How do you make a sequel to one of the best, most popular action games ever made? Very carefully. Just ask Valve, the creator of the blockbuster 1998 first-person shooter Half-Life. This enigmatic company has seemingly been dormant ever since the release of Half-Life, emerging only for the occasional announcement of a new patch for Counter-Strike or another refurbished Half-Life bundle for retail outlets. Now Valve has started talking again--and talking big, for a change. But it's been keeping busy all along. After all, as Valve's founder and CEO Gabe Newell is quick to point out, the sequel to Half-Life has been in the works for the past five years, ever since Half Life's release. Yet only now, with the finish line in sight, has the company decided to come forward with some hard facts about what exactly Half-Life 2 is going to be. Recently, we were fortunate enough to take a look at an early version of the game in action and speak with key members of Valve about what they've been doing all this time. So it practically goes without saying that we have some exciting details to report.

Gordon Freeman is back in Half-Life 2, and he'll have some help from Dr. Eli and Alyx Vance.

The original Half-Life brought a real sense of surprise and suspense to action gaming. As if to set us up for more shocks, Valve was quick to hit us with this little doozy: Half-Life 2 is on track for a worldwide release on September 30 of this year. We're not talking "when it's done" here. We're talking "really soon." What about multiplayer support? Half-Life is still on people's minds after all these years because of the incredible work done by fans of the game, who used Half-Life's 3D engine to produce entirely new and outstandingly good multiplayer games such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. If not for these multiplayer mods, Half-Life wouldn't have enjoyed nearly the sort of longevity that it has. So the good news is, Half-Life 2 will indeed have multiplayer features out of the box. The bad news, for now, is that Valve won't elaborate any further. More details on multiplayer Half-Life 2 are forthcoming, but it has been confirmed that Half-Life 2 is being built--or rather, the proprietary technology powering the game was built--with the mod community in mind. We'll cover that later on in this preview.

In case you were wondering, the game is also being built, first and foremost, for the PC. Leading up to the official announcement from Valve that Half-Life 2 would be publicly displayed for the first time at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 2003, rumors spread far and wide about what the game would and wouldn't be. One of the more popular rumors was that, much like how Bungie Software moved development of its outstanding first-person shooter, Halo, from the PC to the Xbox, so would Valve switch to focusing on console development. Newell laughed this off--no, Half-Life 2 will be a PC game. At first. Newell did confirm that an Xbox version, at least, will follow suit, though there's no hard release date for it yet. At any rate, Newell emphasized that the success of the original Half-Life can be attributed in no small part to the game's huge, worldwide following of PC owners. Valve would have to be downright foolish to abandon its huge installed base when making Half-Life 2.

What about the game itself? Read on to learn more about what Half-Life 2 will play like, who's in it, and what's going on in it.