I think Valve knows as much as anyone (and I think, to be honest, they'd already started to figure this out when Episode 2 came out) that the episodic experiment just hasn't worked out like they (and we) would have liked.
That's ok. Sometimes you try something and it just doesn't work, and you have to change tack.
That's clearly what Valve have done. They've taken the rather simple notion that the frustration of not knowing when the story is going to be continued is temporary, but a bad game is forever.
People forget that once upon a time, the two biggest vapourware jokes were about Duke Nukem Forever and Team Fortress 2. Unless I missed it, not a single person has brought it up that TF2 was announced in 1998, and only came out in 2007, and just went dark for a period of years with absolutely nothing heard about it. I was there. I remember! I remember watching the original gameplay videos (on 56k dial-up!) where mouths flapping along to voice coms was a revolutionary feature. Then nothing was heard again for years.
As it turned out, they churned through a bunch of different designs for it because each one they tried just wasn't fun enough. You forget that it took forever to come out, because once it's out, and it's good, the wait doesn't matter one jot.
I'd bet the same thing is happening with the next Half-Life game. Hold your horses, it'll be good when it comes out.
That's ok. Sometimes you try something and it just doesn't work, and you have to change tack.
That's clearly what Valve have done. They've taken the rather simple notion that the frustration of not knowing when the story is going to be continued is temporary, but a bad game is forever.
People forget that once upon a time, the two biggest vapourware jokes were about Duke Nukem Forever and Team Fortress 2. Unless I missed it, not a single person has brought it up that TF2 was announced in 1998, and only came out in 2007, and just went dark for a period of years with absolutely nothing heard about it. I was there. I remember! I remember watching the original gameplay videos (on 56k dial-up!) where mouths flapping along to voice coms was a revolutionary feature. Then nothing was heard again for years.
As it turned out, they churned through a bunch of different designs for it because each one they tried just wasn't fun enough. You forget that it took forever to come out, because once it's out, and it's good, the wait doesn't matter one jot.
I'd bet the same thing is happening with the next Half-Life game. Hold your horses, it'll be good when it comes out.
