Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (E3 2010)
Well its that time of the year again and yet hundreds and thousands of people are wondering about Half-Life 2 next installment.
well before we actually get into Half-Life 2: Episode 3, lets first look at the past.
well when Half-Life 2 was first released it was and still is the biggest games of all times but later valve announced they will be releasing episodes starting with Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 released on June 1, 2006
yet once gamers completed the first installment the question has been when is Episode 2 going to be released, well Episode 2 was released on October 10, 2007
but what many people do not know, that first two episodes of Half-Life 2 were developed concurrently by separate teams.
and yet years have passed and we are still waiting on an sequel.
well the reason for the long delay originally Electronic Arts was hired for the port of the orange box to both ps3 & xbox 360 but this was the biggest mistake due to bugs, game crashing and made many people on consoles very unhappy with there experience with Half-Life 2
Currently Valve Software are working on improving there source engine,
not that it now supports xbox 360 native but currently they are adding support for playstation 3 that will also work with the source engine native, among new features planned for the 2010 version of the source engine, some spectate there is an source engine 2.0 but you could call this an new engine but currently valve has not announced anything major that would declare the engine to be new, as for pc version of the SDK it does change regularly and going by the engine dates we are already in the 4 version of the engine since the release of Half-Life 2.
so when is Half-Life 2: Episode 3 being released, well Valve refused to comment currently both at E3 & in emails i have sent
but it looks like Half-Life 2: Episode 3 is going to be shipped with the new source engine that portal 2 is based on so we would expect to see announcements from valve in 2011 for Half-Life 2: Episode 3
but if you really do wish to complain to valve fee free to email them
For general issues, e-mail scott@valvesoftware.com. For marketing or press issues, e-mail lombardi@valvesoftware.com. To complain about HL-2 Ep 3 taking too long, email marc@valvesoftware.com. To complain about L4D2 not taking long enough, email toml@valvesoftware.com.
of course lets not forget Gabe Newell (gaben@valvesoftware.com)
Personally, I think development of HL2 episode 3 has been pushed back in favor of left 4 dead, left 4 dead 2, portal 2 and updates to team fortress 2.
HL2 episode 3 does not need a new engine. If anything needs a new engine, its counter-strike:source. HL2 EP3 would have been fine released on the original hl2 engine, or even the updated engine that l4d was supposed to run on.
A few months ago I disabled updates for tf2. When I finally decided to allow tf2 to update, there was a 2 gig download. Since I do not play tf2, I do not see why I should waste bandwidth on updates I’ll never play.
Then, there has been the updates to l4d and l4d2 – such as posting no mercy to l4d2, and the sacrifice add-ons for l4d and l4d2.
I think episode 3 has been pushed to the back of the list – l4d, l4d2, tf2 updates, portal 2,,, and then we “might” finally get someone on episode 3.
With the amount of time valve has spent on portal, l4d, l4d2 – and their add-ons, EP3 could have been finished a long time ago.
Well as i do personally work in the game industry but i do know they have an new engine but its more so for improvements and features they need for there current titles mostly portal 2 right now.
maybe one of these days we may actually see EP3 but then technology by then could be out dated
as its the same team that’s now working on portal 2 that was working on EP3 and those that was reasonable for alien swarm.
I know there engine really outdated but they are just pushing the limits of BSP when really they should move to something like scene graph as it would allow multilevel objects all linked as root or child of an object like ogre3d for example without needing to compile and maybe one of there days there level editor will be wysiwyp (what you is what you play) and not having to compile to check if the lighting and physics, sound etc are actually how you want them.
Steve