It doesn't seem to be mentioned here, but HL2 (which now includes the sequel episodes) is completely free to claim on Steam until the 18th, if you're new to the series.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/
Also try clicking on the gravity gun at the end of the anniversary page.
Also I highly recommend Black Mesa, which is the remake of HL1 in the HL2 engine. The Xen levels went from what they were to possibly some of my favorite levels in the game, and the music scoring is top-notch. It feels great to play.
And regarding another fan project - turns out the Prologue for Project Borealis has been released on November 11th! They're trying to make HL3 according to the Epistle 3 post from a couple of years ago.
https://projectborealis.com/prologue-release/
Looks great, and feels pretty close to HL2 mechanics! Definitely has to be optimized more, but a very promising start (albeit short, ~10-15 minutes).
I worked on this in the first year, on the gameplay code. Glad it’s finally bearing some fruit.
I had a lot of issues getting black mesa to run on linux natively or via proton. Frequently crashes. Not uncommon per protondb. Food for thought of you're on a linux setup.
Maybe even in a game period. Beautifully done remake.
Black Mesa is also 75% off right now, incidentally. Seems like everything Half Life is either free or on deep discount for the anniversary.
Reminder that you don't actually buy the game, you just license it off steam
Tangential, irrelevant, "flamebait...generic tangents...internet tropes." "reminder" that the guidelines explicitly say to avoid. Nobody mentioned ownership or licensing or anything tangentially related until you did.
> Nobody mentioned
Hence the reminder.
And when you buy an album on CD you just license it for personal use, you can't play it on the radio or in a commercial space. "Buying" a copy of some intellectual property always had strings attached even in the age of physical media.
To add to bdjsiqoocwk pointing out the self-evident, in many jurisdictions you have both the right, and the tools to make backups of media for personal use. What exactly is legally permissible and actually possible with non-physical stuff is much more complicated.
Steam can delete a game from your account, they can't delete a cd that I physically have with me.
Why does this even need to be spelled out...
Not contradicting your point, but adding tangential interesting information.
Blu-Ray UHD discs can no longer be played on modern computers as Intel has removed the trusted execution environment needed to decrypt them. Blu-Ray UHD players do a handshake that verifies the use of Intel SGX.
One might have always been skeptical of these discs, especially as AMD had never implemented those TEE instructions.
But I believe the interesting takeaway is that even physical media is becoming something you can’t count on using without the continued permission/assistance of some outside party.
Without regulation I would expect that all new media will eventually require players to be always-online.
Why hasn’t the requisite software been updated to perform a non-SGX handshake? That seems like a yawning oversight. o_O
The UHD DRM scheme requires some kind of secure enclave for key management, and SGX was the only suitable system for that on PCs. There is no non-SGX system they would certify.
This should be so trivially apparent to anyone on HN using Steam that pointing it out is like noting the sky is blue.
True but a lot of games require an online launcher to even start, even if they are also distributed on physical media
I buy most of my games on GOG for that reason. At least you can download a DRM-free copy that can never be taken away.
Do they have a record of doing this?
Paranoia here is largely warranted. But people had fewer rights than they realized before. And finding a way to play older media is often a rather expensive endeavor.
Edit to add: I also find picking on Valve awkward here. Microsoft? Sony? I would be far more inline. Even Nintendo. Valve seems to be much more on favor of empowering users, though.
> Why does this even need to be spelled out...
Indeed. Why did you bother?
In my decade+ of using steam, this has never been an issue.
Also try playing with the can and the trash bin.
20-25 years ago a handful of companies had a weird hold on me. I’d jump on anything Google made back then. Blizzard could sell me any game they came up with. If it was from Blizzard, it was gonna be great.
Lost all of it obviously. Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.
Except if valve were to release a mystery black box with faint lambda symbol on it. I’d pay whatever they asked for it.
That's pretty much exactly the logic that got me to buy a Valve Index + Half Life Alyx and it was totally worth it. VR turned out to be cooler than I expected and both the game and the Index were just so satisfyingly well-executed. It's nice to have products which clearly had far more attention to detail and quality than was economically necessary. It's clearly the result of a different philosophy than I've seen at most tech companies.
I had the same experience with the Steam Deck: just very well done, including side things like the case that came with the device. I've grown used to accessories bundled with electronics ranging from basically garbage to okay (but not great), while Valve's case was as good as I'd expect from a high-end third-party product.
