We all expect Half-Life 2 to debut at retail and on Steam simultaneously. Perhaps more interesting than the extraordinary amount of cash that has been pumped through the Valve though is Newell's comment on the developer's ambitions for content delivery system Steam, which has endured its own problems - that one might charitably put down to "teething problems". Final Fantasy games may involve hundreds of staff members nowadays, but other than that we're stumped. Off the top of our collective head, it's difficult to think of another game that came close to that figure, let alone one that managed to recoup it. "Yikes, that's a scary number." It certainly is. "Last time I checked, we were about $40 million into the project," he told Maxitmag this week. When he does pipe up though, he doesn't disappoint.
Given the developer's widely reported problems and the game's delays, it's hardly surprising that an interview with founder and head honcho Gabe Newell is now something of a rarity.
The original Half-Life - rightly regarded as one of the defining moments in a genre that used to belong almost solely to the residents of Dallas, Texas - is a very solid guarantor, and, even a year on, those first shots of the game and the trade show presentations continue to reverberate around the internet with the clanging resonance of the world's biggest crowbar.īut what with source code leaks and slippage problems, these days Seattle-based developer Valve Software has to contend with a faint level of scepticism from some quarters (even if we'd wager most of its critics are just as likely to buy the resulting game as everybody else). What makes the difference is that most gamers actually believe a lot of what they hear about Half-Life 2. It is "the full package", promising a world that combines "unparalleled visual quality" and "realistic physics" so that its "believable characters" are in a position to deliver a "brand new experience". Its "breath-taking" and "jaw-dropping" technology is a "quantum leap" in terms of what we've come to expect from games. Expectations have "gone through the roof" since E3 last May. Half-Life 2 has been swimming in clichés for almost a year now.
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