What simply occurred? Valve is celebrating Half-Life 2’s twentieth anniversary with a large replace, a short lived free giveaway of the complete recreation, and a bundle together with the 2 episodic expansions and new developer commentary. Moreover, a two-hour YouTube documentary sheds mild on the canceled third growth, revealing new particulars for followers.
Should you’re one of many few Steam customers who nonetheless would not personal Half-Life 2, now’s your likelihood so as to add Valve’s blockbuster first-person shooter to your library completely – without cost – till November 18. The bundle additionally consists of each follow-up episodes, plus the sport has obtained a serious replace in celebration of its twentieth anniversary.
The patch would not overhaul the sport’s graphics to the extent of the upcoming RTX Remix mod, but it surely brings dozens of bug fixes, minor enhancements, and new options.
Newly added Steam Workshop assist makes it simpler for gamers to find and set up the numerous mods created for Half-Life 2 over time. Gamers can now choose the “Misplaced Coast” chapter straight from the sport’s important menu, and the developer commentary function beforehand launched within the episodic expansions is now built-in into the bottom recreation, with three and a half hours of latest audio.
The replace additionally revises visible parts like lighting, grass, HDR results, and draw distances. Moreover, menus and the HUD add assist for numerous ultrawide side ratios and gamepad configurations. For these in search of nostalgia, gamers can toggle the lighting and results from the sport’s authentic 2004 launch.
In the meantime, Valve has launched hours of archival footage on YouTube chronicling the event of Half-Life 2 and its episodes. Among the many subjects lined, the canceled Episode 3 is prone to be probably the most intriguing for followers. The documentary offers the primary official particulars on the growth in years.
By means of new footage and idea artwork, Valve reveals that Episode 3 would have largely taken place within the Arctic and launched an ice gun. The builders confessed they might have simply shipped Episode 3 however in the end did not as a result of a scarcity of recent concepts that would meet the corporate’s high quality requirements. Nonetheless, a bunch of followers is at present growing a free marketing campaign impressed by a draft of Episode 3’s plot, which collection author Marc Laidlaw printed in 2017.
Different new movies embrace demonstrations from Siggraph 2000, E3 2002, and E3 2003. Valve additionally introduced an expanded reprint of Elevating the Bar, the e-book documenting Half-Life 2’s improvement, which has been out of print since 2004. The second version consists of newly uncovered idea artwork from the three episodes.
In tandem with Valve’s celebrations, Nvidia has joined the festivities by unveiling a customized Half-Life 2-themed GeForce RTX 4080 Tremendous graphics card. This GPU is designed to showcase the upcoming RTX Remix mod, which is able to add real-time path tracing and up to date textures to the sport. Followers can enter a contest on Nvidia’s web site to win the cardboard, and the upcoming mod now has its personal Steam web page.
