The Source-engine makes it possible to play with relatively old hardware. We're aiming for the game to work flawless on medium-machines with ATI 9600 and 128 megabytes of RAM. More on this once we're closing in on the release and make the engine behind the game even more effective.

We've gathered resource results that have been done for an anatomical and medicinal purpose to develope 35 separate muscles in the characters faces to convey emotions. This means eyebrows, chinmuscles, cheekmuscles and forehead moves while the characters in Half-Life 2 talk, something that has made it easy for us to create immersion in the moments we want. Half-Life 2 will contain the same kind of satirical humor the first game had, that's why this has been extra important to us. Our animators have also used lots of filmed sequences that we've made when they have animated the characters in the game, to make all the animations as smooth and believable as possible.

Absolutely! Everything will be available to the modscene. We're very well aware of what all the hobby programmers and their mods have meant for the incomparable success the first game had, that's why we think it's very important to create a game engine and tools that will give the audience even bigger possibilities to make their own mods.

Yes, we've put a huge amount of work into to making it easy and smooth to transfer stuff you've made in the Half-Life engine. We've also worked hard on developing the most simple and userfriendly tools without dragging down on the more technical challenging parts that we are certain that many people will want to work with. We will, as a part of E3 have a couple of seminaries for the modscene where we'll offer courses in the tools we've made, everyone is welcome!

We won't go on the technical details on how it exactly happened, but I'll tell you that we've on Valve have never felt as bad as we did after the game was stolen. It was morally hard and of course there were those that didn't want to continue working on the game after this. The creativity basically just gets flushed away from you. We've reworked certain parts of the game and we're aiming on releasing the game during summer.

The date was completely wrong, simple as that. We were too optimistic.

The first thing we said was that we wanted to give as much as humanly possible to the audience. Give the gamebuyers exactly what they want and that way show our gratitude to all of those who bought the first game. We've made alot of money on Half-Life, now we've invested those money in Half-Life 2 and have hopefully made a game that our audience will love as much as they did with Half-Life. On the games story and how we wanted Gordons nightmare to continue was pretty much thought out and done after we finished the first game. Our scriptwriter Marc Laidlaw is still, ever since we started the work with Half-Life, having a clear picture of the world he wants to tell us about and Gordon as a character.

We started the work on Half-Life 2 already at spring 1999 and of course we had tons of stuff we had been forced to leave out of the first game that we wanted to include in our next game. The first thing we wanted to do was to create a more dynamic physics system that the player could interact with in a way that had never been done before. At the time there was only one real physics imitating game, Dreamworks' game Trespasser. This was more of a physics demonstration than a real game and we realised that we would have to wait for better techniques to be able to create the game we wanted. We also wanted to convey different feelings and offer a deeper and more touching story. This together with smart storytelling and lots of heavy action was our goal with HL2, something I today definitely think we've accomplished.

It's been more than ten years since the last game and Gordon is today another man than he once was. There is now a relation with the G-Man and there is a major problem Gordon must solve. We won't tell you more than that, risking to spoil the story for those who have waited 5 years for this sequel.

I can't answer that. I can however tell you that the player has to find Gordons friends, establish new contacts and he'll also meet some familiar faces. I cannot tell you more than that.

Yeah, I guess I can do that (Gabe looks questioning on Doug Lombardi, who nods). Gordon will not leave Earth this time, partly because we don't think it fits into the whole story and partly because we got some heavy critique on the Xen-part in the first game.

Alyx's mother was one of the scientists that died on Black Mesa. She is a sort of side kick in the game and will accompany Gordon very often. She is a revolutionary person and she wears a t-shirt with the Black Mesa-logo.

Both yes and no (laughter). Marc Laidlaw wrote a 1000-pages thick bible on the Half-Life universe after the first game and as I said earlier there is lots and lots to tell.

Smart AI is of course a huge part of the gameplay in Half-Life 2. The enemy soldiers seek for cover, help eachother and act tactical, just like in Half-Life. The allies Gordon will meet during the adventure will react different depending on how the player solve different situations and they will also handle scenarios differently depending on the behaviour of other allies. There may erupt conflicts within the group if Gordon for instance orders three friends to attack a group of 10 Combine-soldiers from the front without any fire support. They may also refuse to do what Gordon tells them to. We've also written certain things in the system for the AI that have never been done before. It'll be extremely interesting to hear the buyer and the press response to this.

What I think we did well with Half-Life was especially the tempo of the game. The variation was far from optimal and there was stuff that we had to leave out because we were rushed, but we really managed to make a good tempo through the entire game. In an action-game there it's more important than you think that the pace of what you're playing constantly changes. That there are hectic moments and you later on give the player time to breath and so forth. We've tried to do this again in Half-Life together with lots of other stuff we learned in the process of the game and afterwards. Experienced gamers play games of this type completely different than less experienced people do, which is a big challenge when designing a game.

Experienced players rush through all areas and don't spend much time in looking around in the environments, that's why we created the Barnacles to make the player look upwards the rest of the game once he encounters them for the first time. Design-elements of this type have been very important to us in the creation of Half-Life 2.

We have a great relation with John (Carmack) and the boys at id. If it wasn't for Doom, i wouldn't have created Valve in the first place. I was working with Microsoft then and I decided to try making id Software to cooperate with us to make a Doom for that version of Windows. After that work I didn't want to work on programs and such but decided to see if I got what it took in creating games. The reason we wanted to develope our own engine this time was very simple. We wanted to put weight on physics, dynamics and AI aswell as graphics and effects. We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing with Half-Life 2 today with for instance the Quake 3 engine or the Doom 3 engine.

Absolutely. We've already written a continue of the story and there are still lots of stuff to tell. We also want to develope other characters in the game such as Alyx, Barney and Dr. Kleiner, something we'll do in various expansion packs to Half-Life 2 in the future but also in Half-Life 3. Right now we're working at an extreme pace to finish Half-Life 2 and I won't talk anymore about Half-Life 3 in a long while. (Laughter)

We're doing fine, we're in the finishing stage there aswell. After ECTS 199 we decided to put that aside and start developing HL2. After the Source-engine was finished we started working on TF2 again.

No, of course you will. We've started the rought planning for the next Counter-Strike, something we won't start the development of before we've all had a loooooong vacation.