Unfortunately VR also showed the flipside of Valves approach to development - putting extreme amounts of money and effort into a project, then abruptly dropping it and moving on to something else. The Index was great at the time but now it's five years old, dated in numerous aspects, and hasn't even had a price cut since launch. Alyx is great but it came out four years ago and Valve has done nothing with VR games since, either themselves or by using their infinite bankroll to help fund third party VR development until it's more sustainable.
I've been patiently waiting for an index 2 or a price cut. I will continue to patiently wait.
I threw my CV1 that I bought secondhand in the trash when facebook bought oculus then forced login. Maybe I'll return to the market when it supplies something I want.
For better or worse Facebook are the ones keeping VR on life support, without them it would have flatlined years ago. They have the only good affordable headsets, they throw tons of money around to bankroll VR game studios in exchange for exclusivity, and even for games they don't bankroll it's a no-brainer to prioritize their platform because >90% of sales happen there.
https://x.com/MuchRockness/status/1849543449906942094
Even the minority who do buy VR games on Steam are mostly playing them on a cheap Meta headset, so without Meta those sales might not have happened either. The most recent Steam hardware survey shows that of the users who have a VR headset, nearly two thirds of them are using an Oculus/Meta model.
I'm happy for them. I'd rather never touch VR again than plug my eyes into facebook.
VR continues to lack a Killer App to sustain the field (I say this as owner of 3 VR devices, including the Index)
Valve tried to make it with Alyx, and while it is amazing, it did not inspire the industry to follow up on.
I do not blame Valve for moving on when nobody followed them.
I think it's pretty obvious that Alyx didn't inspire the industry because it's a giga-budget game addressed to a tiny potential market, that Valve could only afford to make due to Steam being an infinite money printer. It wouldn't surprise me if Alyx never recouped its development costs despite the immense hype around it.
If Valve wanted more Alyx'es to happen they needed to spread their wealth around until the VR market gained more momentum and became self-sustaining.
It's also a $60 purchase that requires a beefy Windows machine in addition to the headset.
VR is a small market to begin with, and most VR people can't play Alyx without buying a whole new computer.
Does Half Life Alyx not come with the headset anymore?
Even among people on Steam (who have those beefy Windows machines for VR), more than half of headsets are an Oculus, and only 17% are an Index:
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Try Metro Awakening too. It came out a week ago and I'm really impressed. Gameplay is excellent. It's no Alyx but it's good. And even on my old Quest 2 it doesn't look too horrible on the device itself (without PC)
I’ve been following Larian trying to build a game of their dreams since early 2000s. It’s been immensely satisfying to see they finally succeed and achieve the popularity they deserved with the release of BG3.
I also highly recommend Divinity OS 1 and 2 for the same level of dedication to every single detail and free post-launch support, even if they didn’t have such an enormous blockbuster budget behind them.
My theory is that there's a period when a studio has huge early success (plus in the case of Valve, they started with huge amounts of money from being former MS employees) that lets them devote themselves to their mission of making games, before either mission creep or dilution with new hires occurs over time either from staff naturally changing over time or expanding. Another factor is that when aiming to 'go big' and realize what they can do with lots of resources, they need to partner/join with others that don't work the same way and will influence them.
Valve still knows how to make excellent games. Deadlock is a Valve game in alpha, and I think it's going to be very popular once released.
yea just ignore artifact
Valve is still a top tier org, but they simply make too much money in the publishing business to bother with game development anymore. Any sales would be peanuts to what they are making through developer fees and the marketplace. This is why all of their releases in the last decade have been F2P.
Sounds like a perfect environment to make games. No budget or schedule pressure, virtually limitless resources so the staff can strive to make art with love and without the corruption of chasing a bottom line.
The entire media industry on almost every format is chasing nostalgia because they refuse to recreate the environment that made endearing stories and experiences in the first place.
Also, supposedly the whole radically flat org structure thing.
Which I imagine doesn't lend itself to doing hard things like making Half Life 3...
Why would any game dev choose to go through a death march to perfection, if they had other project choices?
Blizzard released one of the best games of all time every year for a decade (if you count expansions, which, for that time, you should). I don't think anything like that can happen again until we invent a new medium.
> Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.
FromSoft
Besides FromSoft as perhaps the exception to the rule as a subsidary to Kadokawa, private companies seem to be keeping their shit together fairly consistently. Larian and Wube are a pair of solid examples, although Valve is probably the most outstanding example.
Game developers and publishers start shitting the bed when they IPO and need to juggle the conflicting interests of managing investor relations as well as customer demands; that or when they're acquired and turned into a subsidiary.
