The news most of us have been waiting for has finally been confirmed: Valve is readying the first expansion pack for the unanimously acclaimed Half-Life 2. Provisionally titled 'Aftermath', the new adventures of Gordon Freeman and his able sidekick Alyx is tentatively scheduled for a 'summer' release, according to PC Gamer UK, which has - incredibly - scooped the world with its cover feature on the hotly anticipated game in its May issue, out today.
Grabbing a quick chat with Valve designer Robin Walker and writer Marc Laidlaw, the ten page PC Gamer feature doesn't reveal much in the way of concrete information, but instead, the ever-slippery chaps at Valve talk around the subject of the game, choosing to focus more on their motivations for choosing to make new Half-Life 2 content all by themselves rather than, say, farm out the job to Gearbox as it did during the Half-Life era.
Walker admits in the PC Gamer interview: "Right now, we're really, really good at making Half Life 2. We think our customers want more of Half Life 2. That's what we're going to give them. But we'd just got comfortable with all our tools and what we could do. That's normally the point in which we'd go off and make new tools...we didn't want to do that."
The focus for Aftermath appears to break with the Half-Life tradition of presenting the storyline from the viewpoint of other key characters in the game, with the mooted Alyx-based episode apparently not happening as many of us imagined it might. Instead, it would appear that as a compromise, Alyx figures as a much more active partner of Gordon Freeman's adventures.
News source: Euro Gamer
