Will people be satisfied with a game that is only as good as HL2? Other old fps devs seemed to have been getting crucified for that lately.

I was more thinking about the fact that Halflife 2 was in development for something like 6 years (?) and it still manged to be magnificent.

It is not much, but it keeps the HL dream alive or something

You can say what you want about the HL series (which I did), but HL 2 also gave us an awesome engine that made a lot of great games possible and it gave us, for better or worse, Steam.

I wonder if the release of HL 3 will have an impact even remotely as revolutionary as this.

Remember that Shogo 2 t-shirt thing with F.E.A.R. 2? T-shirts are just developers weapon of choice when they feel like pissing people off. This isn't because they are making HL3. This is because they aren't making it, and they want to rub your noses in that fact. Or I suppose that Monolith might have just pissed me off so much that im now one of those super pessimists that everyone hates. Its definitely one of those two things that is happening.