Lost Coast to feature commentary

The much anticipated Half Life 2: Lost Coast, the free technological showcase that includes HDR rendering, moves a step closer to release with Valve announcing that it could in fact be just a couple of weeks away.

While many gamers will be frustrated by the ever-moving release date, their patience will be rewarded with a unique Developer Commentary, confirmed on Friday as the secret new feature reported 2 weeks ago.

Exact details on how it will work are unknown, but the theory is similar to Director's Commentary sound tracks on DVDs: play the game, and at certain points you will have access to audio comments from the design team discussing decisions they made on lighting, texturing and other aspects.

Here is the full quote from Valve:

While we know we're starting to sound a little like a broken record, Lost Coast, Day of Defeat, and Aftermath are in the final phases of development and being polished for release. While the latter two aren't quite at the point where we can nail down an exact release date, we're expecting to have Lost Coast ready in a couple of weeks.

One of the interesting features we added to Lost Coast is a commentary system, where you'll be able to hear first-hand some of the background on the features and choices in Lost Coast from the team responsible for building it. If this is something that goes over well with the community, we'll be adding it into our future titles.

We'll also be releasing a new SAS model for Counter-Strike: Source in the very near future. Here are a couple of screenshots of what it looks like currently:

To round things off, Valve said they will be revealing later this week a second third-party game to be distributed via Steam, after they signed a deal to release SiN 2 via their digital publishing network.

Is Steam, and digital distribution, the future? Do you think in-game commentaries from developers are a good idea? Express your opinion in News Discussion.