For those who already own (and likely cleared) it, the anniversary update is well worth checking out. It adds 3.5 hours of developer commentary from the original team and Steam Workshop support to replace weapons, enemies, the UI, and even experience full campaigns. Lightmaps have also seen improvements, with bicubic filtering resulting in better shadows, while radial fog results in “cleaner, smoother horizon lines.”

UI-scaling now supports higher resolutions, while every map (and Deathmatch map) now supports full HDR lighting and tone mapping. Players can also use blood and fire effects from the Episodes or those from the original launch. This is all on top of dozens of bug fixes and improvements. Check it all out below.

Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update

Bug Fixes and Change Notes

Content

• Added 3.5 hours of Developer Commentary by members of the Half-Life 2 team.
• Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two are now playable from the Half-Life 2 main menu.
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast has been added to the Extras menu.
• Added Steam Workshop support. Play entire campaigns or replace weapons, enemies, UI, and more with content created by the community.
• Added custom Steam Game Recording gameplay events and phases throughout the game.

Rendering and Graphics

• Fixed issues causing props or entire maps to be fully bright or fully dark depending on settings.
• Added bicubic filtering for lightmaps to produce smoother shadows. It can be enabled by setting Shader Detail to Very High.
• Fixed missing grass detail sprites in many maps.
• Added settings to enable Classic Effects that were originally in Half-Life 2. These effects can also be enabled using r_classic_blood or r_classic_fire.
• Added support for radial fog.
• Specular reflectivity has been adjusted throughout Half-Life 2 to better match the original release.
• Updated models for the Crossbow and RPG weapons to support ultrawide displays.
• Fixed camera clipping into vehicles at high FOV settings.
• Fixed lambda cache indicators and other decals vanishing when backtracking through map transitions.
• Setting Model Detail to High will now always display the highest detail version of a model and never swap for a lower level-of-detail.
• Set Antialiasing to 4x MSAA by default.
• Fixed teeth shader rendering fully white on some GPUs.

UI and Options

• The UI now scales to support higher resolutions.
• Launching the game in Steam Big Picture mode will now use the gamepad-friendly UI previously available on Steam Deck. You can also launch this mode with the “-gamepadui” launch option.
• The High Dynamic Range setting has been moved to the main Video settings page.
• Commentary mode can now be enabled on the New Game screen.
• Fixed display of greyscale art for locked achievement icons to match their behavior in steam.
• Improved legibility of gamepad button icons.
• Button hints will now prefer to display standard face buttons and trigger icons only. This behavior can be disabled with the “sc_prefer_basic_origin_hints” convar.
• Replaced instances of system fonts like Verdana throughout the UI with a new font, GorDIN.
• Added a new font renderer that provides more consistent rendering between platforms.
• Fixed edges of certain font characters being cut off with antialiasing enabled.
• Fixed scrollbars and button animations using inverted colors.
• Removed the non-functional “Use ‘bloom’ effect when available” setting.
• Added Rich Presence info while playing Half-Life 2.

Input

• Updated the default Steam Input configuration.
• Added a Gamepad settings menu.
• Added the ability to select a weapon selection UI style while using a gamepad.
• Added settings for separate Aim-Assist modes for mouse/keyboard and gamepad. The new Aim-Assist “Enhanced” mode now attempts to track enemies and snap-to-target while driving vehicles.
• If using toggle crouch, pressing sprint will now make the player stand.
• Legacy joystick settings have been removed from the Mouse settings menu.

Gameplay

• Reduced chances of birds getting stuck in the world.
• Fixed Combine crouching behavior during door assault scene.
• Fixed Combine not firing in some cases during the finale.
• Game sounds and music now pause while the game is paused.
• Fix crash that can occur if the player gets too far ahead of the helicopter in canals.
• Fixed Dr. Breen not looking at the camera in certain broadcasts.
• Fixed smooth friction sounds not playing.

General Map Updates

• Full HDR lighting and tonemapping pass across every map in Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch.
• Increased lightmap resolution in most maps.
• Adjusted rendering distances across the game so details and objects remain visible much further away.
• Removed Far-Z clip plane from most maps.
• Increased window and door fade distances.
• Improved lighting and world detail inconsistencies during many map transitions.
• Tuned fog and skyboxes for every map with water on the horizon for better horizon blending.
• Replaced instances of simple reflective water with fully reflective water in nearly every map.
• Fixed many instances of floating props across the game.
• Sewed up holes, aligned textures, and fixed seams on many displacements throughout the game.
• Swapped some distant trees out for higher detail models.
• Enabled shadows on many static props that were missing them.
• Added glow sprites to all lights that were missing them.
• Fixed lightmapping for many large static prop structures.
• Added simple rooftop geometry to background buildings that were missing them.
• Added background displacement geometry to areas which are now exposed by removed the clipping plane.

