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Half Life 2 Episode 2 Launch Date

By DivineOmega | June 16, 2007

The episodic sequel to episode 1 of Half Life 2 now has a confirmed release date from Valve. This release date is the 9th October, 2007 and it is to be released on the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Released alongside Episode 2 will be two of Valve’s most highly anticipated titles, Team Fortress 2 and Portal.

All three of the upcoming games are going to be based on (as always) Valve’s latest installment of the Source engine, which was built for Half Life 2 originally and has seen a vast variety of improvements. The engine contains some of the most interesting innovations in recent FPS gaming, including highly detailed character models with dynamic facial expression, not to mention the fully integrated physics engine which binds all objects within the virtual ‘world’ created by game designers

Personally, I am really looking forward to Portal even more so than Episode 2. The idea of 3 dimensional space portals is not new as the technique was used extensively in Prey (Doom 3 engine) - a game I intensely enjoyed playing. However, Portal looks like it is going to be primarily a first person puzzle game which the impossible (maybe?) physics which these portals introduce into the game. I’ll like to see how current hardware copes with this kind of game, as it will no doubt involve rendering and re-rendering various portions of the environment a multitude of times to allow the player to ‘look through’ the portals he or she creates.

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