blorrent

This is very good question, with an obvious answer, because it’s not done yet.
By what do we know so far? Why aren’t they reveilling anything? Why the hell haven’t we even had like a teaser, some screenshots? Episode One had a teaser on Episode Two at the end of the game. Did the production stopped at all? Are they out of ideas?

Last year Doug Lombardi that Episode 3 could be unveiled before the end of the year but never before the release of Left4Dead, because their were putting their efforts on it. The game was released, the year passed by and nope, no Episode 3 revelation. Oh right and Left4Dead 2 was announced to be released this year, so they are probably concentrated on that now.

According to Doug Lombardi:

We are taking longer because it’s an ambicious project

and

The next time you play as Gordon will be longer than the distance between Half-Life 2 to Episode One, and Episode One to Episode Two

so using a little math, we can estimate that the third Half-Life 2 episode 3 won’t be ready until around 2010.

Yes we all want more that 4-6 hours of gameplay, and Episode One and Two had quality and were rather short, but waiting this much is torture, even more because shorter times between each game were the promiss that came along with the episodic content.

Just for a short timeline on release dates:
Half Life 1 – November 1998
Half Life 2 – November 2004
HL2 Episode One – Juin 2006
HL2 Episode Two – Octover 2007

Episode Two contained one of the best deals in quite some time, it packed Team Fortress 2 and Portal and cheaper that some AAA games. Word that Portal 2 is being developed got me worried that they are planning the same deal for Episode 3, releasing Portal 2 and Team Fortress 3 or some other thing with it.

Never the less I just hope that Episode Three will bring a longer gameplay time, closer to Half Life 2, Oh and for god sake new weapons.