Portal 2 Announced

Whoa, great news. Day One purchase.

I’m not sure I like this, personally. Assuming that the single player content is comparable in length (4-6 hours, max) to the first Portal, paying full price ($40-$60?) for something I could buy for $20 last time only makes sense if the multiplayer component has value to me. Since not everyone is going to want to play the multiplayer, I hope they offer a single player only version.

Yet last time for $45 I got Portal, TF2, HL2, Ep1, Ep2, and CS: Source.

And I preordered.

So I would hope they’ll be doing something similar to The Orange Box. Heck, I’d pay $45 for Portal 2 and Ep3, even if they were just two 5-10 hour single player games. It already sounds like we’re going to get a whole multiplayer game game as part of Portal 2.

[QUOTE=Dean;2118832
So I would hope they’ll be doing something similar to The Orange Box. [/QUOTE]
Well the orange box started out as just hl2:ep2…

Given the fact that Gamestop is selling Portal 2 as a normal full-price title --and, surely, they didn’t came up with that price spontaneously on their own–, I wouldn’t expect there to be some sort of Orange Box.

“This holiday season”!? Ohhh mah Gooood.

I wonder if Valve has the balls to keep it an only-two-hours game, trimmed of all the fat. (EDIT: Ah, if they’re charging full price for just this game, I guess there’ll be more to it)
I was sure there was going to be some innovation added to keep things fresh, but I hadn’t thought of co-op. I was thinking something to do with time-travel or cloning, so that you’d create multiple yous to co-operate with in order to complete puzzles, like Winterbottom/Time Donkey/Cursor*10.

The Orange Box was quite possibly the best gaming value ever. It’d be great if that’s matched but I won’t hold my breath.

Orange Box was a fluke don’t expected to ever do it again. I think Valve wasn’t to happy how episode 1 did in terms of sales so when it was time to release episode 2 it make sense to sell it as full price game and given the expansion to consoles and the other projects they had it all makes sense. But the L4D and L4D2 success as full priced games I think made them abandon the smaller games for now, at least until the console market catches up in terms of digital distribution. Interesting the way they came up to had more value to the game by having a Co-Op campaign. I fully expected the single player to be twice as big as portal and to have much more different environments and gameplay variety besides the portal gun. Also I now expect Episode 3 in holiday 2011 as a full priced game.

Why would you assume that?

I imagine Episode 3 might come bundled with the previous Half-Life 2 games again - it’s something you’re not going to want to play without having played the others.

I think we’ll be very lucky if it has any other freebies included, though.

Maybe this time it could come bundled with Left 4 Dead and DLC!

Although with two campaigns and three years of development they might feel they have enough content there to charge full price for Portal 2 on its own.

I wonder why the orange box sort of cross-promotion between your IPs isn’t more common. I mean, Portal would’ve done okay off of just Valve name recognition probably, but it dominated as part of the orange box. Crackdown got a lot of attention for the Halo beta, and then built a following by being awesome.

Catalog titles don’t really sell for shit anyway, right? And successful IPs are a publisher’s lifeblood, right? Why not package in UT3 + some awesome mod content with Gears of War 3, just as a bonus? It’s not like you were going to all of a sudden sell 100k units of UT3 just because GoW3 came out. If you think the title is good and just needing exposure to build an audience, why the hell not?

I wonder what the downsides of this kind of strategy would be. Contracts would probably be nasty; I can’t imagine that standard dev contracts include “oh and we can give out your game for free later.”

There’s been a bunch of coverage for my achievements talk at GDC, which is great, but the really exciting news for me today when I woke up is that I have become part of the Portal 2 ARG…

The random dude in the cellphone pic in the second image is me, standing there on stage after I gave Gabe his award!

Chris

Attention PS3 monogamists Valve may not hate you

It makes sense given that Source now supports OpenGL with some extra work they can port it to the PS3

Hmm, maybe. PSGL is pretty much dead. A game using it would not be competitive with the GCM games. It’s not just slower, but the performance tools are all based on GCM.

Interesting I was under a false impression that GL was more in use on the PS3. So maybe is unsupported rumor after all or they decided to port it to the PS3 as well, after all if they are to continue this new trend of a game a year they may have 3 or 4 more games for the PS3 before Sony changes again completely the hardware platform.

So, does anyone else see the headline “Portal 2 Coming to Sony Playstation 3” in the Steam News rss feed? Mine is on iGoogle, but it doesn’t link anywhere. I don’t have a PS3 but thought it worth mentioning.

edit: Nevermind, it’s just a bad link to a real update.

I can’t believe this hasn’t been posted here yet. IGN has ~10 minutes of in-game footage of Portal 2, and it’s awesome. Amazing. OMGWANT.

http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/64330/portal-2/videos/e310_portal2_demo_01_061510.html

So much character, such fantastic art, incredible animation in…well…everything…

It’s going to be a long wait.

Oh man! Thanks for posting that. The game already looks straight up amazing.

Also, 1up just posted this about co-op. Sounds like that will be even more crazy. I had a difficult enough time in the first game pulling off bizarre stunts alone. But now, with two people having to do a series of tasks… Well, both myself and that other person better have some damn good patience.

~mink~

There are three videos in the ign page.

And it looks pretty good! New type of puzzles, nice jokes, etc.