As mentioned above, it should take over a year, and then it is pretty hard to tell how long it is from that. Could be 10 months, could be 20.

I just hope they don't have insanely high specs :( (ala higher than Cryisis is now, which is very likely).

It's about half-life 2: episode 3, not half-life 3. It should still be running at source and I expect it next year in october.

I know that. Still, HL:Episode 2 takes higher specs than HL2, right? I thought so at least. But if HL:E3 takes no higher specs than HL:E2 that is awesome.

It'd probably need some higher specs than Episode 2 as I'd imagine they'd add some more new stuff into the Source engine, but it'd still be playable across a wide range of hardware.

I read an article a while back that development time on Episode 3 will take longer then the time from half life to half life episode 1 and from episode 1 to episode 2 and that it shouldn't be expected before 2010. I remember reading the article from gamespot and it was taken from an interview with the producer or lead developer or something.

Maybe after Black Mesa Source is finished?

I don't know about how long they were going to take, but I do know that instead of working on Episode 3, they've been putting much of their time on the TF2 class/achievement updates and Left4Dead.

They can't have been using much time on that. There's been 3 updates, and they have said that they had the Heavy one worked out from the start. They also said that there won't be any in Q1 09, so they cannot have done a lot on anything new yet.

I still have not understood the Episode thing. The second one was pretty amazing and the original is still one of the best games around not even talking about the genius that is portal

...

But I thought the idea of shorter Episodes using the same game engine was to release them FREAKING FASTER THAN FULL GAMES. Sigh.

That was what everybody thought (including Valve), but it wasn't the case lol.