Really? Most of the people I know that are huge Souls fans weren't big on Armored Core. Then I've never heard anyone mention 2018's Déraciné and if you go a couple more years back their track record becomes fairly poor.
Yes Really.
I've never understood the saying "the exception that proves the rule" until now. Possibly one of the greatest runs in game company history?
I gotta have my poison bogs
Wondering when they show up in AC: Fires of Rubicon.
It's Larian for me
Same here when the Raising the Bar reprint releases. I never managed to get the first edition, so I'm beyond excited they decided to make a second one after all this time. And as a fan, I need to have it.
I will buy the next few games by Larian Stuidios after BG3 no matter what they are
Public companies are slaves to the shareholders
It would be nice if it was again possible to run it in current Mac OS. The original Half life still lists Mac OS but with incompatible information (newer versions of Steam require recent versions, but HL only runs on old 32 bit OSX)
It should work in Wine, although I haven't tested this update yet.
(disclaimer: I work for CodeWeavers, we sell CrossOver which should be a great and easy way to play)
edit: tested out the 20th anniversary update on M2 Pro, it works great!
All, or at least most of Valve's games used to run natively on Mac, and now they don't (even on Intel Macs)
My claim to fame on the 20th anniversary (84 views thus far) is to have completed Ravenholm without inflicting any deaths or receiving any injury:
I've played through HL2 and its expansions so many times as a kind of meditative relaxation thing I couldn't tell you how many times.
I could never get used to Ravenholm though. Thinking about it even now years later stresses me out a tad.
I watched the whole thing. Impressive!
Thank you. There was a lot of repetition and problem-solving. The headcrabs were the worst. Well, and the fast headcrabs/spiders. The final segment from the exit of the mine to the end of the level is also done however that posting is waiting for a rainy day.
Heh I like the 'pascifist' angle.
If you want a fun way to revisit the game but don't want to replay, the 50min "Developers React to 50 Minute Speedrun" is a ton of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_PdwL5Y8g
It highlights some of the architectural decisions (and how players exploit them), and has gems such as one of the commentators having their entire section skipped by the speedrunner.
> gems such as one of the commentators having their entire section skipped by the speedrunner
The day that dev looked at player time-location heatmaps, investigated outliers, and then cried...
I can never understand why they haven't made a HL3. Given that they could literally make approximately 3.88 bajillion dollars from it in 24 hours.
I suppose this is the very definition of developer integrity.
For a while their stated reason was that they felt they couldn’t live up to the hype and the gaming community was too toxic and would have crucified them for it. True or not, I can see why they’d think that.
However it’s also worth noting that they were spending that time on other projects making them likely even more money. HL3 isn’t going to have live service or esports applications that make money like their other games do. It probably won’t be a big earner compared to those other games.
Valve are also a privately held company and the rumour is the top people there are crazy rich, and even those further down the ladder earn a lot more than they would elsewhere. They don’t need HL3.
It might not make as much money as live service but it might work like halo cars for the auto industry, giving them lots of press and attention and higher status as a game developer.
No rumor needed, they’re a 500 employee company with billions in estimated profits.
I doubt it'd be the guaranteed best seller you think. Most people spending a ton of money on video games weren't cognizant when HL2 came out. And those that were have been burned before/changed and would probably need to see raving reviews to be that interested.
Portal 3 seems like the easy money grab. That had more lasting pop culture relevance, and "it's more Portal" would be enough for a bunch of people to buy it.
They already make 7.76 bajillion dollars every hour from Steam, they don’t need to make anything for money.
they made several money printers with cs and dota boxes
It makes me really happy to see old games getting remastered.
I was a Mac kid. There were a whole bunch of games that I wanted to play but didn't have access to. (At least we had Marathon!) American McGee's Alice was at the top of that list, with the Arkham Trilogy close behind.
The Steam Deck is giving me a chance to catch up on all the computer games that I didn't have the hardware for when they were popular. I've now caught up on Arkham, but I just can't get into Alice. The graphics and the controls are so bad from a modern perspective that it distracts from any desire I have to explore that world. I had to download a mod to even unlock the original Alice, because they don't sell the complete collection on Steam any longer.
Seeing that the Half Life games have been recently remastered, maybe it's time for me to give them a play through. I'm going to be spending lots of time on airplanes over the holidays!
Nice, I wonder when the third documentary will be out
Valve can't count to 3!
In 2007 when The Orange Box was released, Half-Life 2 took forever to load on my dual-core Athlon 64 X2. It would run but the levels would take a solid minute to load. At the time I figured it was some incompatibility with the multiple cores as that was still rare and a lot of other software gave me trouble with it at that time.