Specific Map Updates

• The introduction sequence has been adjusted to closely match the original sequence, including fixing specular highlights on the G-Man’s eyes.
• Fixed various texture seams on train station wall
• All fences now properly cast shadows.
• Fixed issues with level transitions setting fog values improperly.
• Removed emissive value from base of lighting prop which was glowing in strange places.
• Fixed a bug with Eli’s idle animations during the teleport sequence.
• Fixed lightmapping of train cars in Red Letter Day and Route Kanal.
• Fixed a rendering bug in Route Kanal where world geometry would pop in and out of view when looking down the tracks.
• Aligned pipe and canal wall textures in a few areas to reduce seams and misalignment in Route Kanal.
• Added and adjusted canal wall brushes where level geometry was conspicuously missing.
• Adjusted brightness and falloff of ambient lights in darker sections of the canals.
• Added small grates as dim light sources of ambient light in a few places in the canals.
• Fixed an issue where the splash for Manhack Matt’s jump into the water would be out of sync.
• Fixed a bug where the large brick smokestacks were popping in and out depending on the player’s position in Water Hazard.
• Added missing cables to utility poles in various canal maps.
• Fixed lighting and shadows on the dock and electric tower outside of Black Mesa East.
• Added displacements and water plane to 3D skybox near the dam entrance to replace simple brush cliff face.
• Fixed the lighting on the rocks and props in and around the Ravenholm graveyard.
• Fixed players being able to trap themselves in the graveyard by closing the gate after Gregori would open it.
• Added radial fog to all coast maps in the Highway 17 chapter.
• Removed area portals from many of the smaller structures along Highway 17.
• Fixed a crash that would occur if you parked the buggy in certain areas before entering the bridge level.
• Fixed a bug where Vortigaunts could fall through the world.
• Added simple 3D skybox representation of the next map visible from the top of the lighthouse in Sandtraps.
• Fixed lighting issues during the basement flare sequence in Nova Prospekt.
• Added additional geometry to various windows throughout the levels to cast more detailed shadows in Nova Prospekt.
• Fixed a bug in teleport sequence in Entanglement ending too early leaving Gordon and Alyx standing around while the teleporter reached its destination.
• Fixed the catwalk explosion detonating at the wrong time in Anticitizen One.
• Fixed the building dome having no polygons on the outstide in Follow Freeman.
• Fixed the ship visibly flying through the building dome in Follow Freeman.
• Fixed Barney being left behind during a level transition or nagging the player too early to “roll a grenade” in Follow Freeman.
• Improved resolution of portal render texture during finale.
• Added soundscape to all menu background maps
• Darkened parts of the skyboxes that fall behind Half-Life 2 logo to help with text legibility.
• Added geometry to menu background maps for Ultrawide support.
• Added smoke to the Ravenholm and Follow Freeman background maps.
• Fixed a bug where you could hear the player’s bones break in the Citadel menu background map.

Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Fixes

• Fixed player model selection in the options menu.
• Fixed slam not being able to be detonated if you were too close to a wall
• Fixed view bob with the SMG equipped.
• Fixed using the Gravity Gun to yo-yo grenades, sometimes causing the server to disconnect or crash.
• Fixed missing sound effects for the Gravity Gun.
• Fixed characters playing a missing animation when switching weapons while jumping and moving.
• Fix weapons being invisible when being given another weapon of the same class.

Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Maps

• Increased player spawn point count in many maps.
• Fixed prop placement in maps that would allow players to escape the world.
• Fixed floating props in dm_runoff.
• Fixed the area portal on the blast door in dm_runoff causing the world to no longer render when the door was shut.
• Added geometry to many maps where the player could see outside of bounds.
• Fixed several areas where the player could see out of the world.
• Moved the blue barrels in dm_resistance that you could pick up with the Gravity Gun through the chainlink doors.
• Improved quality of the Valve intro movie when launching the game.
• Fixed playback of the the post-credits movie at the end of Episode One and the intro movie at the start of Episode Two.
• The achievements for Episode One and Two have been added to Half-Life 2. When launching the game it will attempt to read data from installed standalone Episodes to re-grant those duplicated achievements.
• Hammer: Show detail sprite preview on non-displacement surfaces.
• Hammer: Fixed bug where orphaned entities added additional data on each map load.
• Hammer: Fixed the ability to render cubemaps.
• Hammer: Increased many limits for BSP data. Models 1024 -> 2048, Brushes 8192 -> 16384, TexInfo 12288 -> 16384, TexData 2048 -> 8096, DispInfo 2048 -> 8096.
• Added save_transition_music convar that allows streaming music to continue to play in between level transitions.
• Localization files updated.
• Miscellaneous security fixes.

