On November 16, 2004, players finally waited for a new game from Valve. Expectations were overblown, and the company promised nothing but a revolution in the world of video games and first-person shooters in particular. Problematic development, terrible reworking within the studio, conflicts over the game's ideas, technological nuances - it seemed that absolutely everything was in the way for Valve employees and the head of the studio, Gabe Newell, personally. But in the end, the game was released and changed the world forever.
We are talking, of course, about Half-Life 2. The continuation of the story of the silent scientist Gordon Freeman, who found himself in the center of a war between different dimensions, set a high bar for video games in almost all areas. The game itself is still perfectly playable. And in honor of the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, let's recall how the world got this game, what it was like, and what its importance and legacy is.
The beginning of half-life
Of course, we need to start talking about Half-Life 2 with a few words about the first part. After all, it was Half-Life, which was released in 1998, that laid the foundation for Valve's approach to video game development and technology.
Half-Life was the beginning of Gordon Freeman's story and, more importantly, Valve's debut game. The studio was founded by former Microsoft employees Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell. As is often the case with successful tandems, the developers distributed their roles perfectly. Newell was responsible for idealism, ambition, and a constant desire to do something new to surprise everyone. Harrington, on the other hand, was more reserved, looked at the world from a pragmatic angle, and saw the gaming industry as a business that needed to be constantly provided with new products.
During their time at Microsoft, both developers earned enough money to live comfortably. However, they did not have time to quench their internal ambitions. This concerned both the issue of creating his own business and his preferences for video games. The latter was especially true for Newell, who was beginning to feel disillusioned with the first-person shooter genre.
He believed that FPS games were becoming too simple and uninteresting, with shooting and explosions overshadowing other elements.
In Half-Life, it was the story and the unique world that they wanted to bring to the forefront. At the same time, the developers did not intend to sacrifice gameplay for their goals. Quite the contrary, Valve wanted to create a diverse and exciting gameplay that would also reveal the game's story. It's an ambitious idea, but Valve has almost never had any other.
A project of this scale and ambition scared off almost all publishers. Eventually, Sierra On-Line decided to take Half-Life under its wing, as the company was interested in a three-dimensional shooter based on the Quake engine. The game was planned to be released in 1997, but during testing, Valve discovered that Half-Life, with all its interesting technologies and solutions, was simply not fun to play. Therefore, the release was postponed for a year (which reminds us, by the way, that a year of development in 1997 is 3-4 years in the 2020s - ed. note), and the team redesigned absolutely every level.
Around the time of these revisions, another key figure joined Valve, science fiction and horror writer Mark Laidlaw. Given that Half-Life was largely based on the genres in which the writer worked, the choice was as good as it gets. Laidlaw had to make the story of Half-Life more coherent and meaningful. Even though he used traditional scripting methods, it was the combination of time-tested narrative techniques and innovative interactive solutions that the game needed.
"I knew when I joined Valve that nobody was really using the FPS tools for storytelling and this was something the whole team wanted to do, even if they didn’t quite know how. So I helped bring a grab-bag of old storytelling tricks to the new game and level design tricks that the others were pulling out of nowhere. I was in awe of them. It felt to me like I was just borrowing from old standards while they were the ones doing something truly new. But that was fine," Laidlaw used similar words to describe his contribution to the development of Half-Life.
He also admitted that he was simply in the right place at the right time. This phrase, by the way, will become one of the key ones in the Half-Life series script and perfectly describes Gordon Freeman's adventures.
The history of the development of the first Half-Life part deserves a separate large study. The sources of inspiration for Stephen King's The Mist and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, the innovative approach to development that involved centralized control and research of each segment of the game, the almost completely lost production data due to the Visual SourceSafe failure - as with any great work, the emergence of Half-Life is no less interesting than its direct gameplay. We're going to omit almost everything, because that's not why we're here. But if you want, you can learn more from the text The final Hours of Half-Life by the famous game journalist and host of The Game Awards Jeff Keeley.
