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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Newell On Half-Life 2 Delay 46

Posted by simoniker from the bated-stinky-headcrab-breath dept.
Thanks to GameSpot for their brief interview with Valve's Gabe Newell, in which he discusses when the ravenously-awaited Half-Life 2 will finally come out. He laments: "I hate release dates because no matter how hard we try, we screw them up. We held back talking about our release date going into September 30th because I wanted to have a much clearer idea of what day we were going to ship on." As for an actual day, he offers: "Right now all we can say is holidays of this year, which to me feels really unfortunate." Elsewhere, Newell refuses to elaborate on the little-known multiplayer modes for the game, saying they're "...something we're not talking about because we want to keep it as a surprise for our customers as we roll into our launch cycle."
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Newell On Half-Life 2 Delay More

Newell On Half-Life 2 Delay

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  • Wrong questions (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pentagram ( 40862 ) * on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @09:59PM (#7110102) Homepage
    They missed asking the basic question - why was the game delayed? - and the supplemental: how did you not manage to realise that the game would require another 3 months development until only a week before the supposed release date?

    • Re:Wrong questions (Score:2, Interesting)

      by desenz ( 687520 )
      My guess, (as outlandish and wrong as it probably is) is that they probably found out the game was easily hackable. Big name game, easy hack, on Kazaa and BT in hours. Pure speculation of course. Don't take it seriously. I have no idea why it was really delayed.

    • Re:Wrong questions (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well announced a delay and then followed that up a few weeks later with the announcement of an ATI/HL2 bundle.

      It may be ATI causing the delay and not them due to such a huge co-launching of two major products. Blah.

      • Well announced a delay and then followed that up a few weeks later with the announcement of an ATI/HL2 bundle.
        Except it's not a real bundle. It's the card plus a voucher. The cards are due out in something like three weeks IIRC, there's no way on god's earth HL2 will be ready by then.

    • Re:Wrong questions (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Babbster ( 107076 ) <aaronbabb&gmail,com> on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @10:17PM (#7110192) Homepage
      You've stumbled onto the state of gaming "journalism." The hard questions don't get asked and every upcoming game is exciting and interesting.

      In this case, though, they did ask your first "why" question and Mr. Newell answered by citing play-testing. Still, like virtually all game industry "interviews," it's a [very] thinly veiled advertisement for Half-Life 2.

      It's too bad that real journalism school graduates cost more money to hire than people with BAs in English Lit who've always dreamed of a job in the video game industry...

      • Re:Wrong questions (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Dot.Com.CEO ( 624226 ) *
        As a person who has worked in the editorial business, albeit not as a journalist, let me assure you 100% that the first "hard" question you asked a "celebrity" would be your last one as he/she would not only walk out but you'd be blacked out from all subsequent events. Also, I don't understand how someone with a BA in Journalism would be better writing for a gaming site than, say, one with no formal qualifications. You need to like games, understand how they work and be able to see through the hype. Gamespy
        • While I agree with you, let me ask you on what planet (aside from the one inhabitited by 14 year old fanboys with Gordon Freeman posters on their walls) is Gabe Newell a "celebrity"?
          • The one inhabited by fanboys of all ages with Gordon Freeman posters on their walls. Wait! That's Earth!
            • Dude, did you see this month's issue of GMR? (The magazine that EB creates/sells.) They fucking ripped into the N-Gage! It was bullshit! I was so pissed off. They gave the N-Gage a big thumbs down and they reviewed the games and gave most of them 3/10. It was fucking bullshit! I am so mad about this incident. Here's what I did, I took a dump on their faggoty magazine and took it to the mall. I laid it out on the counter and told them that my N-Gage that I preordered better fucking be there as soon as the mo
          • He is a celebrity in the gaming world in much the same way Romero used to be. People know his name and his word carries some weight.

            Anyway, I was talking in general, not specifically about Newell.

      • You've stumbled onto the state of gaming "journalism." The hard questions don't get asked and every upcoming game is exciting and interesting.

        and anything deeper than "it's late, but it'll be out by christmas, here's a quick excuse" is really only interesting if you are or want to be a game developer, or you're a part-owner of valve. it's hard for this kind of article to be hard-hitting and deep, simply because of the subject matter and audience. it's not exactly watergate.

        if you are seriously interested

    • Re:Wrong questions (Score:2, Insightful)

      by The Munger ( 695154 )
      I think this post [slashdot.org] a little further down adds a lot to this argument. Keep in mind that they never publicly stated that that would be the release date until (as you say) about a week before hand - The only reason people thought it was Sept 30 before that was leaks from other sources. They've been working on this project since the end of the last decade. You can't claim that a few weeks off in a schedule that is a few years long is really that bad.

      And then there's the other question, do we care that much?

  • Phew - I can delay the upgrade a little longer... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by quinkin ( 601839 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @10:20PM (#7110211)
    Phew - I can delay the upgrade a little longer...

    Seriously though, my upgrade cycle is dictated far more by games than anything else. Despite the fact that I rarely have time to play them...

    Q.

    • I am in the exact same situation as you. The new generation of games comes out? Time to get that shiny new P4 3.2C, 800Mhz FSB Motherboard, a gig of RAM, etc...

      And then you spend all your time optimizing, fixing, tweaking, and repairing your system. Sure, you have games, but they are mostly used as benchmarks.

      It's time to admit what you are: A Computer Hypochondriac.
  • Will centre around the long awaited Team Fortress 2. I seriously doubt that Valve would just shelve all of the effort that they put into that product. Besides, games along the lines of Natural Selection have helped to get players used to the RTS as FPS gameplay that TF2 will herald.
    • This is less clear than you might think. While it would certainly be good of Valve to give us Team Fortress 2 (or its equivalent) as a free bonus with Half-Life, given their development of Steam as a revenue-generating content delivery service I think it's unlikely. It's it far more likely that it will be an add-on pack that will cost extra for all those people who choose not to buy Half-Life on the Steam subscription plan.

