In an interview with Eurogamer, Valve’s Doug Lombardi expanded on the price and availability of Half-Life 2: Episode Two and the revisions that brought them to the new Team Fortress.
After the news that Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode Two would be delayed into the first quarter of 2007, Eurogamer caught up with the company to discuss the series. With console versions of the game coming out for the Xbox 360 and PS3, along with a standalone PC release, the pricing for the different versions is still unknown.
“On all three platforms there’ll be on SKU [stock keeping unit] available that’s Half-Life 2, Episode One, Portal, Team Fortress 2 and Episode Two. And that will probably end up being around standard full price as a console title and a PC title. And then on the PC there will be a pack that’s just Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2, and we’re still working out the pricing for that but it’ll probably be somewhere in between Episode One [pricing] and full price,” said Lombardi.
He went on to claim that Episode Two would likely be longer and more varied than the first episode thanks to the brand new environments and weapons.
Moving on to Team Fortress, the popular squad-based multiplayer mod for Quake and Half-Life, Lombardi explained why it’s taken the series so long to develop. “Since Atlanta E3 in ’99 when we first showed Team Fortress 2 as a very army-looking style game, there’s been three iterations of the game that we built and sort of scrapped internally,” he said. “The most significant reason for that was the look and feel of the game, and sort of drifting from the look of the original Team Fortress. The gameplay in TF Classic and Team Fortress for Quake was sort of over the top rather than super realistic stuff and when we started to move down the army route all of a sudden it became really serious and quickly we realised we weren’t building Team Fortress.”
Using the Source engine, Team Fortress 2 presents a cel-shaded graphics style that is a departure for the series.