Most importantly, Half-Life was an incredible success and a revolution in the FPS genre. After it, releasing shooters with a story sewn into a txt file in the game's root folder became a bad taste. Half-Life gave birth to Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic, which would later grow into independent projects with huge popularity. And Valve will be expected to produce only masterpieces that move the video game world forward.
Therefore, in 1999, the development of Half-Life 2 began with the main idea - to surprise everyone again.
A step forward in everything
But first, Gabe Newell had to come to terms with one important change in Valve's life. Mike Harrington, who personally wrote a significant part of the code of the first Half-Life and participated in many business processes, decided to leave the company. The developer wanted to concentrate on his family, and specifically, to go on a trip with his wife Monica on a ship that the couple built for their needs.
Newell trusted Harrington in everything and could discuss any issues with him; he had no other such connection. That's why his friend's retirement was hard for Gabe, but he had no plans to stop. On the other hand, he turned out to be the sole head of Valve, and all processes now came under his full control. So the ambitions of the developer and the entire team grew even more.
"Last time the fact that a bunch of ex-Microsoft operating-systems guys could get together and ship a game--any game--was a cool story," Newell told the team in reference to Half-Life. "This time we have to follow up the best PC game of all time and do it in a way that doesn't completely burn out the entire staff," Gabe Newell describes the beginning of the development.
Valve could quickly release a relatively cheap and easy-to-create sequel. The role of such games was partially taken over by Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift from Gearbox Software. However, Gabe and his team didn't want to waste time.
A team of about 100 specialists, almost $1 million per month of development - the stakes were high for the time. At the same time, Newell tried to treat Valve employees with understanding, did not limit them in time, and provided an almost unlimited budget. He even promised that he would personally finance the development if something went wrong. However, the success of Half-Life helped Valve not to worry about finances once again. At least for a while.
Given that Valve wanted not only to create a game but also to surprise everyone with technology, the development of Half-Life 2 is closely related to the production of its own Source game engine. Experiments with it began back when the first part of Half-Life was created, but the engine entered the full development phase only with the start of work on Half-Life 2.
Creating an innovative game and an equally innovative engine in parallel is an extremely difficult task. That's why Source was not developed from version to version, as this approach also led to backward compatibility and testing problems, but rather in a modular way. Source systems and features are separate modules that can be worked on independently. The modular system was designed to solve the problem of compatibility between different files and versions forever, but in practice, problems still arose regularly. However, fixing all the bugs and errors in Source took significantly less time compared to other engines of the 2000s.
Another key technology that Half-Life 2 was supposed to popularize was the Steam gaming service. At the beginning of the noughties, Valve was looking for a way to deliver games directly to players without the need to cooperate with publishers, disk producers, stores, and other companies like that. Half-Life 2 was the first major game to be released on Steam. The history of Steam's creation was not without its problems: the service caused litigation between Valve and Sierra Studios, and some players could not run Half-Life 2 on release due to problems with file decryption and connection.
But Steam still became the leading PC gaming platform. Already in 2013, Valve's service accounted for about 75% of the entire digital video game distribution market. Since then, various companies have tried to replicate Steam's success by releasing their own game launchers such as Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Connect. However, these attempts did not shake Steam's position, so companies like EA and Ubisoft returned to the practice of releasing their games on the Valve store.
We can talk about Half-Life 2 technologies for a very, very long time, and their echoes or direct application can be easily found today. For example, Half-Life 2 showed the potential of Havok physics processing software. Havok can now be found in many games of The Legend of Zelda level: Breath of the Wild, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End.
Source was also designed to make it easy for mod authors to use. After all, it was thanks to mods that games like Counter-Strike and Sven Co-op, which became a cooperative version of Half-Life, were born. And Valve often invited mod authors to work for them.
However, don't think that Valve used Half-Life 2's groundbreaking technologies only to show off their skills and test players' PCs. Progress in computers and software allowed Valve to take the story of Gordon Freeman to a new level in almost everything. The company has always prioritized the interactivity of the gameplay, which should not be interrupted by cutscenes, and all actions should be performed directly by the player. Half-Life 2 hasn't changed Valve's approach, but has supplemented and diversified it to such a great extent that the game seems to be timeless and stubbornly refuses to become obsolete.
