@bvstarmaiden: I've heard that point before, and while it might be true in some cases, I don't think that it's true for the majority of women in the western world. We're not in the 1920's and women aren't brought up to bake and have children for the rest of their lives.

If a woman can handle being an executive in some firm, which I believe is considered a rather unisex profession, and it's quite a taxing job, then she can might as well be a programmer.

There is a huge number of things that most women show more interest than men and vise versa, and their career choices are chosen accordingly.

@tony_at_home: While programming is a main function of developing computer games, there are still plenty of other relevant fields for game developers that don't require it like Artists, 3D Modelers, Sound Designers, Producers etc

Did it occur to anyone that maybe a lot of women simply don't want to work as game developers? Do men and women have to share the exact same interests? I don't see anyone complaining that there are not enough women construction workers.

I study Engineering and all the time I see statistics about how much women there are in my faculty and how much more my university plans on having in the future. Geez, maybe the reason that there are less women isn't because of the evil chauvinistic patriarchal society, but simply because there are less women who want to be engineers than men?

@c0mmanderKeen: I agree. Movies have about 2 hours to get you invested in their characters, while a game with a good story has at least 10 hours to do so. The amount of attachment I felt to some video games characters was rarely surpassed by a movie character.

@noirtenshin: I did say that this is how they 'try' to justify their short campaigns, not that it is justified, especially in my view that I couldn't care less about multiplayer.
For the topic at hand, 13 hours of single player is a rather ok length even by older standards like Half Life and the like.

@RaveNRolla: FPS is usually associated with competitive multiplayer while TPS isn't. Which is why FPS developers spend about as much time crafting multiplayer as well as single player campaign, while TPS focuses more on single player and maybe has a half assed multiplayer portion.
Again, this is usually the case as there are always exceptions, but FPS games try to justify their short campaigns with bigger emphasis on multiplayer.

@KotomineKirei: It's missing the very last portion of the game, but 90% of the game is fully playable and done with high quality.

@denny33142: Black Mesa turned out quite well.

Maybe finally companies will drop the yearly release routine now that it's hurting their sales. I'm thankful that gamers actually voted with their wallets about the franchise to make this happen, and not get swept away in the flow like with the CoD games.

I haven't seen such a well made sequel since Diablo 2. If there are any universities that teach game development, this game should be taught in the "how to make a sequel" course.

It does have a few technical problems, but they're rather minor. I was a bit concerned about the timed missions, but they turned out quite exciting, although I'm playing non-ironman nomal mode right now so my opinion might change about that.
Overall, it just improves on Enemy Unknown in every single way. Thank Firaxis for setting this high standard for sequels.