Worried.... Something Smells

[afty]

Is anyone else here a little bit worried about Half Life 2?

Their marketing program is very very fishy.

There has been no demo, there still is no demo.

It's only 7 days to shelf-date in the UK (meaning the game has almost certainly gone gold already) yet no-one has a definitive review or preview available, it seems no-one has got their hands on playable code? Either that or Google isn't playing nice today.

The only stuff we have to go off are some videos... nice looking, but quite a bit of the stuff people are assuming is dynamic could be scripted.

There is little to nothing coming out of Valve, and there's speculation about the multiplayer aspect that they haven't quoshed.

It's taken 6 years to make a sequel.

They failed to every get TF2 out the doors.

Now I'm not writing this game off or anything, I think it has alot of potential *however* there are a huge number of people going ape**** to play this game, when the pre-release process has been so... worrying.

Am I alone?

[Bob^^]

Was just thinking this earlier! To be honest, you really would have expected a playable demo to be out and circulating like the plague by now, but so far there is nothing, not even anything leaked (that i'm aware of?).

I guess we'll just have to wait and see, i must admit i'm not holding my breath for an on-time release ;)

[andyf]

Who knows, genius new marketing campaign?

When it hits the shops, people are going to buy it in droves going off what they've seen so far...

I do trust it to be good, I believe I know a valve employee who has been working on it (and he hasn't said a damn thing about it either :) ) I suspect bvark knows him too.

[Blood Sport]

Very vaild point there. Also you notice how theres been no builds that have been leaked on the net like doom 3 etc

[RocketKnight]

I wondered that when I saw the release date Game have got down. The only possible reason I could think of is that they're thinking along the lines of "it's Half Life, this thing markets itself!". While it's true that the product will sell regardless of what they do between now and then, I don't think they would be stupid enough to do absolutely nothing to promote it, especially this close to its supposed release. My prediction is that the release date is horribly wrong, and it's going to be another "when it's done" saga for a few months. Which would place it's release nicely in the Christmas period. £££

[spaz]

ati leaked the doom3 code (i think) and because they have made a multi-million dollar deal with valve to bundle the game with the card i doubt it'll happen again, and nvidia might not want to leak it because it will show their cards up :)

[andyf]

Originally posted by Blood Sport
Very vaild point there. Also you notice how theres been no builds that have been leaked on the net like doom 3 etc


I think that's more down to having good control of your network ;)

[Blood Sport]

I agree with RocketKnight on this one I think the release date is very wrong I think the release will be more around x-mas time as this would increase sale a little more than releasing the game now

[afty]

It's very rare though to have a release date put back once you're within a few days of it. By that time things have happened (shelf space allocation, mastering, dupe runs booked etc. ) that are hard to go back on.

[Cheez]

Our local game has no sign that it is about to be released though. Normally for big titles they have "Comming soon" boxes etc. For this there is nothing.

[Gunsmith]

well i heard itll be available via steam on the 30th but again i dont know

if it is then bandwidth will be so choked it will be a piss take

speaking of marketing, i know im gonna get some flak for this but lets put out video cards to one side here.

i heard ati coughed up 8 mill for hl2, which makes me ponder just how trustworthy this whole relationship between ati & valve is and this isnt good.

by pulling this sort of marketing ploy and hyping up HL2 to the point of beyond they have created an insurmantable demand for ati cards as a result, which may seem like a good thing, but it has destroyed the competition between nvidia and ati. thus there it no reason for ati to drop there prices. in fact i wouldnt be surprised if ati started charging more.

the fact that shader day has caused people to go out and buy ati cards when its not evan released just proved how effective shader day was, something was a little odd when valve insisted on using old drivers for nvidia, admitidly the past 2 detonator releases have been buggered to **** and that the last detonator to work properly was the 44:03 but i hear that valve went back further then that. (need to look this up)

i wouldnt be surprised if hl2 doesnt come out until after the release of the new 9900 which may cause consumers to run out and buy that as the ney score will prove that hl2 runs EVAN BETTER on that then the 9800 pro ever did. i dont think more will be needed to push that idea as the hype machine will have done that.

just my 2 cents but something does indeed smell fishy, or is that a battered mars bar im smelling? o_O

[Jazza]

Valve have yet to say it's gone gold, which Gabe said they would do. According to people inside, it's still 30th. But the publisher hasn't said a word as of yet. Most gaming websites, have the rumour mill working on overtime about what's gonna happen.

