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[mothwing]

«Portal 2 Announced»

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season.

Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007's Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards.

Steam News.

Comments

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

You know the history of how Aperture Science got started selling shower curtains to three of the four armed forces branches? I think they didn't sell to the Navy.

Or the founder's dying wish to establish three projects - the Take-A-Wish Foundation, the Heimlich Counter-Maneuver, and the Portal project?

And they ever reported progress on Ep 3? All I know is that it involves the Borealis, an Aperture Science research ship stuck in ice somewhere. I was hoping this update to Portal would have something about Ep3 because of the Aperture Science connection.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Well, my knowledge is limited to what I picked up in-game and what it says on the Wiki, so I don't know the details. My brother gave me the progress report and I didn't fact-check it at the time - it might have been wishful thinking, though.

Did you know that Kim Swift left Valve? I didn't and just read about it when catching up on Portal 2 news the other day. It's a loss for Valve. :(

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

A loss for Valve, but she's still designing games, so yay for that.

Makes me kind of wonder what Portal 2 will turn out to be. I think Valve's good at remaining faithful to games (as with Half-Life to Half-Life 2) while also giving more, but idk, Portal was not your usual game, either.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to more games designed by her and her new home, though I'm not as excited about Dark Void.

I don't know, but I took the fact that she left only in December to mean that she was still heavily involved in the design of Portal 2. Or so I hope, I am not sure how long beta-testing, etc. takes.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Well, I figure work on Portal 2 started when Portal was published, or possibly just before. At most probably a few months later. So much of the design work has been done, but if they're talking about a holiday season, it's not quite finished and not close to beta testing yet.

So she probably had a significant hand in it.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Hopefully!

(I am not very knowledgeable about games and their developers, but I was really excited when I found out that Portal had a female developer omg.)

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I've...been in a couple of beta tests.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

I always suspected that I've as yet only seen the iceberg tip of the glacier that is your awesomeness. For which games? I've only ever been in two open betas, for Hellgate London and Allods Online.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

The Matrix Online, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, City of Villains, and World of Warcraft. Yes, there is a distinct Blizzardly bias there.

Oh, I thought you might appreciate < a href="http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3178251">this article.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Wow, html fail.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Whoa. That's so cool, Blizzardly bias and all. I'd have loved to be in the two Warcraft betas - even though I probably wouldn't have done them any good.

Thanks for the article, that is very interesting, although I'm curious about how they'll get Chell back into the game. Did the wormhole have a malfunction and throw her into the future?

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Well, I kinda suck at competitive RTS, so my primary contribution in The Frozen Throne was "how quickly can a noob lose to a hero rush?"

And the answer to that was "pretty fast."

Portal's set in the same universe as Half-Life, so they already have many ways to explain time travel and other weirdness. This does make me a lot more interested, if only to see Earth's future, post-Combine, post-whatever else.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

XD

It's been far too long since I played the Half-Life series, but is time-travel ever really explained and used there? The scientific background features, obviously, and G-Man happily stops and steps in and out of time. But of course, maybe he could give Chell a lift.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think he probably could. I doubt that'd be the case.

She also could be cryogenically frozen. Or I guess something more advanced.

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

And I don't think Half-Life explains anything in any great detail. Just some vague stuff about how the original Black Mesa incident occurred and how the Combine arrived afterward.