It’s Half-Life 2’s twentieth anniversary, and in celebration, Valve has launched a particular replace that provides the Episode One and Episode Two expansions to the bottom recreation so you possibly can play all of it straight by, together with a two-hour documentary, developer commentary, and far more. The sport can be free on Steam till November 18. Valve’s announcement itself is an interactive expertise — seize the gravity gun on the backside of the web page and you may decide up absolutely anything on the display screen and toss it round (together with that can, which you’ll be able to then put within the trash).
“Every map in Half-Life 2 has been looked over by Valve level designers to fix longstanding bugs, restore content and features lost to time, and improve the quality of a few things like lightmap resolution and fog,” the crew says. The discharge notes are intensive, together with updates to the graphics settings, gamepad controls and the Steam Deck menu. Valve’s additionally revealed some outdated demo movies from Half-Life 2’s improvement.
The anniversary celebration additionally brings excellent news for anybody who didn’t handle to snag a replica of Elevating the Bar, the 2004 behind-the-scenes guide that’s since change into a coveted collector’s merchandise: an expanded second version is coming in 2025. This new model provides idea artwork from Episode One and Episode Two, plus “ideas and experiments for the third episode that never came to be.”
