Half-Life 2 set to go gold in August

Valve Software boss Gabe Newell has revealed a few more details of the forthcoming Half-Life 2 in a post on a popular web forum - including the fact that the company is currently aiming to finish work on the title in August.

"To the best of our admittedly weak planning abilities, we are looking at August," he said in a post on the Half-Life 2 Fallout forum, where he also discussed a number of other details of the games, including internationalisation and installed size.

This confirms earlier comments from the studio which stated that Half-Life 2 was on track to be completed this summer - although publisher Vivendi has not yet announced a release date for the game, and there has been some suggestion that they may leave it until early autumn before actually putting the game on shelves.

Newell also confirmed in his post that Half-Life 2 currently takes up 2GB of space compressed (unpacking to a 3.5GB install), not counting extras such as CS:Source, HL:Source and DOD:Source, which are updates of existing Half-Life content to the Source engine and are expected to ship with the game.

As such, the game will almost certainly ship on a DVD, although we'd be surprised if a CD version of the game doesn't also appear - even if it seems somewhat unlikely that anyone with a PC powerful enough to play Half-Life 2 will be lacking a DVD drive.

In terms of internationalisation issues, Newell revealed that there will be a special German version of the game, with toned down violence, and that the title is being localised into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Thai.