Half-Life 2 News

Valve prepares Half-Life 2 for the Steam Deck with its largest patch in over 10 years

There are fewer video game series more important than Half-Life, particularly when it comes to PC gaming. While the first game challenged perceptions of the importance of narrative within FPS games, Half-Life 2 pushed the best graphics cards and best gaming CPUs of its era with never before seen heights of visual fidelity and its innovative physics engine. It also ushered in a new era of PC gaming with the Steam platform. Now, 17 years later, Valve has updated its classic title with its biggest patch in over 10 years.

As highlighted by YouTuber Tyler McVicker, a new beta branch is now available to download via the game's beta tab in Steam. While there are currently no official patch notes for this version of Half-Life 2, numerous technical improvements have already been quickly discerned.

The game's HUD now scales with the selected rendering resolution, having been previously locked, resulting in larger elements on aspect ratios outside 4:3. There's also support for ultrawide resolutions, with an FOV ceiling of 110 that is enabled without having to modify DLL files.

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Valve quietly updates Half-Life 2 with increased FOV, ultrawide support and ancient bug fixes

Half-Life 2 has seen a few small, minor updates over the years. But in advance of Valve's new handheld PC, the company has spruced up their seminal shooter with a major beta update to ensure it looks as smooth as possible on not just the Steam Deck, but all other contemporary PCs...
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Half-Life 2 and the episodes get a Beta with Vulkan (DXVK) and more

Valve has put up a Beta for Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two as they prepare more of their own games ready for the Steam Deck.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/10/half-life-2-and-the-episodes-get-a-beta-with-vulkan-dxvk-and-more

Half-Life 2 community rallies to break its peak player count for reasons

The Half-Life 2 community has rallied together to smash the peak concurrent player count record for one of the best FPSs ever made, pushing the total from a dismal 6,882 to over 16K - which is certainly a lot more respectable. Why did the community do this? To see if it could be done, it seems.

The Half-Life 2 'Breaking the Bar' event was organised by fan community Lambda Generation, which wanted to see if the fans could push Half-Life 2's concurrent player count peak up from the low 6,882 it appeared on SteamDB. It seems they succeeded in even beating the all-time peak of 12,953 players from 10 years ago. The new record stands at a much more respectable 16,101.

The problem with Half-Life 2's records is that the game pre-dates most of Steam's tracking features, as it was the title that Steam launched with in the most bare-boned state imaginable. By the time Steam had begun tracking things like concurrent player counts, most people had already finished Half-Life 2.

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Half-Life 2 community gets highest amount of concurrent players since literal records began

In an event called "Breaking the Bar", the Half-Life community decided to rally together and get as many concurrent players together as possible. The rules were simple: starting at 3pm UTC, everyone who wanted to take part simply had to run (and ideally play) Half-Life 2, while prominent streamers would be playing the game to raise attention. The reasoning is maybe a little more ambiguous, but sometimes you simply have to rally behind something—and they did it, hitting a peak of 16,101 concurrent players at exactly 3.30pm, with an additional 8,630 viewers on Twitch...
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