Valve talks Episode Two
David Speyrer, Gautam Babbar and Doug Lombardi open up.
It's only interesting if the next challenge is more vicious than the previous, right? If we just churned out Half-Life 2 a year and a half after Half-Life 1 and used the same engine and you were still whatever, people wouldn't care any more.
It's Vista-compatible, it's not DX10, although there are features of DX10 cards we're taking such as the Team Fortress facial animations. As for Live, I don't know that we're really going to do any of the Achievement stuff on the PC. Steam is going to be compatible for folks who want to do Games for Windows stuff, but for the Orange Box stuff I don't think we'll be doing that.
We haven't done it before, so we're going to support it on the Xbox 360 where it seems to have a great home. People are real enthusiastic about it, and we have some interesting ideas for what's going to go in there. I don't know that we've announced any final... You've seen a lot of what we're experimenting with.
That's one idea we have.
We have to use just one set of 1000 because it's just one SKU, so we have to figure out how to creatively apply that.
You can imagine there's lots of internal debate between the teams about whether to do 333 points per game or something like that.
Pre-production is definitely going, and it'll be ramping up rather quickly now that they're ramping down on Episode Two. Some people are shared and there are separate groups that do R&D, like Dave was mostly R&D on EpTwo the whole time EpOne was in development. At the very end he got pulled over to help ship EpOne and then got sent back to continue. There's an EpThree team skeleton crew doing production, and I'm sure Dave's tapped half of them if not all of them at some point or will in the next couple of weeks.
This one's a bit longer, and very different. When you're doing a trilogy, the first one has to resolve what was up, so City 17 at the end of Half-Life 2, and this one really kicked off and we're well on the new adventure now.
I don't think you'll head back to City 17, for sure. Not in Episode Three anyway.
She's part of the plot.
No comment [laughs].
It's a deliberate choice. We wanted to really get people into a meaty story, and it's just part of the story we're trying to tell.
I think any trilogy you look at, the second one is always the one that's got all the big reveals that get things charged up a bit.
They always kind of bridge.
Certainly Lord of the Rings, the original three Star Wars are like that.
That would be too obvious.