Nog twee weken en drie maanden en dan is het zover, de release van Half-Life 2, althans, als we de richtlijn van Valve mogen geloven. Maar hoe ver is de ontwikkeling van Half-Life 2 nu? Volgens Ken Birdwell van Valve is het spel zo goed als klaar en is men nu de helft van Half-Life 2 aan het gameplay testen. Tevens laten Ken en Josh van Valve weten dat, tot hun grote verbazing, Barney en de wetenschapper erg populair waren bij de gamers, terwijl deze figuren voor Valve in eerste instantie weggooi karakters waren. SE - One thing that I noticed while watching the demo was that Half-Life 2 was much more open, in terms of environment. Is Valve trying to convey a sense of the alien presence spreading, outside the confines of the Black Mesa facility and infiltrating civilization? Josh - The game really, kind of goes all around. But the thing is that we do not teleport the player like in other games where you go somewhere and the game stops and then all of a sudden you're in a new place. We want this to be a continuous experience because we thought that that was another thing that was really important in Half-Life 1. From the minute you started till the minute you ended there was this continuous flow. And people really liked that. For me, when I played the game, that was great. That's what I loved. So, you'll have a really wide array of places that you'll be going, but you'll be doing the traveling. And that's when the vehicles start to make sense. You'll have these wide-open spaces, but you don't want to walk acro them. That wouldn't be any fun. But it's pretty fun to drive acro them so in the one map you saw, we have this wide open [expanse]. Hoofdluis maakt meer kapot dan je lief isIn dit interview gaat men dieper in op de ontwikkeling van Half-Life 2, wanneer men begonnen is, wat de gevolgen waren van nieuwe grafische kaarten en Direct X versies en nog veel meer.