Will it be released on Steam on the 30th?? Are Valve just being quite, and it will be released on time? Will it be released on in Feburary next year? Will it be released before Duke Nukem Forever? Is it delayed because Steam isn't up to it?

For it to be released on the 30th, it would have had to have gone gold by now.

The honest answer is no one outside Valve knows.

If it is delayed by a few days, it can't be too much of a bad thing, as it probably would save having to download a patch the day it came out.

Another thing, the new ATI card, I think it's the 9800XT, which will be shipping with HL2. Has apparently started to be shipped to stores in the US.

So many rumours, where will it end!!!!

**edit**

Another thing, I believe the AquaMark 3 benchmark, proved the same thing as the Halflife 2 benchmark, 9800 is better for DX9

[afty]

Originally posted by Gunsmith
by pulling this sort of marketing ploy and hyping up HL2 to the point of beyond they have created an insurmantable demand for ati cards as a result,

Nah, they created a demand for Half Life 2... I'll tentatively state that probably 90% of people who will buy a copy of Half Life 2 don't know the difference between ATI and NVIDIA, and the remaining hard-core gamers who bother to read the news etc. will buy whatever they want regardless.

Valves pimping in benchmarks with ATI is brilliant, but if ATI paid 8 mil for a bundling deal, I'll lay odds they'll regret it if it's only bundling...

[spaz]

Also I read somewhere about the geforce FX needing 4x more code or something to run hl2 better, because of this ati deal I wonder if theyre putting 4x more effort into getting it to work?

I have to admit though, i'm buying a new card in the next week and I am definately going to buy ati because of those benchmarks, im just another sheep :(.

[Bambers]

gabe said that they spent 5x more work (FX doesn't need 5x more code, just shaders that avoid heavy register use etc) on the mixed precision code for the FX cards than the generic dx9 code thats used by the r300/350 and any other dx9 card.


Shader day only made more public what was the case already. Valve is just big enough to be able to put it clearly without getting a phonecall from nvidias lawyers.

Just look at core and eidos with tomb raider. Patch is released with benchmark tools (and bug fixes), FX cards get trashed with dx9 effects on (an nvidia branded the way its meant to be played game with FX specific code), a little later patch gets pulled down with a statement 'core and eidos beleive TR:AOD perfroms very well on nvidia hardware blah blah' :rolleyes:


as for the 8mil, its a rumour but its interesting, if that much is spent for things like this how much did nvidia pay for doom3?

[Triprotic-Acid]

I'm not expecting it to make the current release date purely because of the the problems they have had with Steam.

Plus they will want to get the whole LAN thing sorted before realease, as that will put a lot of people off if it's not sorted.

It will be out before the end of the year though, I'll eat my feet if i'm wrong about that :p:

[Cheez]

I'll bet you were that positive about Team Fortress 2 as well.

Hell while we are at it lets make bets about when Duke Nukem Forever will be released!

[KBB]

Originally posted by afty
It's very rare though to have a release date put back once you're within a few days of it. By that time things have happened (shelf space allocation, mastering, dupe runs booked etc. ) that are hard to go back on.

/me remembers Republic: the revolution...

[Triprotic-Acid]

nah, they have never given out a release date for TF2, or DNF for that matter (was always "when it's done").

[afty]

Originally posted by KBB
/me remembers Republic: the revolution...

That got put back a few times, but never within a week of ship date, or am I wrong?

[KBB]

im unsure, but i think towards the end it just hit the day it was supposed to arrive, then be put back another 3 weeks. But your right tho, there are very few games that have in the past been delayed so close to release. If i can play HL2 at the weekend, then thats great :D

[Blood Sport]

cheez
please dont get me started with Duke Nukem Forever ...please

[Jazza]

Update

"Here's the quote from Valve's Doug Lombardi: "

The previously announced September 30th release date for Half-Life 2 is being pushed back. We are currently targeting a holiday release, but do not have a specific "in-store" date to share at this time. We will release that information as soon as we have confirmed a new date.

by holiday I'm not sure if they mean Thanksgiving (November) or Christmas.

[MONK]

Would ammuse if after all this the was great......

Of course we could also be waiting another five years for the new version.

[afty]

Originally posted by Jazza2
The previously announced September 30th release date for Half-Life 2 is being pushed back. We are currently targeting a holiday release, but do not have a specific "in-store" date to share at this time.

Holy ****. It's TF2 all over again!

[Nikumba]

Amazon have it as the 1st of December :(

Nikumba