They've been quite tight lipped about it. Due to the delay and the secrecy I think it's more than likely that it is in fact Half-life 3 and not just episode 3. My bet is that it's probably going to be a full game.
I heard somewhere along the line in an interview or something of the sort that they're working on guns crazier than the portal guns for Episode 3. I'm calling shenanigans.
http://www.gametrailers.com/episode/gametrailers-tv/67?ch=1&sd=0 Was this episode. He did deny working on CS2 though. Anyone else see a news post a few weeks back saying they were researching sign language for Episode 3? Supposedly between Alex and Dog.
Because if you add up all the time they must surely waste writing .QCs and going from .max/.maya to .SMD to .MDL and from .TGA to .VTF and back and forth for model and material updates and instead put that time towards doing something useful you would probably be having fun playing episode 3 right now.
I sure as hell wouldn't refer to the Half Life episodes as 'episodic content' when they take longer than a normal game in between. I suppose for a HL game 2-3 years would be considered faster but in general they're just on a normal schedule. Episodic should refer to something within or at most a year between releases, even…
I thought they would be having more content packs with L4D but whatever, I loved it and I'll be buying the second one - I just sure as hell hope the lobby connects the two so all the content is available from one base location. I think people were expecting too much considering how amazingly generous they've been with Team…
I don't think Valve invented episodic content but I think they were the biggest name to run with it. I feel like that was the hot idea for a second, and now a year or two later it looks like the idea hasn't really panned out. And what with the economic situation, riskier ventures like that probably won't become popular…
I'm pretty sure they are still working on it. Last bits of information I heard were from Gabe. He basically said that it cost too much money to produce the episodes to the quality bar they had set for themselves and it also took too much time to craft each experience along the way. From the sounds of it they decided to use…