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Rumor: No New Half-Life in 2010
by Chris Faylor, Jan 19, 2010 11:10am PST
While Half-Life developer Valve has remained rather quiet as to when series star Gordon Freeman will continue his crowbar-wielding antics, a rumor currently making the rounds claims that it won't be this year.
"Loose Talk has learned that there won't be any game from the franchise in 2010, and what will finally come out is still unknown," reads the self-proclaimed "rumors and scuttlebutt" column in the February 2010 issue of Game Informer. "Will it be Half-Life 2: Episode Three? Or will it be a full-on Half-Life 3?"
The last Half-Life entry, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, arrived in October 2007. Since then, Valve has described Episode Three--the final entry in the Half-Life 2: Episode trilogy--as "a more ambitious project" and teased "the next time you play as Gordon will be longer than the distance between Half-Life 2 to Episode One, and Episode One to Episode Two," later telling Shacknews "Freeman's not done...stay tuned for more."
Comments
Eurogamer: Is there a point at which Left 4 Dead and Half-Life 2-style design ideas will start to converge? Is there an opportunity for procedural single-player games that still have really dramatic scripted sequences?
Lombardi: "The AI director - I don't want to say it fell out of Half-Life 2, but it was definitely a jumping-off point of stuff we did in Half-Life 2, particularly Episode 2. There are a couple of key battles where the number of Combine, and where they come at you from, uses something like that. It's much cruder than what we accomplished with Left 4 Dead, but there was some of that there. I think you can definitely extend that."
"...you're mixing replayable sandboxes with these climax moments which aren't going to have that - at least for the foreseeable future. I don't know to what extent that's enjoyed by the consumer. I don't know how many times people would be willing to play the single-player part of the experience."
"I haven't spoken to people who have said, "I wanted to play Half-Life 2 ten times." Instead, they want to find out who the G-Man is."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/left-4-dead-2-interview?page=2
Using the AI Director to extend replayability, bringing that technology back to the core franchise to keep players engaged longer, is a huge area of opportunity.
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 13 replies.
My understanding of the Ep1 "Games Completed" stat http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep1/?gamesHelp is that there is room for skewed numbers for players that actually completed the game (and watched the credits). However, the stat for players that reached the last level should be reliable.
My interepretation of key stats for Ep1 is:
1. Out of 4.6mil sessions an average sessions ran 35 min.
2. The average total playtime was 4 hours.
3. The average total completion time was 5 hours 40 minutes (confirmed by internal playtesting).
4. Out of the 5 hours and 40 minutes it took to play the complete game, only 51 of the total players made it to the last level. Not completed the game to watch the credits, but arrived at the last level.
"Our data indicates that while 52.03% of the players have reached the final map, only roughly half of those players have completed the game. This leads us to believe that either players are quitting before they see the credits, or there is a bug in how we collect this data."
Out of the 4,650,952 (100%) sessions played, 2,419,890 (47.97%) of the players never reached the final map during the time the stats were compiled.
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