GC: Episode Two in Q1 2007
And Portal might've been in HL2.
Valve's Doug Lombardi has said that Half-Life 2: Episode Two and its entourage of Team Fortress 2 and Portal will be released next year. Most likely in February.
Speaking to Eurogamer at Leipzig this week, Lombardi blamed it on "Valve being overly aggressive on our dates". "We're aiming for Q1 right now and we're really far along in the playtest stage."
"You know, our thing is always that we're trying to make really good experiences and so we're going to manage to that rather than the schedule."
He also said that Portal - which looks ace, by the way - might even have wound up being part of Half-Life 2 if things had been different.
"To us, the Portal gun is similar to the gravity gun in Half-Life 2, and had we been doing episodic back then it would've been great to put out something like Ravenholm as an episode of its own and let people play with the physics and then say, well, now what are we going to do with the physics based on what we saw from people playing with it?" he said.
"We'll be able to get a lot of feedback and say, okay, how are we going to use this in Episode Three or in future versions of Half-Life single-player or multiplayer? We'll be able to make more educated decisions about how to progress that sort of technology, which we think really can open the gameplay as much or perhaps more so than the gravity gun and the physics did."