I tried to play it much more recently, maybe six or so years ago on an Intel MacBook before they broke 32-bit, and once again even on modern hardware the game took FOREVER to load.
Maybe this is just my experience? I haven't heard anyone else complain about the terrible load times?
Do you mean the start menu screen where they render a level in the background because why not?
+map_background none
I extremely recommend scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page for this one.
Does anything happen if you throw the can at the cop? Experience was kind of bugging out on me.
Heh doesn’t work on Safari for me.
edit: on iPhone
nice, thanks for the easter egg
Excitedly checks to see whether it has been updated yet to support 64 bit Macs.
Sadly slinks away
Fixes
> Reduced chances of birds getting stuck in the world.
I really think I give it a replay. It was such a great game and truly started a new area of gaming.
It looks like the Mac and Linux ports are now gone
If you tried to pick up the crowbar at the top of the page and were disappointed, scroll all the way down, pick up the portal gun thing, and scroll back up, destroying the whole webpage in the process.
Props to the webmaster (do people still say that?), I love seeing easter eggs like this.
If there is any game worthy of a remaster or remake it's HL2, and all of its episodes. It remains one of my most memorable gaming experiences, and not just because of nostalgia. The story, writing, characters, dialogue, environments, gameplay, graphics, audio... Everything was pretty much revolutionary back then. I remember being awed by the physics in the demo, and couldn't get enough of the gravity gun once I got the game. It was so brilliantly versatile and satisfying to use.
And yet these days we get "remasters" of games that are not even 5 years old. Most of the AAA industry is just putting out lazy cash grabs and predatory live service garbage. Valve itself has profited immensely from the live service business model. I just wish they would get back to development, or sell someone else the rights to their single-player franchises. Spinoffs like HL: Alyx and Aperture Desk Job don't really cut it for me.
Anyways, this update looks alright. I'm looking forward to the new commentary.
In the video doc they talk about the failure to execute on Episode 3 or even a Half Life 3. Has a weird tone to it, the whole thing ends on a depressing note.
As Gabe says, they didn't fulfill their obligation towards their customer and fan base to complete the story. Alyx is cool, but niche.
Oh well, Half Life 3 not confirmed, yet again.
Only three more years until Team Fortress 2 hits a similar milestone. Which is crazy to think about, because I still play it online at least once a week.
Portal will hit 20 years in 2027 as well.
Any idea how much earbuds are worth nowadays? I got the originals for being a first-day mac player, then traded them for some absolute nonsense… rip.
https://backpack.tf/stats/Unique/Earbuds/Tradable/Craftable
8 keys, I guess?
783 keys, rather. $500. Volume looms pretty low though…
Wonder if these bugfixes mean new speedruns?
One of the few mainstream game companies that cares deeply about their legacy and community. Kudos.
Missed the chance to call it “Actinium”
So 3 is soon?
The black bar means someone died. A real computer scientist.
I hope it’s not a legend like ken or something, but it’s not obvious from the front page and #1 is a video game.
Tell me we’re not handing out black bars for anniversaries of software now?
Thomas E. Kurtz of BASIC fame https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42141761
RIP.
Legend.
Direct link to the 20th anniversary documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4
Trying to spend more time doing leisure activities again, so the developer commentary might make a fine excuse to crack this bad boy out again.
Can't wait to see episode 3. There have been some rumors they might be working on it, but I'm not holding my breath anymore.
Haven't most of the old writers left Valve by now?
Kotaku:
> In a new two-hour documentary from Valve, current and former members of the company talk openly about the creation of Half-Life 2 as well as finally spilling the beans on what happened to Episode 3, and even showing gameplay of early prototypes of the canceled game.
The two hour documentary was just uploaded like an hour ago, so presumably nobody has watched it completely yet.
Cool, but do I really feel like buying this game yet again?
Still holding out for HL 3. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's free for the next few days.
Half Life 3 is out, dude. It's titled "Alyx".
I think it might be free at the moment. That's what happened on the HL1 anniversary anyway, so maybe check.
Yeah I'm also saving my $0 for a better investment.
I can double your investment in 24 hours. DM for details.
It’s literally free right now.
This would be an incredible way to stealth-release Episode 3, but I understand at this point it would be impossible for it to be not a disappointment, so I imagine nobody wants to risk trying to make it.
the article is stupidly short and unhelpful and people here still didn't read it
Half life 3 ffs