Thanks to one of Filefront.com's users, there is serious reason to believe that Half Life 2 Episode 2 is nearing final stages of completion and that gamers should be expecting it soon. Quite a big amount of details are being disclosed in the article from which I extracted some pieces, indicating that a hoax is pretty much out of the question.

The article reads: "Valve has released a new Steam update recently announcing that the long-awaited and much delayed Half-Life: Episode 2 is nearing completion.

No, really.

Valve has stated that each episode of the continuing series will have a new focus. For the first episode this focus was on NPC interaction, with the player being constantly accompanied by Gordon's sexy sidekick, Alyx Vance. Episode 2 will focus more on large, open environments - something the Source engine has not previously been known for."

Now, if this had been all, you may have been skeptical about it and by all means no one would blame you. However, the article also spills the beans on the sequel to Team Fortress (the team-and-role based online multiplayer modification based on id Software's Quake):

"Half-Life: Episode 2 will be shipping with two other Valve titles. The massively addictive team game, Team Fortress 2, which has been rendered in a special cartoony style will make up one part of the package. [...]Team Fortress 2 is the massively delayed sequel to Team Fortress that lets players battle it out in a light-hearted class-based team game. With special classes like Medic, Spy and Engineer available, the original was a classic LAN party favourite that is finally getting a revamp."

Good stuff to know and quite impressive if you bother to check the whole article out, but until Valve makes an official statement, we can only hope that at least 60% of what is written is true.