My entire weekend has consisted of Half Life 2. I played a good 5 hours and watched the entire 2 hour documentary.
The anniversary update is quite subtle in terms of actual noticeable changes but it’s all very welcoming. The new lighting, fog and increased view distance give the game a slight visual upgrade without compromising the artistic qualities. Including the episodes and Lost Coast are very awesome as well, as you can play through the main game and two episodes under one save.
The Workshop is still brand new so there aren’t many uploads yet but I played through a few. First thing I noticed is how many reuploads of old great HL2 mods there are. This is awesome as it gives players an incredibly simple way to access them. No longer are you needing to go to ModDB or GameBanana to download mods and extract them to the installation folder, now you can download and install mods instantly even while in game. I saw the incredible MINERVA mod from 2012 on there, highly recommended if you’re into HL2 mods. Gameplay wise, it’s smooth as ever. Obvious for a 20 year old game, but it does feel buttery smooth in a way other games don’t.
It was making me a bit sentimental while playing HL2. In many ways, Source engine games formed a huge part of my adolescence. The textures, character models, lines of dialogue, the grand overall look and feel of the Source engine is so engrained into my psyche, so much a part of who I am today, that it felt like revisiting an old friend you haven’t talked to in years. I was looking back at old achievements I got, and seeing the ones I’ve unlocked in 2010, it was making me think, “what did my life look at that point? What was my gaming setup like?”. Given I was still a teenager at that point it’s really not that deep, but it is still fun to think back to the exact location I sat in, the room I was in and what it looked like, and what was going on in my life at that specific moment in time. “What sort of thoughts and feelings did I experience the first time the Combine told me to pick up that can? How did I react to first getting the gravity gun?”.
The documentary was incredibly well made as well. They went through almost the entire story of the development starting with what happened after they shipped the first Half Life. We’ve heard some of the bits and pieces like Valve getting hacked and their build leaking online, to how they picked random people off the street to model their iconic characters, but there was a lot more that was incredibly interesting. A lot of talk about the design philosophy and how they created certain moments as well. Of course the “ice gun” and Borealis talk were all exciting.
One tidbit that was really interesting to me was about the AI, one of the devs says how it’s really easy to make AI be able to hit you with pinpoint accuracy, but the hard part is making them believable. They explained how if there is a group of more than two Combine after you, only two are allowed to shoot at a time, and the rest need to find something else to do while they “wait their turn” to shoot. This can be seen all throughout the entire game. It never leads you to think “why aren’t they all shooting?”, but instead it makes for firefights to feel more realistic and better choreographed.
Man, I have a lot to say about HL2. I could keep going but this post is already super long. I love HL2 to death, this update is fantastic, and I recommend everyone to play it again or for the first time. There has never been a better time to play this incredible game. If you’ve already played HL2 and are a big fan of the game and Valve, I highly recommend watching the documentary first then playing the game. It gives me tons more insight into the game and has allowed me to appreciate it better in a new light.
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