Episode 3

You know…

At the moment I’m trying to get back into console games (I.e. By fixing my Ps3) and so I make sure to keep up with the latest news so I’m not left behind. So I’m looking over the news and Value announce their releasing this new game… I don’t normally care about this sort of thing because the only valve game I like is portal, but it’s hard not to notice something in any of the responses following these announcements.

Episode 3.

God damn you people sound like a broken record about this shit.

It’s a weird thing to do with human nature, but at the suggestion of a new thing that you like it suddenly becomes as important as your human rights. For some reason you’re no longer looking forward to it, but now you’re entitled to it.

So haters gonna hate.

Whenever I see this I just want to sit these people down and talk about two things…

One: Development cycles of ‘epic’ games have shot through the roof, Blizzard has proven that you can spend 12 years without a sequel and it will still be successful. If episode 3 is going to be as good as you somehow believe it will be, it probably needs a long time to make.

Two:… This is my preferred response… Valve doesn’t care about Half-Life at the moment. This isn’t hard to imagine really, more than any other company at the moment Value still retains alot of its own personal identity. They’re not like the big publishers, churning out sequel after sequel, they can pick and choose what they want to work on and when they want to work on it.

From a creative stand point (The one I’m familiar with) dropping Half-Life is a great choice. Just looking at all the other games Value have released (Not even taking into account Steam) you can tell their spreading their wings and doing things they actually want to do… Half-Life might be there golden child, but like any success story focusing on only one of your hits will get you remembered… for only that. You only need to look around a little to find famous authors etc that are only remembered for one of their works… and how frustrated they were with that.

Besides Gordon Freeman might never talk to the player, but I bet he’s an asshole at work.