A Valve employee has been spotted wearing a Half-Life 3 t-shirt. Yes, apparently Chandana Ekanayak, an executive producer at Uber Entertainment (the guys behind Monday Night Combat), spotted a random valve employee wearing the shirt pictured above. Now, hold on a second here (prepare for your dreams to be deleted here, along with mine), before we get too carried away I'd like to point out that Random Valve Employee Man had absoluetly no problem having a a picture of the shirt taken by Ekanayak, who proceeded to stick it up on Twitter. If Valve were really close to a Half-Life 3 reveal they most certainly would be doing their gosh darnedest to keep it under wraps until the big reveal. Not to mention stuff like this can get someone fired. So unless Random Valve Employee Guy really disliked his job with one of the premier game developers, I think it unlikely he'd just let a picture be taken unless it meant very little for the time being.
That said we'll have to wait and see what Valve's inevitable response to this will be.
In the meantime, here's some more gaming news from the past week.
Sony Clarifies One Account Policy For PS Vita
NeoGaf discovered this weekend that the Playstation Vita will allow only one Playstation Network account per portable.
So what in blazes does that mean exactly?
At a recent hands-on event, Sony tried to clarify. "Only one account. If you want to use a different account you need to format the system to factory settings." Sony's Brad Douglas, Sony Japans Third-Party Relations guy clarified further by mentioning that the Playstation Portable also only allows one account. The only difference is that the Portable doesn't force you to do a factory reset to log in. The main reason players have two accounts is so they can play digital titles available in Japan, as well as their own country. The factory reset throws a wrench into that by forcing you to stay region locked essentially, unless you like jumping through very small hoops on fire draped over piranha tanks.
EA Online Passes Can Expire
A now, and understandably so, disgruntled NeoGaf member has learned that the online passes that EA requires for access to it's games online content expire after a certain amount of time after purchasing a brand new copy of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit only to find the games online pass activation key had expired. Some other members looked through the EULA and did find a clause that states the codes can in fact expire. Joystiq followed up on the story and as it turns out some games passes are set to expire, according to a customer service advisor with EA. So essentially for these games even if you buy the game new you will still have to pay to access online features, a move initially made to combat used game sales.
Again, people are understandably upset with EA. I think it's absolutely unbelievable that they never really came out and notified anyone about this. Yes it's in their EULA agreement but this is the kind of thing people really need to know ahead of time.
XCOM Loses A Developing Team
2K games has announced that it's Canberra, Australia development team, which was helping to work on the upcoming XCOM reboot, would be shifted to help with development of Bioshock: Infinite instead.
Initially, this lead to speculation that XCOM might be on hold, or might have even been canceled. However, 2K Games told Kotaku that 2K Marin was still developing the game with the hope that the game would still be a strong title. However, when pressed for more information about the size of the development team, 2K declined to get more specific. "As a rule we do not comment on the size of our development team."
I don't view this as a setback for XCOM necessarily. Bioshock: Infinite is shaping up to be one of the premier titles for next year, and 2K probably recognizes that in order to get it out in time for it's tenative holiday 2012 release, they're going to need as many people working on it as possible.
GamePro Sails Away Into The Sunset
This news is not a good sign for the state of the printed gaming press.
One of the longest running magazines about video games, starting way back in 1988, GamePro announced that it will be ceasing it's publication as a standalone company as of today, December 5th. Both the site, and the magazine will be shutting down. In a statement on their site (which probably no longer exists) was this:
Thank you for your loyalty, support, and participation in the GamePro.com community. At noon on December 5, 2011, the U.S. version of GamePro online will shut down as an independent site. GamePro will become part of PCWorld.com (http://www.pcworld.com/gamepro) offering gaming news, reviews, and how-tos from the PCWorld team. Thank you to the entire GamePro staff for their hard work and dedication.GamePro was one helped to give the games industry a voice, especially as it began it's rise into the pop culture stratosphere. Handfuls of talented writers and journalists have written for the magazine. It's death is a significant blow to gaming journalism and really give us a sign of the times.
Dragon Age Getting Multiplayer
An insider has claimed that Dragon Age will be getting a multiplayer mode that has an arena-like style to it. The mode will cover Player versus Environment, Player versus Player, and Player versus Dragon play modes. Details on the PvE section are slim, but according to the source the mode is fairly far along in development. IT is apparently being developed using DICE's Frostbite 2.0 engine. What was not made clear is if this rumored multiplayer mode is going to be DLC of some kind for Dragon Age II, or if it will be in an upcoming game. Or perhaps a game on it's own entirely.
Sadly, this news seems to confirm somewhat the rumors that EA is requiring all of it's games to have some kind of online multiplayer. And unlike the Mass Effect co-op mode, so far this mode sounds somewhat unrelated to anything in Dragon Age as of now. Then again we didn't know exactly what Mass Effect's multiplayer was exactly until it was announced/leaked. Still given the success of recent RPG's like Skyrim and Skyward Sword, one has to wonder if requiring games that have previously been single player to have multiplayer is a good idea or not.
Okay so maybe this past week wasn't all happy news. Hopefully this coming week will be a bit happier. And, with a bit of luck, maybe some Gordon Freeman too.
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