Gamers, it’s time to feel old. Twenty years ago today, Half-Life 2 was released. To have fun its Twentieth anniversary, Valve has released a large update to the sport, and it’s currently free on Steam—if you happen to one way or the other don’t already own it. The Twentieth Anniversary Update for Half-Life 2 includes the Episode One and Episode Two expansions alongside the bottom game. That’s not all—Valve has also added updated game content and detailed patch notes, with level designers reviewing every map to repair longstanding bugs, restore content and features, and improve overall quality.
The patch introduces updated graphics settings, allowing players to make a choice from the unique launch-day blood and fire effects or those created for the episodes. Other changes include updated gamepad controls matching the Half-Life 1 anniversary update, an overhaul of Aim Assistance, and an improved Steam Deck essential menu.
For the die-hard fans, a brand new edition of Raising the Bar is coming back into print next 12 months, nearly twenty years because it first went out of print. The second edition includes never-before-seen concept art from Episode One and Episode Two, in addition to ideas and experiments for the third episode that never got here to fruition. This is likely to be the one taste we’ll ever get for Half-Life 3—or possibly it’s a teaser!
You may watch the two-hour Twentieth Anniversary documentary below, together with the total patch notes for the Twentieth Anniversary Update.
Half-Life 2: Twentieth Anniversary Documentary
Half-Life 2 Twentieth Anniversary Update Patch Notes
Content
- Added 3.5 hours of Developer Commentary by members of the Half-Life 2 team.
- Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two at the moment are playable from the Half-Life 2 essential menu.
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast has been added to the Extras menu.
- Added Steam Workshop support. Play entire campaigns or replace weapons, enemies, UI, and more with content created by the community.
- Added custom Steam Game Recording gameplay events and phases throughout the sport.
Rendering and Graphics
- Fixed issues causing props or entire maps to be fully vivid or fully dark depending on settings.
- Added bicubic filtering for lightmaps to provide smoother shadows. It may be enabled by setting Shader Detail to Very High.
- Fixed missing grass detail sprites in lots of maps.
- Added settings to enable Classic Effects that were originally in Half-Life 2. These effects will also be enabled using r_classic_blood or r_classic_fire.
- Added support for radial fog.
- Specular reflectivity has been adjusted throughout Half-Life 2 to higher match the unique release.
- Updated models for the Crossbow and RPG weapons to support ultrawide displays.
- Fixed camera clipping into vehicles at high FOV settings.
- Fixed lambda cache indicators and other decals vanishing when backtracking through map transitions.
- Setting Model Detail to High will now all the time display the very best detail version of a model and never swap for a lower level-of-detail.
- Set Antialiasing to 4x MSAA by default.
- Fixed teeth shader rendering fully white on some GPUs.
UI and Options
- The UI now scales to support higher resolutions.
- Launching the sport in Steam Big Picture mode will now use the gamepad-friendly UI previously available on Steam Deck. You too can launch this mode with the “-gamepadui” launch option.
- The High Dynamic Range setting has been moved to the essential Video settings page.
- Commentary mode can now be enabled on the Recent Game screen.
- Fixed display of greyscale art for locked achievement icons to match their behavior in steam.
- Improved legibility of gamepad button icons.
- Button hints will now prefer to display standard face buttons and trigger icons only. This behavior may be disabled with the “sc_prefer_basic_origin_hints” convar.
- Replaced instances of system fonts like Verdana throughout the UI with a brand new font, GorDIN.
- Added a brand new font renderer that gives more consistent rendering between platforms.
- Fixed edges of certain font characters being cut off with antialiasing enabled.
- Fixed scrollbars and button animations using inverted colours.
- Removed the non-functional “Use ‘bloom’ effect when available” setting.
- Added Wealthy Presence info while playing Half-Life 2.
Input
- Updated the default Steam Input configuration.
- Added a Gamepad settings menu.
- Added the power to pick out a weapon selection UI style while using a gamepad.
- Added settings for separate Aim-Assist modes for mouse/keyboard and gamepad. The brand new Aim-Assist “Enhanced” mode now attempts to trace enemies and snap-to-target while driving vehicles.
- If using toggle crouch, pressing sprint will now make the player stand.
- Legacy joystick settings have been faraway from the Mouse settings menu.
Gameplay
- Reduced probabilities of birds getting stuck on this planet.
- Fixed Mix crouching behavior during door assault scene.
- Fixed Mix not firing in some cases through the finale.
- Game sounds and music now pause while the sport is paused.
- Fix crash that may occur if the player gets too far ahead of the helicopter in canals.
- Fixed Dr. Breen not taking a look at the camera in certain broadcasts.
- Fixed smooth friction sounds not playing.
General Map Updates
- Full HDR lighting and tonemapping pass across every map in Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch.
- Increased lightmap resolution in most maps.
- Adjusted rendering distances across the sport so details and objects remain visible much further away.
- Removed Far-Z clip plane from most maps.
- Increased window and door fade distances.
- Improved lighting and world detail inconsistencies during many map transitions.
- Tuned fog and skyboxes for each map with water on the horizon for higher horizon mixing.
- Replaced instances of straightforward reflective water with fully reflective water in nearly every map.
- Fixed many instances of floating props across the sport.
- Sewed up holes, aligned textures, and stuck seams on many displacements throughout the sport.
- Swapped some distant trees out for higher detail models.
- Enabled shadows on many static props that were missing them.
- Added glow sprites to all lights that were missing them.
- Fixed lightmapping for a lot of large static prop structures.
