Do you know that your favourite Half-Life is turning 25 soon? And on this occasion, the company has announced some good news for players like you. So, without any further delays let’s dive into our guide and know what this good news is.
Half-Life With New Update
In a recent blog post, Valve announced that Half-Life is turning 25, and to commemorate this occasion, it is offering good news to the players. That is, now players can own the Half–Life game for free, just for a limited time period.
Also, there will be various anniversary new additions including anniversary updates, updated graphic settings, Steam Deck verification, and more. As Valve is nostalgic it feels like yesterday when Half–Life was launched in 1998.
Since then it has surely come a long way, only because of its first–person shooting genre game. It started the first–person shooter game industry and carried forward the legacy gracefully.
Even now, it is counted as one of the most influential games in the genre. And to celebrate its 25 turning milestone has company has introduced numerous UI and other updates. These are as follows,
New Content
- Now Verified on the Steam Deck (and our native Linux runtime has been set as the default).
- Half-Life: Uplink — the original standalone Half-Life demo — has been added to the game, and is accessible through the “New Game” menu.
- Added four all-new Half-Life Deathmatch maps: contamination, pool_party, disposal, and rocket_frenzy
- Added Ivan the Space Biker, Prototype Barney, Skeleton, and Too Much Coffee Man as player models to Half-Life Deathmatch.
- Added dozens of new sprays formerly available only on the “Half-Life: Further Data” CD.
- Added support for Steam Friends Rich Presence, allowing your friends to follow your journey through Black Mesa.
Nostalgia
- Brought back the original Valve Intro video. Can be skipped with the “-novid” launch command. Updated main menu to a design inspired by the game’s original 1998 main menu.
- Changed the default models to the original (non “HD”) models.
- Improved physics for throwing grenades.
- Improved satchel charge controls: primary fire now always throws a new satchel, and secondary fire always detonates.
- Fixed players with high framerates freezing in place on death in multiplayer.
- Fixed some cases where the player could get stuck in place on level transitions.
- Fixed weapon view-bob angles.
- Fixed Snarks attacking FL_WORLDBRUSH entities (such as func_walls).
- Fixed players sometimes failing to deploy a snark while crouching and looking down.
- Fixed singleplayer auto-aim setting being changed when entering a multiplayer game that disallows auto-aim.
- Fixed the flashlight HUD showing empty after loading a savegame.
- Fixed rockets in CONTENTS_SKY not always detonating.
- Fixed gauss gun making a loud static noise if it was charged across level transitions.
- Fixed a crash in mods that display keybinds in their UI.
- Fixed interpolation artifacts when animated models are moved by other entities.
- Fixed some buffer overflow exploits.
UI Changes
- Main-menu background and buttons have been reskinned, and now scale based upon screen resolution without stretching, supporting background image layouts up to 3840×1600.
- In-Game HUD now uses double or triple sized sprites when playing at higher resolutions.
- UI dialogs and in-game fonts now scale to improve readability at high screen resolutions.
- In-Game HUD HEV suit display has been shifted to the left of the screen, and no longer changes position at larger screen resolutions.
- Added an “Allow widescreen Field of View” setting to correct non-anamorphic FOVs, for widescreen and ultrawide displays.
- The default server name and multiplayer player name are now based on the player’s Steam Persona.
- The Steam platform menu has been removed, now that all its features are in Steam itself.
- Fixed player and spray images not updating their coloring on the settings screen.
- Removed the now very unnecessary “Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards.” setting.
- Input Changes
- Added “Lower Input Latency” option: Synchronizes the CPU and GPU to reduce the time between input and display output.
You will explore more once you will play the game. So get set ready for a new adventure and without any delays grab the amazing deal.