The appearance of Valve’s Gabe Newell on the inaugral Seven Day Cooldown podcast seems to have generated all the headlines in the world. Apple’s new boss didn’t really visit Valve, DOTA2 will use a brand new kind of free-to-play and, now, why ‘Ricochet 2’ has been so long coming. There is, I’m afraid, absolutely no way that ‘Ricochet 2’ is a veiled term for another game rather than a sequel to weirdo Tron-like jumpy multiplayer mod Ricochet. And doubly-definitely not a game that might have a ‘Half’ in the title. No sirree.



When Gabe says stuff like “We end up changing our minds as we’re going through and developing stuff, so as we’re thinking through the giant story arc which is Ricochet 2, you might get to a point where you’re saying something is surprising us in a positive way and something is surprising us in a negative way, and, you know, we’d like to be super-transparent about the future of Ricochet 2” he really, definitely, absolutely, truly means a sequel to Valve’s near-forgotten HL1 mod, and definitely, absolutely, truly not the long and torturous wait for a new HL title.

Newell claims the reason for the five-year silence on the next installment of Gordon’s adventures Ricochet is not aloof dismissal of fans desires, but an earnest fear that “we always have this problem that when we talk about things too far in advance. The problem is, we think that the twists and turns that we’re going through would probably drive people more crazy than just being silent about it, until we can be very crisp about what’s happening next.”

That’s all that’s let slip, aside from that “Everyone who was working on Ricochet 2 continues to work on Ricochet 2.“

While this is scant information and even consolation for those who’s been hammering fruitlessly on the doors of Valve’s fortress of silence for a half-decade, it is worth observing it in the light of the employee training manual that also slipped onto the webernets this week. That goes into far more detail about the developer’s profound dedication to doing projects right and based upon the open creative input of everyone involved rather than to meet deadlines, and how that’s a perk of remaining entirely independent and more than a little wealthy.

You can listen to the full Gabe podcast here, and this selection particularly was via Develop.