Not all of Valve's ambitions made it to the release version. The game was supposed to feature a jet ski and the Boreas icebreaker, which would become one of the main topics of discussion among fans over the years. Also, in one of the versions, Gordon was supposed to travel to different planets, but the development team decided that this approach would harm the integrity of the narrative.
The final style of Half-Life 2 was strongly influenced by art director Viktor Antonov. He came up with the idea of making the game's setting an Eastern European-style city. Antonov himself was born in Bulgaria, so he is well acquainted with the chosen setting. The team liked the idea, and that's how the city of City 17 appeared, which has already become legendary and in which Ukrainians will definitely be able to see familiar elements common to all of Eastern Europe.
The tightness of the script and the presentation of the story became one of Valve's key priorities. Writer Mark Laidlaw was particularly passionate about them. The Source engine freed up his hands and allowed him to fill the world with more fleshed-out characters rather than mere extras or script tools.
"In Half-Life 1, security guards and scientists could best be described as archetypes, not individuals. They were abstractions of characters that matched the visual fidelity we could achieve at the time. But as our technology improved with Half-Life 2, we saw an opportunity to move beyond abstrations. The increased visual fidelity of the character models, combined with improvements in animation, made us believe we could focus on creating indiviadual characters – people you would actually care about," these are the words Laidlaw used to describe the approach to characters in Half-Life 2.
Again, we can talk about the development of Half-Life 2 for hours. The final months of development alone are worth mentioning, when the team found themselves in extremely tough conditions and worked almost without rest. And yet they still failed to keep their promise of a release date. Gabe Newell has even sworn off making promises about the exact day Valve games will be released.
"I don't think that's ever going to happen again. Gamers should trust us on quality issues, but we've pretty much emptied the account when it comes to trust on release dates," Valve CEO joked in an interview.
But the gaming community still managed to come up with the term "Valve time", which represents the studio's unrestrained promises regarding the release time of games, updates, and everything else. There is even a separate page where all such inconsistencies are recorded.
You can read more about the development of Half-Life 2 in the text The FinalHours of Half-Life 2 by the same Jeff Keeley. There you can read about the leak of an unfinished version of the game, which hit the developers' morale hard, and about the fuss around the announcement and release date, and about the personal ambitions of almost all Valve employees. It's time for us to talk about the game itself.
Welcome to City 17
For Gordon Freeman, who was in stasis between the events of the two Half-Life installments, the games are connected literally seamlessly. From the ending of Half-Life, he jumps straight onto the train that opens Half-Life 2. But in reality, 20 years have passed between the games. And during this time, a lot has changed for the Earth.
The invasion of the Black Mesa research center by aliens from the Xenos dimension was only the beginning of the problems. Nikhilant, who controlled the military forces of Xenos, was also responsible for the gap between his dimension and Earth. When Gordon Freeman killed him, control over the gap disappeared, causing portals to Xenos to appear in different parts of the Earth. The Alliance's multidimensional empire took advantage of the portals to invade Earth. During the Seven Hour War, it managed to establish control over humanity.
Gordon is brought out of stasis by the mysterious G-Man, one of the main mysteries of the entire series. Not knowing anything about the world around him, Freeman must adapt to City 17, home to the Citadel, the Alliance's headquarters on Earth. The scientist quickly becomes a key figure in humanity's uprising against the aliens and the main hope of the Resistance.
The beginning of Half-Life 2 refers to the iconic trolley ride scene from the start of Half-Life. Only if the first part introduced you to the game world and almost all game locations in such an unusual way for its time, the second part immerses you in an unfamiliar setting, in which almost nothing seems to be left of the Half-Life canons.
City 17 impresses from the first shot. It is an ordinary city in terms of architecture and household items that could easily be in real Eastern Europe. However, alien details, full control of the Alliance, and propaganda at every corner make it impossible to forget that the people here are second-class citizens. The Alliance has even installed a special field that suppresses humanity's reproductive abilities.
The city combines the comfort of familiar images, which was not present in the first part of Half-Life, and a constant sense of threat, the all-seeing supervision of the Alliance regime. City 17 has become one of the main modern fictional cities for a reason. It seems to embody everything that people fear and despise about totalitarian regimes.
