johng Blog

Well we just had a raft of announcements on the future of Half-Life from Valve. It includes the return of Team Fortress 2 and the simultaneous release of Episode 2 on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. It’s interesting for such a PC focused developer to suddenly bring their next gen console ports into the same release schedule as their main platform. Also, the episodic nature of the series means that it is best delivered on Steam or Xbox Live but as of yet the PS3 does not have a firm infrastructure to do this.

With this as the case I highly doubt we will be seeing a downloadable version of Episode 2 on the PS3 on launch day due to the untested and unproven nature of Sony’s online service. Instead we would only see a retail release at a budget price (ala Episode 1) making it the cheapest PS3 game around.

With the extension of support to these other platforms and the addition of TF2 and Portal (crazy Prey style game) to Valve’s development schedule I can definitely see Episode 2 slipping into 2007. I hope they prove me wrong but as it has been proven in the past Valve will keep working till it’s done and all this extra work can’t help. Wish I could start preloading now.