With Valve Software confirming that it plans to launch Portal 2 in time for the holiday season of this year, fans of the first experience built around portal guns are clamoring to get all the details on the new project. And even if it has only been a few days since the initial announcement, which did not talk much about the substance of the game, there are already some details out that make Portal 2 an experience worth waiting for.

It seems that the main single player narrative will be longer than that of the first Portal and will be taking place a few hundred years later, with the main Aperture Science Labs structures now overrun with vegetation, although the computers appear to still be functioning.

GlaDOS itself, the charming evil Artificial Intelligence of the first game, seems not to have been destroyed by the player, as initially thought, and its various modules are now overseeing various sections of the complex. This appears to open up the possibility of encountering aspects of GlaDOS not shown initially, requiring different strategies on the part of the player.

The protagonist Chell will also be returning for Portal 2 and despite the time that has passed, she is the same person we left after GlaDOS was taken out. New types of cubes will be added to the game and physics is set to play a bigger role in solving the puzzles.

There are also some insights into the development process at Valve. The first Portal, which was built around the Narbacular Drop prototype, was also more of a test than a complete videogame, with the company itself surprised by the way it took off and captured the imagination of players. Now, with Portal 2, Valve is aiming to create a complete videogame, longer, more complex and more satisfying in terms of narrative.