Valve celebrates Half-Life 2’s twentieth anniversary with a giant replace

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 sport so you may play all of it straight by way of, together with a two-hour documentary, developer commentary, and rather 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’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).

“Each map in Half-Life 2 has been regarded over by Valve degree designers to repair longstanding bugs, restore content material and options misplaced to time, and enhance the standard of some issues like lightmap decision and fog,” the group says. The discharge notes are intensive, together with updates to the graphics settings, gamepad controls and the Steam Deck menu. Valve’s additionally printed some old demo videos 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 “concepts and experiments for the third episode that by no means got here to be.”