At its core, Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter, just like its predecessor. But the issue of the variety of game situations in it has reached a fundamentally new level. In one segment, you control monsters, in another, you use the environment against enemies, in the third, you lead a squad of armed rebels, in the fourth, you avoid the sand by jumping on objects on the beach so as not to lure enemies. The game constantly throws up something new, and it's impossible to get bored.
But if I were to try to single out the central feature of Half-Life 2's gameplay, it would be the advanced physics engine. There is a reason why one of the main weapons in the game is a gravity gun. It allows you to manipulate objects around you, attracting them to you or pushing them away with great force. With the gravity gun, you can essentially complete almost the entire game. But even without it, interacting with all kinds of boxes and other objects allows you to customize the gameplay. For example, in one of the segments, you will need to create improvised shelters to prevent enemies from shooting Gordon in a few seconds.
The perfect pacing of the story, in which calm moments with dialogues and exploration are interspersed with action-packed and explosive battles, stylistic variety of locations, an interesting plot, and an unusual setting. Today, it's hard to think of a single significant disadvantage of Half-Life 2. The developers knew exactly what they wanted to tell and how they wanted to tell it.
And all this to the beautiful music of Kelly Bailey, which can be both extremely touching and almost alien and distorted.
Half-Life 2 ends on a high note. The Alliance Governor on Earth is defeated, the Citadel is about to be destroyed. It would seem that the Resistance has won. But G-Man intervenes again, with new "offers of cooperation" for Gordon Freeman. The final credits begin to creep across the screen.
It would seem that Valve has created the perfect stockpile for the third installment, in which Gordon can again be moved to completely new conditions. But the company had other plans.
Episodic system
A long six years passed between the releases of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. This time period can be perceived as more monumental if we remember that the games were released even in different millennia. Valve realized that this is a long time, and the developers wanted to delight players with new video games more often.
That's how the idea for Half-Life 2: Episode One came about, which was released just two years after Half-Life 2, in June 2006. Valve employees had already gotten used to the capabilities of the Source engine, so the release of a smaller game turned out to be useful for them as well. It was relatively easy for Valve to experiment with the technologies they had on hand, while working in a time-tested format. Therefore, instead of developing new tools, the studio focused on the potential of the Source engine.
"Right now, we're really, really good at making Half Life 2. We think our customers want a lot more of Half Life 2. That's what we're going to give them. But we'd just got comfortable with all our tools and what we could do. That's normally the point in which we'd go off and make new tools - we didn't want to do that," game designer Robert Walker commented on the decision to create Half-Life 2: Episode One. By the way, back then the game was called Half-Life 2: Aftermath.
In 2006, the concept of DLC and story add-ons was not yet widespread. The idea of presenting the story in episodes also looked very bold, as Telltale Games was still six years away from the triumph of The Walking Dead: Season One, which popularized episodic video games. So Valve has once again become one of the main innovators in the gaming industry.
Half-Life 2: Episode One starts immediately after the end of Half Life 2. The Citadel's reactor is about to explode, so Gordon and his partner Alix need to urgently flee City 17. To do this, they need to break through the crowds of enemies who have lost their organization without the central control of the Alliance. But Gordon and Alix, who have been through a lot together, are unlikely to be stopped by anything.
Half-Life 2: Episode One puts a lot of emphasis on Alix Vance. In the main Half-Life 2, she was one of the most memorable characters, and in the sequel, she turned into the main character. She constantly accompanies Gordon, helps him in solving puzzles, and covers him in combat segments. To a certain extent, Valve has predicted the future again, as after BioShock Infinite, Gears of War, and Uncharted, sidekicks will be regularly seen in AAA video games. Valve has significantly redesigned Alix's artificial intelligence to make her more like a real person.
"A big focus is Alyx, both from a storytelling perspective and from a gameplay perspective. We really liked her as a character, and the fans did too, so we wanted you to be spending a long time with her, and seeing how far we could push this notion of single player co-op. Being in this world with someone who's operating pretty intelligently and acting more as an ally, rather than this dumb collection of polygons that sort of troops around and gets in your way," Gabe Newell commented on the decision to focus on Alix in Half-Life 2: Episode One.
