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’ll be able to play all of it straight by way of, together with a two-hour documentary, developer commentary, and way more. The sport can also 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’ll decide up absolutely anything on the display screen and toss it round (together with that can, which you’ll 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 in depth, 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 Valve’s additionally revealed some outdated demo movies from Half-Life 2‘s improvement.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 duplicate of Elevating the Bar, the 2004 behind-the-scenes ebook that’s since turn out to be 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.”
