GI: How often do you think we'll be seeing new chunks of story and content?

Lombardi: Episode Two is already in development - we'll ship it when it's great. We're not saying our key strategy for episodic content every four months or every month, or whatever. If the episodes are strong and people like them and sign up for Episode Two, and so forth.

Newell: They were supposed to be three months apart. (laughs)

Lombardi: We've learned that, once again, we're better at making quality than trying to keep to a schedule. (laughs)

GI: Now with being able to deliver chunks of this episodically, you're always increasing the technology, which is a cool thing that you can do with episodic content. Will that kill the need for having a Half-Life 3?

Newell: It depends on what you mean by having a Half-Life 3, right? There are a couple of different elements. Technology is probably going to be more interivally developed now. You don't have to develop that in lock step with single player content release. But the HDR in Lost Coast was really valuable. Essentially when you're doing something that is significant, it's like you're breaking everything and then you're trying to put it back together. HDR touched every element of the engine - the renderer, physics - there's all these different pieces and there are consequences to that. If you could only do one of those at a time, having being broken in two places is four times as painful as being broken in one place, because all of a sudden it's a lot harder to tell where you did the damage. That sort of steps on the technology side. It's way more efficient to build that way. On the storytelling side I think right now we're having a lot of fun - chapter, chapter. chapter. I assume at some point we're going to say, and our fans are going to say, "That was really great for awhile, but now we want the big one." I think that we're having the option now of having the same choices of - tv show, tv show, tv show, movie. How do you make that decision? Fans like them both. But, some things you want to do with a movie-like piece, and some things work better as individual episodes.

It's taken The Simpsons over ten years to finally get around to a feature film. As a fan of The Simpsons I wish they had done the movies sooner. As a fan of Battlestar Galactica, I would love it if they would take the time to do either another mini-series - they had an interesting choice, which I think was smart, is they launched with a big thing and they've gone episodic, and I think at some point they'll come back and launch another mini series or another three hour theatrical release.

But I think for developers like ourselves, we now have that choice. Where before we had no choice. You did that movie, you did it every 24 months, or in our case six years (laughs) that was really painful. But now we have the flexibility. The technology side, innovations are going to come at more bite sized chunks.