Half-Life gets 25th Anniversary Update with restored content, new maps, more
Seminal first-person shooter Half-Life turns 25 this weekend, and developer Valve is celebrating the occasion with a special anniversary update adding new and restored content, alongside a bunch of other things. Oh, and it's made the game free to claim and keep starting today.
Half-Life, for those too young or too in denial to remember, introduced the world to crowbar-toting science nerd Gordon Freeman on 19th November 1998 (Freeman's full-life consequences wouldn't materialise until sometime later), and anyone looking to relive their memories of those halcyon days now get to do so with some fancy extra bits thrown in.
Starting with the game itself, Half-Life has received a spot of gentle massaging for the modern era. There's UI upscaling for higher resolutions («We built most of this stuff for 640x480 CRTs and apparently some of you have upgraded since then», says Valve), and it now supports Steam Networking play and proper gamepad config «out of the box».
Valve's also implemented widescreen field-of-view settings, Linux software rendering, lighting fixes, plus a heap of other quality of life improvements, bug fixes, and balancing tweaks, as detailed in the Anniversary Update extensive patch notes. Additionally, the whole thing's been tweaked to ensure it passes Valve's own Steam Deck Verified checks — and, for nostalgia fans, the classic Valve logo video and music have been reinstated at the start of the game, and the main menu has been reskinned to match the 1998 build.
Elsewhere, Half-Life now includes Half-Life Uplink, a mini-campaign built by the original dev team and released as a CD exclusive for magazines and hardware manufacturers back in the day. «As this was many people's first experience with Half-Life,»
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