- Added easy rooftop geometry to background buildings that were missing them.
- Added background displacement geometry to areas which at the moment are exposed by removed the clipping plane.
Specific Map Updates
- The introduction sequence has been adjusted to closely match the unique sequence, including fixing specular highlights on the G-Man’s eyes.
- Fixed various texture seams on train station wall
- All fences now properly solid shadows.
- Fixed issues with level transitions setting fog values improperly.
- Removed emissive value from base of lighting prop which was glowing in strange places.
- Fixed a bug with Eli’s idle animations through the teleport sequence.
- Fixed lightmapping of train cars in Red Letter Day and Route Kanal.
- Fixed a rendering bug in Route Kanal where world geometry would pop out and in of view when looking down the tracks.
- Aligned pipe and canal wall textures in a number of areas to scale back seams and misalignment in Route Kanal.
- Added and adjusted canal wall brushes where level geometry was conspicuously missing.
- Adjusted brightness and falloff of ambient lights in darker sections of the canals.
- Added small grates as dim light sources of ambient light in a number of places within the canals.
- Fixed a problem where the splash for Manhack Matt’s jump into the water could be out of sync.
- Fixed a bug where the big brick smokestacks were popping out and in depending on the player’s position in Water Hazard.
- Added missing cables to utility poles in various canal maps.
- Fixed lighting and shadows on the dock and electric tower outside of Black Mesa East.
- Added displacements and water plane to 3D skybox near the dam entrance to interchange easy brush cliff face.
- Fixed the lighting on the rocks and props in and across the Ravenholm graveyard.
- Fixed players with the ability to trap themselves within the graveyard by closing the gate after Gregori would open it.
- Added radial fog to all coast maps within the Highway 17 chapter.
- Removed area portals from lots of the smaller structures along Highway 17.
- Fixed a crash that will occur if you happen to parked the buggy in certain areas before entering the bridge level.
- Fixed a bug where Vortigaunts could fall through the world.
- Added easy 3D skybox representation of the following map visible from the highest of the lighthouse in Sandtraps.
- Fixed lighting issues through the basement flare sequence in Nova Prospekt.
- Added additional geometry to numerous windows throughout the degrees to solid more detailed shadows in Nova Prospekt.
- Fixed a bug in teleport sequence in Entanglement ending too early leaving Gordon and Alyx standing around while the teleporter reached its destination.
- Fixed the catwalk explosion detonating on the fallacious time in Anticitizen One.
- Fixed the constructing dome having no polygons on the outstide in Follow Freeman.
- Fixed the ship visibly flying through the constructing dome in Follow Freeman.
- Fixed Barney being left behind during a level transition or nagging the player too early to “roll a grenade” in Follow Freeman.
- Improved resolution of portal render texture during finale.
- Added soundscape to all menu background maps
- Darkened parts of the skyboxes that fall behind Half-Life 2 logo to assist with text legibility.
- Added geometry to menu background maps for Ultrawide support.
- Added smoke to the Ravenholm and Follow Freeman background maps.
- Fixed a bug where you might hear the player’s bones break within the Citadel menu background map.
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Fixes
- Fixed player model selection in the choices menu.
- Fixed slam not with the ability to be detonated if you happen to were too near a wall
- Fixed view bob with the SMG equipped.
- Fixed using the Gravity Gun to yo-yo grenades, sometimes causing the server to disconnect or crash.
- Fixed missing sound effects for the Gravity Gun.
- Fixed characters playing a missing animation when switching weapons while jumping and moving.
- Fix weapons being invisible when being given one other weapon of the identical class.
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Maps
- Increased player spawn point count in lots of maps.
- Fixed prop placement in maps that will allow players to flee the world.
- Fixed floating props in dm_runoff.
- Fixed the world portal on the blast door in dm_runoff causing the world to now not render when the door was shut.
- Added geometry to many maps where the player could see outside of bounds.
- Fixed several areas where the player could see out of the world.
- Moved the blue barrels in dm_resistance that you might pick up with the Gravity Gun through the chainlink doors.
Other
- Improved quality of the Valve intro movie when launching the sport.
- Fixed playback of the the post-credits movie at the top of Episode One and the intro movie at the beginning of Episode Two.
- The achievements for Episode One and Two have been added to Half-Life 2. When launching the sport it can try and read data from installed standalone Episodes to re-grant those duplicated achievements.
- Hammer: Show detail sprite preview on non-displacement surfaces.
- Hammer: Fixed bug where orphaned entities added additional data on each map load.
- Hammer: Fixed the power to render cubemaps.
- Hammer: Increased many limits for BSP data. Models 1024 -> 2048, Brushes 8192 -> 16384, TexInfo 12288 -> 16384, TexData 2048 -> 8096, DispInfo 2048 -> 8096.
- Added save_transition_music convar that enables streaming music to proceed to play in between level transitions.
- Localization files updated.
- Miscellaneous security fixes.
Notes
- The previous version of the sport has been archived to a publicly visible Beta branch named “steam_legacy”, with the outline “Pre-Twentieth Anniversary Construct.” If a mod or feature is behaving in an unexpected way, you might have to run this archived construct until the difficulty is resolved within the default construct.
- With the Episodes and Lost Coast now contained inside Half-Life 2 itself, we’ll be reducing the visibility of the standalone versions on the Steam Store. The old standalone applications will remain available to make sure community projects that depend on them still function properly but they are going to now appear throughout the Tools menu in your Steam Library.