Other

• The previous version of the game has been archived to a publicly visible Beta branch named “steam_legacy”, with the description “Pre-20th Anniversary Build.” If a mod or feature is behaving in an unexpected way, you may need to run this archived build until the issue is resolved in the default build.
• With the Episodes and Lost Coast now contained within Half-Life 2 itself, we’ll be reducing the visibility of the standalone versions on the Steam Store. The old standalone applications will remain available to ensure community projects that rely on them still function properly but they will now appear within the Tools menu on your Steam Library.

Original Story follows:

Gamescom is the next big gaming expo and takes place later in August from Koelnmesse GmbH in Cologne, Germany. Several big companies like Bandai Namco, NetEase, Xbox, Bethesda and Nintendo have been confirmed, but it seems that Valve Corporation is also appearing, potentially for something Half-Life related.

A Reddit user discovered the company’s name in the list of exhibitors, despite Valve not publically announcing its appearance. It also shared images that mentioned Half-Life as its main topic. Could this be something related to Half-Life: Alyx? The long-rumored Citadel? The fabled Half-Life 3? At this point, it’s unknown.

It could even be an error with the app or, worse come worse, fake. Time will ultimately tell, so stay tuned. Gamescom 2023 runs from August 23rd to 27th, preceded by Gamescom Opening Night Live on August 22nd, where several announcements and world premieres are expected. Stay tuned for more details and updates in the coming weeks.

Steam is celebrating Japan’s Golden Week, a series of holidays taking place between April 29th and May 3rd that is, for many, the longest vacation period most folks in Japan will have in any given year, with a sale on thousands of Japanese games from now until May 6th.

There’s a ton of games on sale. Highlights include Death Stranding (60% off), the Devil May Cry HD Collection at (34% off), NieR: Automata (50% off), Tekken 7 (85% off), Yakuza Kiwami (50% off), and Persona 5 Strikes (20% off). This is just a small sampling. There are literally thousands of games on sale, so it might be a good idea to check your wishlist if you’re looking for something specific.

Several Western games are also on sale, including just about every Star Wars game, which are on sale because Star Wars Day (May the 4th) is right around the corner. The Golden Week sale ends at 10 AM Pacific Time on May 6th.

Just a week ago, Steam broke its all-time concurrent player peak with over 23 million players. It should perhaps come as no surprise then that the record has been broken yet again. About 24,534,770 peak concurrent players were recorded over the weekend, which is absolutely bonkers.

You could attribute this to more people staying at home due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Also, eagerly awaited games like TaleWorlds’ Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord and Resident Evil 3 launched before the weekend, resulting in a bump in player numbers. Either way, Steam is benefiting greatly from the increased traffic.

We’ll have to wait and see how the coming weeks plays out especially as more people stay at home. In the meantime, some of the bigger releases for the month on Steam include Square Enix’s Trials of Mana and The Coalition’s Gears Tactics. Stay tuned for more details to see if the concurrent player peak goes up once more.

Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx recently became available and scored big with critics. It’s the first title in the series to be in VR but also the first major single-player game from Valve in a long time. The team was composed of about 80 developers, making it the company’s biggest yet, and members of Campo Santo were included.

The kicker is that Campo Santo, which was acquired by Valve in 2018, had halted its own project In the Valley of Gods to work on Half-Life: Alyx. So with the latter out, is the team back to working on the first person adventure? Not quite. Former member Chris Remo, who’s now a designer at Valve, spoke to PCGamesN and said that In the Valley of Gods is “on hold for the time being.”

“We were working on it when those of us from Campo Santo came up to Valve, and something we found over time was, in contrast to working on that game, Valve was a place with a lot of teams, a lot of projects, a lot going on.”

As per Remo, there wasn’t a “particular moment or decision” as such that resulted in this. Different people just began working on other things. Remo noted that, “I worked on Underlords for a bit. I’ve been working on Half-Life: Alyx now for a while. We just eventually came to a conclusion as a team like, ‘Oh, it looks like we’re all kind of working on other stuff right now. Let’s put this thing on hold for a bit and figure out over time what that means.’ Really, that was about it.”

