ValveTime

In the fourth episode of ValveTime TalkTime, Glenn, Nick, James and John discuss what they would like to see Valve do for the next Half-Life game, and argue about what does or does not need to be done for the game to be considered a success. Don't forget to leave your questions in the comments below as TalkTime Episode 5 will be a question/answer session where the ValveTime staff will talk about what you submit!


Feel free to leave your feedback regarding what you think of this series! If you would like to see more, let us know! If not, tell us! Our series can only improve with your help.

Update: Dave Oshry has since released his an official statement to Pixel Enemy regarding the supposed Valve meeting at GDC 2013.

It would appear as if the media have massively jumped the gun regarding this particular rumour, and in turn have managed to blow the tweets from Goldfarb and Oshry way out of proportion. While gaming news organisations (including ourselves) are most likely largely to blame for the initial development of the situation, we feel partial blame should also lie with Oshry and Goldfarb, who willingly exploited their industry positions to spread and further develop fake rumours, which is extremely unnecessary, unprofessional and unwelcome. However, we are pleased to see Dave Oshry attempt to clean up the situation by releasing his full official explanation to Pixel Enemy and ValveTime in order to replace his initially released Twitter statement.

Original: Pixel Enemy and several other gaming news sites are reporting that Twitter is now a legitimate news source. Jokes aside - yesterday, David Goldfarb, lead designer on Battlefield 3, and Interceptor Entertainment's David Oshry both posted messages to Twitter explaining their positive reactions to something shown at a behind-closed-doors meeting with Valve at GDC 2013. Valve had apparently given various game developers an early sneak peek at something currently unannounced. Hopefully these "Nice Things" help explain why it has been such a super slow news week for Valve so far.

We're back after our winter break with the first Weekly News Round-Up episode of 2013! In the news this week, Dota 2 received an update which re-introduced laning music, Team Fortress 2 map contributors got an extra bonus in the shape of stamp strange filters and we found an image of Jeremy Bennett, one of Valve's art directors, wearing a Half-Life 3 T-shirt at Comic Con back in 2011.

You'll remember that in December 2011, the owner of Uber Entertainment posted this picture taken at the Westside Game Industry Night in Seattle, claiming that a Valve employee was caught wearing a HL3 t-shirt. But that t-shirt was wrong; the lambda and "3" were reversed. And no one's really confirmed who exactly was wearing the shirt.

Anyways, this newly discovered picture of Jeremy was taken in August 2011, before the dubious twitter pic, so now Half-Life fans have even better evidence that Half-Life 3 has probably been well in development for at least a year.

Recently Valve has been more vocal about their next plans for Half-Life and the future. Instead of just telling fans to "hang in there", Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson have both gone on record this year and said that "Ricochet 2 started development". Gabe also confirmed that they were working on a next generation gaming engine and looking for some software to ship it on. More ambiguously, developers at Valve have also left subtle Easter eggs all over the place, like on the Dota 2 blog or 2011 Steam winter sale art.

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