  • Project Management (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SandSpider ( 60727 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2003 @11:05PM (#7110485) Homepage Journal
    Yeah, there's this thing, it's called "Project Management." It's where you figure out how long things are going to take to do, and you make sure they happen in the right amount of time.

    I know, sometimes it's tough. Usually it's the most difficult when you have someone telling you that you have to have something done by X time, and you know that time is clearly impossible, but they make you plan for it anyways. That's not the case here, though.

    The case here is more likely that they don't know how to plan for QA. I would be willing to bet that they think that Quality Assurance means "Testing the game at the end and fixing the bugs."

    Good project managers know that QA is planned for from the beginning, and that you know, from experience and extrapolation, how longs things will take to do. Most importantly, be able to know when you're done. Usually the answer is and ideal, "When we test a couple of times and there are no bugs," though that usually works out to be, "When we test a couple of times and there are no bugs we can't fix by the first or second patch." There are other, better ways to know when you're done testing, if it's part of your complete project plan.

    =Brian
    • Seriously though, having a few weeks or even a month on a four year project extra isn't bad at all for project management. Especially when you're dealing with creative always new technology. At least HL2 isn't akin to Duke Nukem Forever.
    • Good point. But you can only plan for a test phase. The outcome of it is not plannable. Experienced programmers can estimate how much time they need for a task. Experienced project managers know how to put these estimates into a plan. And yet many release dates slip. Quite a few books have been written about this subject. Many of them are propably older than you.

      In my experience a project plan is a sequence of things that are most unlikely to happen. One more MS Project plan exported to an Excel spreadsh
      • Good point. But you can only plan for a test phase. The outcome of it is not plannable.

        But the outcome is estimatable. (word?) Ideally, you should be estimating how many defects you'll find, and their severity. All that should to into your QA plan up front, before you ever see the code. But that applies more to stable projects with a measurable history. You could still do it for a new project, you'd just be less accurate.

        Of course, all of this is theoretical - I have been doing QA/Testing for 10 yea

    • I am a project manager for medium to large IT projects. I'm also a BSc in IS and MBA with a MSc in IS coming up.

      To put it bluntly, the one job for a project manager is solving problems. Not preventing them. Problems will arise, no matter how well you plan them. You might have an excellent Gantt chart made at the beginning of the project but chances are it will have to be ammended lots of times by the time of the alpha version.

      QA is not something you only do at the end, as well. It is ongoing, starting at

    • Good project managers know that QA is planned for from the beginning, and that you know, from experience and extrapolation, how longs things will take to do.

      First, Valve's had quite a lot of experience with QA both on their own side and on the publisher's (Sierra) side. They probably can make pretty good estimates about how long the QA process will take if it works out good. They can probably even estimate pretty well how long the QA process will take if they have to go through 4 iterations of it (includi
    • It's a game, who cares? This is not some business critical application that has to ship out on x date or the company they work with will get pissed or lose money. They missed their ship date...so what? They release it later and make money then instead of now. The only people who care are generally young people. They can't wait to spend their 50 bucks on the next great game. I know, I used to be one of them. It is so much easier now just to see there are a million other games out there to beat, and wh

  • The last time somebody wouldn't talk ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nice2Cats ( 557310 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @01:21AM (#7111221)
    ... about some great new surprising feature, it was Master of Orion 3's Harvester race. Man, and what a great game that turned out to be.

    Common, people, this isn't a film or a novel. If they are unwilling to discuss the concept with the gaming public at large, it sounds very much like their afraid it is going to be a shitty idea. If they believe in the multiplayer mode, they'd be screaming it from the rooftops to build up suspense.

    This doesn't sound good at all.

    • I'm guessing the suprise is either full backwards compatability with halflife1 mods, or TF2.
      Just a guess though, If I knew for sure I wouldnt be leaking it on slashdot, heh.
    • I agree, there MUST be some kind of doubts going on within Valve. It doesn't take a hardcore PC gamer to tell you that people are drooling over the idea of Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike 2 being made for Half-Life 2. Because of this, the expectation level for the game is unbelievably high. The only way Valve could bring the expectations up higher that it is now is by releasing a 5 minute demo and say "And that was just the training."

      Without causing any flame wars, I think the same thing is happening wi

  • Lets not forget to mention (Score:5, Informative)

    by gedanken ( 24390 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @04:11AM (#7111745)
    That the source code to the freaken game was just leaked to the public!

    Yeah that could lead to some delays.

    • Re:Lets not forget to mention (Score:4, Funny)

      by ymgve ( 457563 ) on Thursday October 02, 2003 @09:28AM (#7112831) Homepage
      Why would a source code leak mean delays? It's not like somebody stole the source and they don't have it anymore..
      • Well, if the source includes the code to their controversial Steam thingy, that's going to nullify it as an antipiracy tool -- at least without some changes. Further, they're going to have to do some extra work seeking out an patching security holes than normal in addition to the usual play game optimizing and bug squashing. Normally, when a game gets released, you have security through obscurity for a week before people figure out how to exploit security holes and create cheat utilities. Imagine the fir
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • okay.. so whats the fsking deal?

    i have to pay for a single player version?
    i have to pay again fro the multiplayer version?

    or i can just pay alot for a special all inclusive version???

    this is garbage... this confusing to me.. let alone people out there in retail land who dont know this and just buy the first box they see.. man what kinda crap is this.. dose daryl mcbride work for valve now?
  • Gamespot failed to ask the most pressing question of all: What's the deal with the allegedly leaked Half-Life 2 source code? Is it real? Is it buildable? Is it all your fault, Gabe?

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