It does create some uncertainty for the future of In the Valley of Gods, which looked to be another strong narrative in the vein of Firewatch. Nevertheless, all we can do is wait and see if Campo Santo decides to return to it. Stay tuned for more details in the meantime.

The dates and venue for Dota 2’s The International 2018, arguably the most high-profile esports tournament in the world, have been announced. Interestingly, it will be taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada on August 20th till August 25th. This will be the first time ever that the tournament happens in Canada. It’s also the first time since 2011 when The International started in Cologne that it will happen outside the United States.

Tickets will go on sale starting from March 23rd at 10 AM PDT and 10 PM PDT with two different types available. You’ll be able to purchase midweek tickets for $125 CAD which provide access to the first four days (August 20th to 23rd). If you want to attend the finals taking place on August 24th and 25th, you’ll need to pay $250 CAD for a ticket.

It’s expected that another Battle Pass will be available to help raise funds for The International 2018. How this will work with the newly introduced Dota Plus, which allows for year-round Battle Pass-like benefits, remains to be seen. How will come out on top in the competition though? We can’t wait to find out.

During a recent briefing for Artifact, Valve’s upcoming not-free to play card game, president Gabe Newell announced that the company was going to be releasing several more games in the coming months.

As per PC Gamer, Newell said that Artifact was the first of several of new releases. “Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us. So that’s sort of good news. Hooray! Valve’s going to start shipping games again.”

Newell expressed interest in Nintendo’s approach of creating games and the hardware together, as seen with the Nintendo Switch. He then confessed that the company has “always been a little bit jealous of companies like Nintendo.”

“When Miyamoto is sitting down and thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario, he’s thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities. He can introduce new capabilities like motion input because he controls both of those things.

“And he can make the hardware look as good as possible because he’s designing the software at the same time that’s really going to take advantage of it. So that is something we’ve been jealous of, and that’s something that you’ll see us taking advantage of subsequently.”

While we’re not sure if that means Valve will try creating its own console eventually, the company has seen rather mixed success in the field with its Steam Machines, Steam Controllers and even the HTC Vive. That being said, the company is focusing on releasing new games so that’s good news. Whether that means follow-ups to Portal and Left 4 Dead will be coming remains to be seen. It’s possible the developer will simply introduce new IPs as it goes along.

And no, Half-Life 3 is not one of those games. Let the meme die already.

In other news of features in the works, Valve Corporation has confirmed that it’s much awaited Steam UI update is still in development. The UI change was first announced at a Valve presentation last year but there’s no updates about the same until now.

Not that this is much of an update. With a Valve presentation in Milan coming, Twitter users asked Valve product designer Alden Kroll if the UI update was still in development. He responded that it was still being worked on and that the option to exclude certain Curators is also in the works.

As for when it would be out, one Twitter user asked if it would be available before he died in the next 40 years. Kroll responded that he hopes they’re done before that. If you’ve been following Valve since their evasive comments about Half Life 2: Episode 3 or Half Life 3, then this is all pretty much standard for you.

What would you like to see in the Steam UI update? Let us know in the comments below.

Yes: We're still working on it 🙂

— Alden Kroll (@aldenkroll) January 5, 2018

Ah, yeah. Only Curators you follow will impact what Steam recommends to you. I also understand wanting to exclude specific curators from places where they are recommended to you. That's something we're working on.

— Alden Kroll (@aldenkroll) January 8, 2018

Gosh I sure hope we get done before then!

— Alden Kroll (@aldenkroll) January 8, 2018

If you haven’t indulged your senses – and wallet – in the Steam Winter Sale, then hurry up. It ends today at 10 AM PST/1 PM EST/6 PM GMT. With the number of games on discount, it’s almost impossible to not find a good deal.

Games like Rainbow Six Siege, Divinity: Original 1 and 2, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, The Evil Within 2, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Ghost Recon Wildlands and much more are available with heavy discounts.

This won’t be the final Steam Sale by a long shot – the Steam Valentine’s Day sale should be happening in February but that will focus mostly on games with a romantic theme. For a wider selection of discounts, the Steam Spring Sale will be your best bet and that’s several months away. If there’s anything you want to pick up, you’ll have to do so today or wait till Spring.

In other news, the winners for The Steam Awards 2017 have also been announced. Check out the full results here.

Back to the Drawing Board

Even with its legendary status, it took a long while for Half Life to reach that point. In 1997, as per the Valve Timeline in the Valve Employee Handbook, internal reviews on the game said that Half Life wasn’t good enough to ship. Which isn’t out of the ordinary for games but it also said that the Half Life team went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. Talk about an urge for perfection.