For Half-Life 2: Episode One, the developers also updated Source, improving lighting, artificial intelligence of enemies, and the facial animation system. That is, even within the framework of the existing engine, Valve had room for progress.
Half-Life 2: Episode One also ends on a high note. The Citadel is finally destroyed, Alix and Gordon escape from City 17, but their train is derailed. They will have to survive in unfamiliar terrain, and the remnants of the alien leaders of the Alliance are not going to sit idly by. The build-up to the sequel was obvious from the start.
But Valve did not hide the fact that it was going to give players more episodes. Specifically, the developers were going to create three episodes within two years, which today, knowing the history of the entire studio, sounds very ridiculous. But the second episode still made it to release.
Half-Life 2: Episode Two was released in October 2007. It was developed in parallel with Half-Life 2: Episode One to make the story of the two games feel coherent and immersive. But with the release of the second episode, an interesting situation has arisen anyway.
The game was released not only as a standalone product on Steam, but also as part of The Orange Box, which also included Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Team Frotress 2, and Portal. Five games, three of which were brand new, fit on one disk at a standard price for the time. It's hard to imagine something like that today, but Valve could afford generous gestures. Especially considering how profitable Team Frotress 2 will become thanks to the addition of customization. In addition, this set, which could be purchased on Steam, became an additional popularizer of the service and the first Steam game for many players.
Half-Life 2: Episode Two focuses on open forest locations, and car travel plays an important role in it. Valve has managed to make Half-Life 2 and its episodes as different games as possible, which is another achievement of the studio. After the previous game, Episode Two feels fresher, more spacious, as if it values the player's freedom more, even given the linearity.
The second episode ends with a radical cliffhanger: the portal to the Alliance world is closed, but in the finale, Alix's father is killed. Gordon and Alix's goal has already been set. It's the Borei icebreaker, the same one that was cut from Half-Life 2. It is supposed to contain weapons capable of repelling the Alliance. Half-Life 2: Episode Three was supposed to be dedicated to the Battleground.
Gabe Newell saw the three episodes of Half-Life 2 as a kind of Half-Life 3. Even from a plot perspective, this approach was justified. In the first Half-Life, Gordon Freeman became G-Man's "contractor" due to his personal qualities, and in the second part, the player used the protagonist's hands to do the will of the mysterious man in the suit and case. And two episodes demonstrate how Freeman gets out of G-Man's control and starts acting on his own. Or at least by the decision of other characters.
The protagonist of Half-Life hasn't said a word in all the games. Here we can speculate about the series' meta-narrative subtext. Think of BioShock, which uses the "mute protagonist" technique to tell the main plot twist of the game and the story of where uncontrolled submission leads. You can easily find similar motifs in Half-Life as well. And Half-Life 2: Episode Three could bring them to their logical conclusion.
Only this did not happen. After all, Half-Life 2: Episode Three was never released, becoming one of the main mysteries of the video game world for a long time.
The mystery of the third episode
It was originally planned that Half-Life 2: Episode Three would be released around Christmas 2007, i.e. in the 20th of December. The game was supposed to complete the story arc of Gordon Freeman, which began in Half-Life 2. At least, that was the idea of the series' chief writer Mark Laidlaw, who was tired of the Half-Life setting at the time.
"I had ideas for Episode 3. They were all supposed to take the series to a point where I could step away from it and leave it to the next generation. I had hoped for a reset between HL2 and Half Life 3 that was as dramatic as the shift between HL1 and HL2. I honestly don’t know if anyone else shared this goal, but it seemed important to me to give ultimate freedom to whoever inherited the series, with my own personal set of loose ends tied up to my satisfaction. Unfortunately, I was not able to do that," Laidlaw commented on his plans to complete the Half-Life 2 story arc in a 2017 interview.
