The first Half-Life is temporarily free and offers brand new official content – INDIAN

Many things have been said about Valve Studios in recent years. Maybe he doesn’t suffer much for any anniversaries and that mostly pretends Half-Life doesn’t exist. Yes, we got the great VR shooter Half-Life: Alyx and with it a promise that the studio wanted to return to the famous series starring Gordon Freeman, but somehow we didn’t notice anyone actually trying to follow through on it. Until now.

No, we still don’t have a Half-Life 3 announcement. But even so, we just don’t recognize Valve. First Half-Life namely, he is celebrating his 25th birthday and not only did the developers remember the anniversary, but in addition, in connection with it, they offered a surprisingly comprehensive update. 25th Anniversary Update, as the update is officially called, adds to the main menu, for example option to run Half-Life: Uplinksomething between a standalone single-player mini-campaign and a demo version that was originally only available on CD for print magazines and hardware manufacturers.

Multiplayer has received a lot of care. Developers from Valve have created 4 brand new maps called Contamination, Pool Party, Disposal and Rocket Frenzy. The Half-Life: Further Data CD, which was once available in brick-and-mortar video game stores for a change, then brings back the Double Cross, Rust Mill and Xen DM maps, as well as multiplayer skeleton skins and a bizarre figure called Too Much Coffee Man . The newly added sprays also come from the Further Data disc.

Fans of lost, deleted or overwritten content should also get their money’s worth. The 25th Anniversary Update also brings the original appearance of the main menu, the original intro with the Valve logo and the characters of Ivan the Space Baker and the grown-up Proto-Barney, which can be used as skins in multiplayer. Originally, these characters came from the early alpha versions of the game.

To top it all off, the update adds full Steam Deck support, proper support for gamepads and Steam Networking, or new graphics features that make Half-Life look like 1998 even on modern monitors. These include the ability to turn off texture smoothing within the GL renderer, lighting fixes including the long-lost GL Overbright support, software rendering on Linux, a wide-angle field of view, or the UI scaling feature at higher image resolutions.

And if for some reason you’ve never bought Half-Life in those 25 years, firstly ask your conscience and think about what you’re spending your money on. For one thing, you’d better burn it on Steam right away. Half-Life is available free of charge until 11/20/19:00. If you add the game to your library, as usual, it will stay there forever. So that everyone can really try the new update and remember one of the best and most influential shooters of all time.

Finally, we have something for fans and veterans. If the 25th Anniversary Update doesn’t feel like enough of a celebration of the first Half-Life’s 25th birthday, you can also play a new official documentary in which the original creators from Valve reminisce about Half-Life as the studio’s first game in the space of an hour.

Behind the documentary is the group Secret Tape, which he leads Danny O’Dwyer, the head of the successful YouTube channel Noclip, which in recent years has offered us a number of quality documentaries and behind-the-scenes views from the gaming world. Even the film focusing on Valve’s original is therefore worth watching.