Elmoth said:
I completely understand that. Valve has just been incredibly lazy on the game development side in recent years. Left4dead 2 was just l4d1 with extra features, DotA 2 is to me, an unremarkable and simple game and Portal 2 was good but lost what made the first great and I still haven't finished it. Half Life is Valve's best selling and most critically acclaimed series, and when they started to work on Half Life 2 their whole mentally was making a game that rose far above it's rivals in every term. They have a golden oppurtunity and they don't seem to take advantage of it. Doesn't every developer want to create the next citizen kane of gaming? Maybe all those kind of developers left Valve. Only explenation I can think of.
I believe Valve is fully aware of that, and unlike many I don't feel they've given up on their flagship franchise. The thing with Valve is their business model is nonlinear. They don't set a release date and stick to it no matter what happens. When they decide they can do better, they do better. And they keep doing better until they are certain what they are releasing is the best they can do. They care about the quality of their product above all else--including release dates.
What happened with Episode 3 is sort of interesting, because they
had a release date back in November of 2007, but then it never happened. And we haven't heard much since. My guess is they thought they knew what they were going to, and probably got a good way into the project, but then decided it was all wrong and scrapped it, starting from scratch. It wouldn't be the first time a creative giant has done it--Pixar had a lot of work done on Toy Story 2 in its first incarnation, but executive producer John Lasseter approached the team and said it just wasn't working. So they stopped everything and started again by getting a new director writing a brand new screenplay. By then they only had two years to complete the film as opposed to the usual four, but they did it.
I can understand why Valve hasn't done exactly that and rushed it through, though, because there is a lot more to games than films. They are much more complicated, and there is so much more that can go wrong. So like Pixar did with Toy Story 2 Valve has been redoing Episode 3 for the sake of quality, but unlike Pixar they've got no particular deadline to meet. While it's exasperating for us, and we are rightfully annoyed, it's at least reassuring to know that the delay isn't the same reason so many other games are delayed (money problems, leadership changes, getting bought out, etc).