The writer left Valve in 2016. Before that, he managed to work on a canceled VR project in the Half-Life universe about the time-traveling ship Borei. He also consulted the writers of Portal and Dota 2. Moreover, Laidlaw was against the fact that the events of Portal and Half-Life took place in the same universe. In his opinion, this technique reduced the value and scale of each game. The writer's dissatisfaction grew, so the decision to leave the company seemed quite logical.
But what about Half-Life 2: Episode Three? Initially, Valve kept the interest in the game alive with various hints and promises. For example, at one point, it was assumed that the game would be a horror, and at another - that it would feature a key character who communicates in sign language, but the Source engine would be able to decipher it for players. Then there were rumors that the developers had abandoned the episodic format in order to release something large-scale again. Dreams about Half-Life 2: Episode Three turned into even more powerful fantasies about a full-fledged Half-Life 3. Only Valve itself seems to have completely forgotten about the game.
Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2 shifted Valve's attention to online games. The experience of Half-Life episodes helped the studio to support multiplayer projects and constantly provide them with new content. However, Half-Life was gradually fading into the background. The game that was once called the best in history began to disappear from the discussions of the gaming community. Half-Life 3 turned into a meme and something unreal.
And then, in 2020, something almost unthinkable happened. Valve released a new installment of Half-Life. Only this was not the third part, but a prequel about Alyx with the laconic name Half-Life: Alyx. It also turned out to be exclusive to virtual reality.
But don't let the emphasis on VR confuse you. Yes, it limited the number of people who could play, because VR helmets have not yet become widespread. But still, Half-Life: Alyx is probably the best game for virtual reality. Not a techno-demo or something limited, but a full-fledged adventure of Alyx in City 17. Which also ended with a very loud moment, because in the finale, Alyx moves forward in time and saves her father, thereby canceling the ending of Half-Life 2: Episode Two. For this, she becomes a hostage of G-Man, but her father and Gordon Freeman are now determined to rescue her.
Half-Life: Alyx became a reason to return to talks about Half-Life 3, but Valve, in its typical manner, continued to keep a mysterious silence. Occasionally, hints of Half-Life 3 still appear, but they no longer cause the same excitement. The Half-Life brand, unfortunately, has lost its former power.
For the 20th anniversary of Half-Life, Valve itself started talking about Episode Three, and Gabe Newell personally. In a documentary about the development of Half-Life 2, he and other developers shared details of the canceled episode. It turns out that Valve could have returned to Episode Three after the release of Left 4 Dead and completed the game in about two years. The developers just couldn't figure out why they needed to do it.
"You can't be lazy and just say, 'Oh, we're moving the story forward. That means you're shirking your promises to the players. Of course, they loved the story. They loved many aspects of it. But to say that you are making a new game just because people want to know what happens next - we could have released it, no problem at all. The failure, my personal failure, was that I was stumped. I couldn't see how Half-Life 2: Episode Three was going to move anything forward," Gabe Newell said about the cancellation of Half-Life 2: Episode Three.
At the same time, there is still hope for a sequel. Only now Valve will need to turn the gaming industry around again and show everyone how to make monumental games. It's an almost impossible task, but for some reason, I don't want to doubt Valve once again. Too often the studio has surprised everyone.
Heritage
Even if the modern player hasn't played Half-Life 2, its influence on the gaming industry and pop culture in general has been enormous. After it, shooters and games with an emphasis on storytelling changed a lot. After all, it was necessary to make projects, if not better, which is quite difficult, then at least not fundamentally worse.
The Source engine has opened up huge potential for developers in a wide variety of genres. But the main one, of course, was first-person adventures. Thanks to Source, we got the following great games.
Garry's Mod. "Sandbox, which allows you to interact with Source rules and objects in an accessible format. It has spawned other popular games and modes, such as Prop Hunt, in which you need to turn into objects and hide on the map.
E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy. A unique cyberpunk story with a world that has no analogues in 2024.
Dear Esther. One of the founders and popularizers of the walking simulator genre.
The Stanley Parable. A parody game that ridicules standard narrative principles, freedom of choice in games, and many other stereotypes of the entertainment industry.
Titanfall, Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends also appeared thanks to Source. Respawn Entertainment took Valve's engine as a basis and then radically reworked it to suit its needs.
