Half-Life 2 News

The week that changed PC gaming forever

People were excited in 2004. The most anticipated PC game there had ever been was on its way. Half-Life 2’s predecessor had shaken up the game industry to a degree that even the last 25 years of hyperbole in the game press hasn’t quite got across. It was like someone had just flipped a switch: one minute there were only Doom clones and stifled yawns, the next, everyone was doing set-pieces, real-time storytelling, and turrets. Valve’s FPS was so good that we were even happy to play the bad impressions of it...
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Half-Life 2 RTX is real, beautiful, and coming soon

Half-Life 2 RTX is on the way, and it's already evoking the same feelings of awe I had simply looking at the now-classic Valve FPS game almost 20 years ago. Featuring ray tracing, modernized assets, and more, this is the closest we'll likely ever get to a full Half-Life 2 remake.

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Half-Life 2 getting a modern makeover with Ray Tracing, DLSS 3, Reflex and RTX IO

Half-Life 2 is getting some revamped visuals thanks to modders using Nvidia's RTX Remix.

The RTX Community Project is remastering the title, dubbed Half-Life 2 RTX, and it's in development with four of Half-Life 2's top mod teams.

Using RTX Remix, Half-Life 2 RTX will feature full ray tracing, DLSS 3, Reflex, and RTX IO in a similar vein to Portal, which was given the RTX treatment last year.

Nvidia are making an early start on their Gamescom announcements, which include the reveal of Half-Life 2 RTX. This incoming mod for the seminal 2004 FPS will, in the style of Portal with RTX, rejig the original game with modern technical goodies like ray tracing, updated environmental details, and Nvidia Reflex support. DLSS will also be on hand to absorb the inevitably mahoosive performance hit from bouncing all those rays around, and that includes DLSS 3, provided you have a compatible graphics card.

It’s being developed by a collective of experienced HL2 modders, Orbifold Studios, without direct input from Valve. No release date yet, as Half-Life 2 RTX – or to use its full name, Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project – is still in the early stages. There is a teaser trailer, though.

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are already pretty frightening. In the original Valve classic, it's the subaquatic ichthyosaur that seriously brings the scares, with that buggy movement and the way it glitches into the camera. Half-Life 2 meanwhile could easily feature among the best horror games of the last 20 years. The fast zombies. The black headcrabs. That part in HL2 Episode Two where you're crawling through the Antlion nest. Yeesh. But now the adventures of Gordon Freeman have gotten even more terrifying, with a new Half-Life horror experience where you play as a Combine researcher, exploring the ruins of Black Mesa.