8 Hours?

Sui

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Can't stop. Being chased by George Lucas. Sentences hard to construct as this keyboard has many letters missing. Oh crud, now he's pelting Star Wars merchandise at me, must be brief. [br] [br] Kotaku.com revealed in two short quotes from Doug Lombardi that Half-Life 2: Episode Two will be significantly longer, taking an average of eight hours to complete. However, the news reporter - Luke Plunkett - spoke of Valve in a rude and sarcastic manner, so I urge you not to visit Kotaku. In fact, if Kotaku walks past you in the street, blank it.[br] [br] Oh dear Jesus, he has a plastic lightsaber.

[Update] This is the original article. Thanks to Benefactor for the notice.
 
Suck up.

They've good reason to throw sarcasm at Valve, as much as I love Half-Life 2.
 
Ooooh, keen.

lol@the kotaku reporter. I'm pretty sure Ep1 took me roundabout 5 hours to complete, though.

....is that a new screenshot?
 
Can't stop. Being chased by George Lucas. Sentences hard to construct as this keyboard has many letters missing. Oh crud, now he's pelting Star Wars merchandise at me, must be brief. [br] [br] Kotaku.com revealed in two short quotes from Doug Lombardi that Half-Life 2: Episode Two will be significantly longer, taking an average of eight hours to complete. However, the news reporter - Luke Plunkett - spoke of Valve in a rude and sarcastic manner, so I urge you not to visit Kotaku. In fact, if Kotaku walks past you in the street, blank it.[br] [br] Oh dear Jesus, he has a plastic lightsaber.

I don't think it's fair to chastise the writer of the article for bringing up valid points about valve,

Doug claims 6 hours, however you can see here in their own statistics that the average player took between 3.5 and 4.5:
http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep1/

Either Doug is a bad liar or a bad player (perhaps that's why HL2 is so easy? :p).

Either way, If they claim 8 hours for episode2, I assume that will actually translate to 5-6.

Finally, Valve previously have stated that work on Episode2 began during development of Episode 1, therefore Episode will have been in development for longer than 12 months by the time it is released.

All in all though, I'm glad episode2 will be longer, hopefully harder aswell.
 
I think Doug was also talking about an extra couple of hours of playing time with the commentary nodes. I think Episode 1 took me around 4 and abit hours...stick the commentary onto that and you've got about 6.
 
So, around 3 hours? Ep1 was like 2 and a half.
 
As much as I would've liked it to last longer, it didn't. I guess I'm not too keen on checking out virtual sights.
 
Note that Valve is probably using these time estimates as with commentary and on HARD. If you're not playing on hard, then stfu about it being too short, because you've got no ground to stand on.
 
Does it really deserve to be called "Episodic" if it's taking over a year to release each 'episode'?

Sounds like time could have been better spent on a longer expansion, or better yet, HL3?
 
Note that Valve is probably using these time estimates as with commentary and on HARD. If you're not playing on hard, then stfu about it being too short, because you've got no ground to stand on.
How about the grounds that even on HARD with commentary mode on, Half-Life 2 Episode One never last the 6 Hours that Doug Lombardi also claims?
 
We all know reviewers and anyone who mentions game length always plays on easy they have to get through these games quickly after all.
 
Does it really deserve to be called "Episodic" if it's taking over a year to release each 'episode'?

Sounds like time could have been better spent on a longer expansion, or better yet, HL3?

Wrong thread for that. We already had a giant argue thread on this.

And I must admit, 8 hours sounds like it will be right for me. I can't wait to sink my teeth into it.
 
Does it really deserve to be called "Episodic" if it's taking over a year to release each 'episode'?

Then what do you call Star Wars?

Time is definitly not the factor to define what an 'episode' is.
 
Episode = 1 year.
HL2 = >1 year.

Meh anyway as long as they keep improving the engine as they go, for a .bsp engine it's still pretty good.
 
Can't people read the stats?

Average completion time: 5 hours 41 minutes

Thats pretty damn close to 6 hours...

http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep1
Lies, damn lies and ...

