Valve submits Half-Life 2 candidate, release date coming "soon"

Developer Valve Software has delivered a release candidate disc for Half-Life 2 to Vivendi Universal Games, and hopes to have a final release date for the hugely anticipated game in the near future.

The submission of a release candidate means that Valve has finished the creative work on the title, and it now only remains for Vivendi Universal's QA department to approve the title - or bounce it back for some quick fixes if show-stopping bugs are found.

As such, a release date for the title should be announced shortly - with Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi confirming last night that "we don't have a release date from VU at this time, but we're hoping they will pull out a release date soon."

The timescales at the moment suggest that unless any major bugs are found, the game could comfortably be at retail in North America and Europe in time for the first week in November - just a week ahead of Microsoft's Halo 2.

The shipment of the release candidate also seems to scotch rumours originating with UK retail sources that Vivendi Universal had pushed the game back to 2005, in Europe at least.

"Nobody at VU has indicated to us that they are not shipping HL2 this year," Lombardi confirmed. Indeed, Half-Life 2 is unquestionably Vivendi's strongest title in the run-up to Christmas, and it's hard to see how it would make any sense to delay it into Q1 2005 - especially given that the game was originally meant to launch in September 2003, and any further delay is only likely to further annoy fans of the series.