Half-life 2, the infamously delayed sequel to one of the best games of all time, is finally complete. I have spoken to Bill Van Buren, a producer/designer at Valve, who confirmed this fact to me on Wednesday. According to Bill, the team at Valve is finally closing up shop today, after which the finished product will be delivered to Sierra for final approval. The game will hopefully be shipped off to the factory for reproduction within a few weeks, and we can expect to see it on store shelves by mid September if not sooner. Bill also expressed to me his excitement that this exhausting project is finally over. It's been a long and hard journey to reach this point, and I think the entire team at Valve deserves our congratulations as gamers. Better yet, congratulate them by purchasing the game as soon as it lands in stores.

When Half-life was released in 1998, it revolutionized first-person-shooter gaming with its advanced AI, creative level design, and realistic graphics. It also was built upon a highly modifiable graphics engine that soon spawned countless user created mods like Day of Defeat, further increasing Half-life's popularity. Even today, six year later, Half-life and its expansion packs sell extremely well throughout the world. Its most popular mod, Counter-Strike, is still the most popular online first-person-shooter, with thousands joining matches across the world as you read this. 

Due to its predecessor's popularity, gamers everywhere eagerly anticipate the eventual arrival of Half-life 2. The popularity and excitement over the impending release of Half-life 2 has grown to such a degree that many fans of the series are upgrading their PCs to ensure that their gaming rig can handle the game's advanced technology. Understandably so. Half-life 2 will not only employ advanced HDR technology, dynamic lighting, and the latest Havoc physics engine, but will also eat up a whopping 2.5 gigabytes of hard drive space. However large this may sound, it is in fact on par with today's standard for FPS installation size. Far Cry, an extremely large and ambitious FPS was crammed onto five discs, totaling around 4.5 gigabytes of files. However, Far Cry was also set in a huge tropical jungle that the player was free to explore at his leisure. The story itself was, in fact, the length of your average shooter. That is, to say, twelve hours or so. I spoke to Bill Van Buren about the game's size as opposed to its actual gameplay length. He told me that regardless of how small the file size may seem as compared to other first-person-shooters of the day, Half-life 2 will actually be extremely long (for a shooter). He estimates that it will take the average gamer around 40 hours to play the game from start to finish, much longer than the original Half-life, which clocks in at around 20 hours.

The real question is, "will we even want to play it for that long?" The answer, from me,  is a resounding "yes." Due to time constraints, I wasn't actually able to try out the game myself, besides a little running around in the environment for a couple of seconds. However, I have seen the demonstrations, which can be easily accessed at Gamespot.com, and can easily identify quality when I see it. Last year's demos at E3 gave us a taste of the technology that will be used to power Valve's masterpiece, yet lacked the gameplay to truly make us all believers. Don't get me wrong, last year's demos were truly incredible all around, yet their gameplay didn't come close the demos from this year's E3. The demos we witnessed this year were more than just demos, they were divine gifts from the gaming god. The guys at Valve are his disciples, and we gamers are his chosen people. And thus, it was good.

With all of the incredible things we have seen and heard about this game, it would seem that a strikeout is nigh impossible. Sure there may be pieces of Half-life 2 that have received a bit more love than others, yet it can expected (and forgiven) from a game that clocks in at 40 hours gameplay time. Check back in a month for my full review.