Developers around the world have also borrowed many of the principles of interactive storytelling from Half-Life 2. While the "mute protagonist" technique may still be questionable, the emphasis on the player's complete control over all events in the game is only to be respected. Half-Life 2 set the trend for interactive environments and to some extent even led to the emergence, if not the significant development, of the immersive sim genre.
The modding community is also very fond of Half-Life 2. All kinds of mods for Half-Life 2 are regularly released to this day. Some mods are extremely non-standard. Silent Hill: Alchemilla, as the name implies, tells the original story of Silent Hill, and Too Many Crates! is an unusual adventure in which you need to find and destroy all the hidden boxes. Thanks to modifications, you can play Half-Life 2 almost endlessly.
The speedrunner community also fell in love with Half-Life 2. The features of the game engine and its physics allow you to actively experiment with high-speed passing. Speedrunning in Half-Life 2 is a separate sport, with leaders constantly changing. But it is equally enjoyable to watch anyway.
Interestingly, Half-Life 2 did not spawn a large number of clone games, as is often the case with successful projects like Diablo or Grand Theft Auto III. Perhaps it's the quality of the game that is unattainable for many developers. Or the huge respect that Valve enjoys among other studios and publishers.
In the first-person shooter genre, nothing like Half-Life 2 has ever come out. More complex games from the system point of view have evolved into immersive sims like Prey (2017), but there are not so many of them either. And fun, meaty shooters like Doom Eternal and Wolfenstein: The New Order cannot boast of the variety that Half-Life 2 had. It's amazing how a game from 2004 can still offer so much to its genre brethren. Another proof of how unique and inimitable Valve's work is.
Valve and 20 years of Half-Life 2
Valve could not ignore such an event as the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2. Unfortunately, there was no announcement of new games. But even the existing "gifts" are enough to please every fan of the series.
One of the main ones was a documentary about the creation of Half-Life 2, which, to be honest, helped a lot in writing this text. It contains a lot of interesting information, including footage from the canceled Half-Life 2: Episode Three. A real treasure for both Half-Life fans and people interested in video game development.
Half-Life 2 itself has also been updated on Steam. Two episodes are now contained within the game, although they were previously separate add-ons. So now you can see the story of Gordon Freeman in City 17 in a completely seamless way.
But that's not all. The game has added developer commentaries that players loved in Episode One and Episode Two, updated graphics, fixed bugs that have persisted in Half-Life 2 for years, and added Steam's built-in support for modifications. The developers managed to give the gaming community the perfect moment to return to Half-Life 2 - or try it for the first time.
And if Valve's graphical innovations didn't surprise you, you can try the advanced version of Half-Life 2 RTX. In it, you will find ray tracing support, updated assemblies, and graphics of a level that will squeeze all the juice out of your video card.
The gifts don't end there. A complete list of changes, innovations, and nice little things can be found on a special website created in honor of the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2. The site is a pleasure even just to browse, as it contains several Easter eggs that will delight fans.
The fans themselves, by the way, did not sit idle either, and did not forget about the memorable date. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2, Icebreaker Industries released Project Borealis: Prologue. This is a prologue to a fan game that will try to recreate the events of the third episode based on Laidlaw's story. It is interesting that the game is based on Unreal Engine, even if it imitates the style of Source.
In addition, the developers made Half-Life 2 temporarily free and the game's fans set a record for the project with 64 thousand players online at the same time.
This already huge text could have become even bigger if we had delved deeper into the details of Half-Life 2's development, release, and impact on the world. After all, almost all of the facts related to Half-Life 2 are worthy of attention in one way or another. For example, how Half-Life 2 and the Source engine influenced the modern horror culture. Or how Alix's father's appearance came about thanks to a homeless man who was looking for any job and was eventually spotted by one of Valve's employees. Or about the offshoot Half-Life 2 by Arkane Studios. This is, without exaggeration, a legendary game, without which the modern world would be completely different.
Have you played Half-Life 2 and its episodes? What do you think of Valve, both modern and at the peak of Half-Life development? Do you still believe in Half-Life 3? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments!