According to Doug Lombari, director of marketing at Valve, the next Half-Life 2 episode will be noticeably longer than the first. “Episode 1 was about six hours of gameplay, and Episode 2 will be closer to eight hours of gameplay,” Lombardi said. Valve also said that despite the delay of Episode 2, the development cycle for the episodic content was getting shorter.

“Episode 1 took 18 months to complete and Episode 2 will end up being about 13 to 14 months, so we’re trimming it down,” he said. “I think we’ll get closer to a year and be on a 12 month cycle. We’ll see how it goes after this trilogy is done.”

For those who recently upgraded their PC video cards to support DX10, you’ll be happy to know that both Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 will support the advanced technology of these cards, even if the PC is running Windows XP. On the low-end front, Valve still plans on supporting PCs that can only run DX8 applications. Valve’s attempting to also support DX7, but couldn’t confirm if it’d go back that far with technology.