eat. sleep. game.

Valve has quietly announced that Half Life 2: Black and Orange have been delayed til Winter 2007 from this summer, which is, oh, I don’t know, the 17th time or so this game has been delayed. The problem here, as I see it anyway, is that Valve was the company to push everyone on the idea of episodic content. Sure, other studios talked about it, such as Ritual and Traveler’s Tales, but Valve was supposed to be the big company that brought legitimacy to the procedure. It surprised me then that no one questioned the ability of a developer who had already become notorious for their product delays about their ability to deliver content on a seriously impacted timetable, but people have questioned my sanity in the past. So here we are, about 10 months after the release of Half Life 2: Episode 1 (and typing that hurts me in ways that I lack the capacity to really describe), and we’re informed that there is at least another 10 months before we see Half Life 2: Episode 2. 20 months between releases is not episodic.

However, amidst my irate ranting toward Valve for their awesome ability to not keep any sort of development schedule, I do have to really give some credit to Traveler’s Tales for the work they’re putting into Sam and Max; it’s the best (and really only true) example of episodic content in gaming right now, and they only seem to be getting faster at getting content out there. We should have a review up soon, but suffice it to say that Chuf seems pleased.

-Aegies