Half-Life 2 is getting a major update in celebration of the classic title’s 20th anniversary. In addition to Steam Workshop support directly within the game, Valve has fixed bugs and restored some content, added new graphics settings, updated gamepad controls, and a whole lot more. You’ll also be able to get the game for free on Steam through November 18th at 1PM ET. After that, it will cost $9.99.
Valve is also now including the Episode One and Episode Two expansions with the base game. They’ll be accessible from the Half-Life 2 menu, and Valve says that “you will automatically advance to the next expansion after completing each one.” You’ll also be able to access the Steam Workshop within the Extras menu, which means you’ll no longer have to leave the game to enable mods.
Valve says it also made massive updates to Half-Life 2’s maps, which will fix “longstanding bugs, restore content and features lost to time, and improve the quality of a few things like lightmap resolution and fog.” There’s a new option to play with the original launch day blood and fire effects as well, and Valve has updated Half-Life 2’s gamepad controls to “match” last year’s Half-Life 1 anniversary update.
If you want to access the older version of Half-Life 2, that’s still an option: you’ll just have to roll back to “a publicly visible Beta branch named ‘steam_legacy’” and grab the “Pre-20th Anniversary Build,” Valve says.
Like with the 25th anniversary celebration for the original Half-Life, Valve has also released a free documentary about Half-Life 2 that you can watch for free on YouTube. Here’s what you can expect, according to the documentary’s YouTube description: “we’ve gotten members of the HL2 team back to talk about the game’s development, how we almost ran out of money, what it was like when we were hacked, what happened when we were sued by our publisher, the birthplace of Steam, and much more.”
In addition to the documentary, Valve has shared videos of old demos of the game — including one that it planned to bring to E3 2022 but decided not to show at the last minute. Valve added 3.5 hours of new developer commentary within the game, too.
And the company is printing an expanded second edition of the Raising the Bar book about the game’s development, which includes “the Half-Life 2 development story, with never-before-seen concept art from Episode One and Episode Two, along with ideas and experiments for the third episode that never came to be.” The book will return to print in 2025.
Maybe soon we’ll get Half-Life 3? Maybe?
