking about it for a second would prove that HL wasn't based on Q2 -- If HL was released so soon after Q2, how could Valve have had time to modify the Q2 engine, as well as provide all of the necessary IP in formats Q2 would accept (models, maps, textures, etc)? History repeats itself -- SiN and Soldier of Fortune were based off of the Q2 engine (so were Daikatana and Anachronox, but those are bad examples simply because Q3-based games launched before they did), and they came after Q2 by a year or more, and without the major engine modifications Half-Life had. Alice, FAKK2, and RTCW were Q3-based games, and they came a year or more after Q3. Valve must be some kind of special, then, if they can highly modify the Q2 engine and launch within months of the official release of the Q2 engine (not supported by the length of time it's taken them to develop HL2 and the later-than-DNF TeamFortress 2).
Re:But will it run on Linux? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Yeah BUT ... (Score:2, Informative)
Screenshot (Score:1, Informative)
http://home.1asphost.com/wingding325/sc551.jpg [1asphost.com]
Re:But will it run on Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
They have pulled back releases of their security modules (anti-cheat) just because users of WINE were having trouble. This is not to say that the experience is perfect, but it does mean that they don't have a "screw linux, it's not supported" attitude.
The rumor is that Half-Life 2 will come out THIS year, which is a very real possibility. Nothing has been heard about Team Fortress 2 for over a year now, so this project has been under very tight wraps (I mean, up until a couple of weeks ago, everyone thought they were still working on Team Fortress 2, and the Valve team gave no hints that they were doing something else).
November will be the 5 year anniversary of the original Half-Life. I would say a 5 year product development cycle should be enough, but I would have only said that with 100% confidence BEFORE Daikatana, and lord knows when the next Duke Nukem game will come out (it's been so long, I'm beginning to think that maybe the original really actually sucked, but we had low expectations back in the day, and the suspense keeps growing).
Re:Screenshot (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pcgameplay.be/
And if that female in the background is from the game, it appears that perhaps there will be a sidekick for Gordon (wild speculation).
I'm not sure why your "leaked" shot has the top of it blurred out, you can see an unblurred version at:
http://www.gamez.nl/content/artwork.phtml?sh
Re:Gaming Platform (Score:3, Informative)
This is why we say that Elite Force uses the Quake 3 engine, but Half-Life uses the Half-Life engine.
Re:Mac version? (Score:5, Informative)
The "polite" explanation [macworld.com]
The background explanation. [macnn.com]
Re:Not on GameSpy (Score:3, Informative)