Holy poop on a pogo stick. HL2’s multiplayer is going to be “CounterStrike, ported to Source”???
While this may excite fans of CounterStrike, I’m pretty disappointed. With all the neat physics features and creativity they’ve been showing off in the SP game, a port to a new engine is pretty far from innovative. And as popular as CounterStrike is, it’s really a love/hate thing. Personally, I could never get into it, and I’d really like it better if there was some more standard DM option that appealed to everyone.
Half-Life 1 (the entire game: maybe also the MP?) is also ported over to the Source engine and will be available at the same time as when Half-Life 2 ships.
During the E3 presentation, Gabe Newell reiterated that Half-Life 2 is shipping this summer, although no specific date was given. Doug Lombardi now says that they are aiming to go Beta around E3, and have the game out in early summer.
Oh, the video is actually shakycam of the whole HL2 presentation. Looks fantastic (huge Halo2 style battles? Oh… yes), and even CS: Source looks great. And I’m sure it’s, financially, a great move to port the most popular FPS MP game ever. It’s just… it seems a little lazy.
Seems like all the old Half-life mods will be updated and re-released on the Source engine, including Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat, etc. So maybe we will see some HL2 themed DM after all. Still not clear if these are separate products, part of the HL2 package, or what.
Does TFC updated for Source mean that they’re going to stop pretending that TF2 is in production?
As for CS… I don’t really care for the game. They just released Condition Zero this year, so it seems kind of odd to me that they’d shove yet another CS rehash out the door as the official multiplayer version of HL2. I like taking more than two hits before I die.
I’ll be waiting for NS and Science and Industry anyway.
TF2 is definately still definately in production, though at this point it’s racing neck and neck with Duke Nukem Forever for the ridicuous vaporware award.
I feel the same way about CS. I don’t hate it, but I like either fast DM action or thoughtful and complex teamplay based games.
I felt sorry for those foolish enough to buy CS:CZ in the first place: they pretty much bought it to get updated graphics for Counter-Strike play, since they thought CS2 wouldn’t be out for another year or so. But with this, there’s a new, much cooler looking, version coming out only three months after they blew their 39.99 on CZ. Pretty bad deal.
Flayra, who makes Natural Selection, seems to be giving the idea of an NS port, which he’d previously rejected, some thought: http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=9924966
I know I’m way behind on the news, but…what the hell has held HL2 up for so long? Wasn’t it supposed to be out last fall? Then they put it off to Christmas, and then I sort of lost track.
The story is that basically, they weren’t anywhere near done by Sept. 30: they completely underestimated how long it would take. So the game was already set to get delayed. Then they got hacked and the source code stolen, so they were basically demoralized and had to regain their will to live again and so forth, as well as re-write a lot of code to ensure people wouldn’t continue to hack. Then it’s basically been just finishing the game. They say that they are about to go Beta (i.e. content complete, just worrying about bug testing and so forth) and plan for a early-mid summer release. Hopefully that will all work out.
God, I hate Counter-Strike. Plain ol’ multiplayer HL was completely awesome, and TFC was pretty darned good too, but I detested CS from the moment I first played it.
Well, it sounds like the other mods, including HLDM and TFC, will get the port treatment as well. And now that I look around more, it’s not even clear whether CS: Source is what will ship with HL2. Some sources say that it’s a separate thing you can purchase. So there may yet be a HL2 MP option that is still under wraps.