Half-Life 2 News

Valve's Steam page currently lists a second mystery game alongside Deadlock, sending Half-Life 3 theorists into another frenzy of speculation

The Half-Life 3 speculation mill has been running hot over the last few months. G-Man's voice actor Mike Shapiro rang in the new year by posting a video in which he refers to "unexpected surprises" in the staggering voice of Half-Life's dimension-hopping villain. Before that, evidence that Valve was working on a "Project White Sands" was revealed on an actor's website—White Sands referring to an area of New Mexico where Black Mesa was supposedly situated...
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If you missed it over the holidays, this noir Half-Life 2 mod turns you into a hardboiled detective in Prohibition-era Chicago

Hear me out. Let's say instead of violent nerd Gordon Freeman wasting alien invaders in City 17, Half-Life 2 was actually about a gritty hardboiled detective fighting corruption in Prohibition-era Chicago. That's the concept behind The Burton Equation, a Half-Life 2 mod you may have missed because it came out on Steam between Christmas and New Year's...
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A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'

The PC gaming icon that is Half-Life 2 recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, and Valve pulled out all the stops with a major new update integrating the game with its episodes and adding a commentary track. The studio also released a two-hour documentary about the making of the game and what was going on at Valve during its development, which is absolutely crammed with fascinating digressions about the challenge it set itself. And one of them was lighting...
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Galactically petty Half-Life 2 modders ban 'anticitizens' who criticised their mod by targeting their Steam IDs, leave the proof visible in code: 'Script kiddies vibes from this lmao'

In an act of incredibly targeted pettiness, the developers behind a Half-Life 2 mod that's been available since 2022 have managed to ban a select group of YouTubers from playing the latest version of their work. The mod in question, Half-Life 2: Overcharged, is an "overhaul modification" that adds new enemies and weapons as well as restoring some cut content, promising new ways to play and so on (thanks, RPS)...
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'Stop talking s*** about us' - Half-Life 2 mod blacklists a handful of YouTubers as 'anticitizens' and blocks them from playing

There is some spiteful drama in the Half-Life modding scene this week. The developers of a heavily criticised mod for Half-Life 2 are intentionally blocking a small number of YouTubers from playing that mod, using Steam IDs to effectively blacklist and ban specific people from running it. Instead of launching the game as expected, these players will see the first-person shooter crash, alongside an error message that reads: "STOP talking SH1T about us". This is an act of revenge for previous criticism of the mod, say the affected videofolks, who are described in the mod's code as "anticitizens".