Valve has been holding on to a special surprise for Half-Life 2 fans to celebrate the game crossing its 20th birthday. Today, the company shipped the 20th Anniversary Update for the iconic Gordon Freeman adventure from 2004, combining the base experience and all episodes into one, bringing developer commentary, Steam Workshop support, and much more. Adding to all that, the game is completely free to claim on Steam right now too.
↫ Pulasthi Ariyasinghe at NeoWin
Valve even made a nice web page with fun animated characters for it (they’re just video loops). Definitely a nice surprise for those of us who’ve already played the game a million times, and for those of us who haven’t yet for some reason and can now claim the game for free. This update also fixes some more bugs, adds a ton of new graphics settings, allows you to choose between different styles for certain visual effects, aim assist for controller users has been massively updated, and so much more. For a 20 year old game, such a free update is not something that happens very often, so good on Valve for doing this.
I can barely believe it’s been 20 years, and that we still have no conclusion or even continuation to the story that so abruptly ended with Episode Two. I honestly doubt we’ll ever going to see a Half-Life 3 or even an Episode Three, simply because at this point the expectations would be so bonkers high there’s no way Valve could meet them. On top of that, why waste time, money, and possibly reputation and goodwill on Half-Life 3, when you can just sit on the couch and watch the Steam gravy train roll into the station?
Because that’s a hell of a lot of gravy.