Averages still don't make a firm basis for saying something takes 6 hours to complete. And look at the graphs: The 'average' only comes out around that number because there is a large spread of people taking a bizarre 6-10 hours to complete. People who ACTUALLY completed in 6 hours are dwarfed by the ammounts of people who took 3.5 to 4.5 hours to finish the game. The largest percentage of people took 4 hours to complete the game. I suspect problems with the stats monitoring.
 
Sounds good. Just cant wait to play it :)

8 hours for Episode 2
6 hours for Portal
How ever much for TFC2

Thats some crazy value.

Plus the commentary for each!
 
Sounds good. Just cant wait to play it :)

8 hours for Episode 2
6 hours for Portal
How ever much for TFC2

Thats some crazy value.

Plus the commentary for each!

Don't forget PORTAL!
 
How about the grounds that even on HARD with commentary mode on, Half-Life 2 Episode One never last the 6 Hours that Doug Lombardi also claims?

I think it was more 4-5 hours, but I was responding mostly to people saying 2-3 hours :p
 
EDIT: D'oh! The point I just made was already addressed - Next time I'll have to actually read the whole thread before posting...

Doug claims 6 hours, however you can see here in their own statistics that the average player took between 3.5 and 4.5:
http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep1/

Just to be clear, the average play time is 5h41m. The distribution does show that a good chunk of the players finished between 3.5 and 4.5 hours, but Doug was not lying about the average play time.

Odd that I bothered to write this not-very-meaningful post after many many months without posting a thing.
 
Good thing I'm waiting for Valve to finish ever episode before buying the whole HL2 pack with all episodes. This way I'll have 15 hours of gaming ahead of me!

And why is it taking so long for Valve to do this? I'll say it again as I did a million times before, their tools suck and there is little to no order in any of their content. Some little organizing can make a world of difference.
 
..."For those who recently upgraded their PC video cards to support DX10, you?ll be happy to know that both Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 will support the advanced technology of these cards, even if the PC is running Windows XP. On the low-end front, Valve still plans on supporting PCs that can only run DX8 applications. Valve?s attempting to also support DX7, but couldn?t confirm if it?d go back that far with technology."..

http://www.gameinformer.com/NR/exeres/A8BFBE29-E523-465F-B396-4FC304742B3A.htm

My bet: DOF and motion blur. :cool:
 
Seems unlikely they'll support DOF and motion blur, at least not the same as the versions we've seen in videos. They've said themselves that they have to post-process the videos to add that. Plus, things like DOF in a multiplayer game have to affect all players or some get a significant disadvantage....
 
"...you'll be happy to know that both Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 will support the advanced technology of these cards..."

Notice it mentions TF2 - a multiplayer only game...
 
EDIT: D'oh! The point I just made was already addressed - Next time I'll have to actually read the whole thread before posting...



Just to be clear, the average play time is 5h41m. The distribution does show that a good chunk of the players finished between 3.5 and 4.5 hours, but Doug was not lying about the average play time.

Odd that I bothered to write this not-very-meaningful post after many many months without posting a thing.

Anyone who does statistics will tell you that taking the average in a case like that is a terrible way to analyse the data.
 
Seems unlikely they'll support DOF and motion blur, at least not the same as the versions we've seen in videos. They've said themselves that they have to post-process the videos to add that. Plus, things like DOF in a multiplayer game have to affect all players or some get a significant disadvantage....

It could be possible, Crysis seems to support both of these as does Project Offset. Keep in mind that post-process isn't the same as post-production, the Project Offset team have real time motion blur and they call it a post process in their videos.
 
I don't get people rushing through a game, if you don't care about the insanely beautiful visuals which the developers have worked hard on then why not just go back to tetris and what not.
 
I think it can really last 8 hours. I think EP2 is going to be much harder than EP1 was. I mean, look at the gameplay demos. If the game is much harder and you explore, it will absolutelly last 8 hours.
 
It could be possible, Crysis seems to support both of these as does Project Offset. Keep in mind that post-process isn't the same as post-production, the Project Offset team have real time motion blur and they call it a post process in their videos.

DOF, Motion Blur and I can't remember what else, were post-processed back then because no hardware could support real-time processing. I want to believe DX10 cards support this in real-time although the main argument is if they can do it no matter what DX level they are operating; ie. run it under XP.
 
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