Half Life 2 is Free on Steam
(store.steampowered.com)
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Supposed to include Episode 1 & 2 from the site update, grab it by the 18th for free and go crowbar some combine skulls.
Funny story about Half Life 2. When it first came out my friend drove to the store to buy it and I started downloading the pirate copy on Kazaa at the same time. Because of the technical issues when steam was first released I was playing the game before he was.
Valve knew what they were doing. They wanted to live off of rent, not make games. Half-Life 2 was the killer app to bring people into the Steam ecosystem.
Well Steam lives rent free in our brains as the first choice for PC gaming. So they won.
It's actually been losing that status for me. As I grow older I look to the future and to the inevitability of the platform being enshittified once Gaben kicks the bucket. Now I buy games on GoG because I value an actual installation executable more highly than the conveniences Steam offers.
They recently kicked off some sort of game preservation initiative, which might just be some clever marketing but I'll be glad if it continues gaining traction and becomes an industry standard practice: https://www.gog.com/en/gog-preservation-program
Can you imagine? Full Software Lifecycle support for decades old games in perpetuity? It sounds like a dream.
Amen to this. Gabe has earned my trust. But that man ain't healthy. If a game is available on GoG and doesn't have a strong dependence on the steam workshop, then I get it there instead.
Not that you’re wrong—and of course having the executable is what’s relevant when it comes to purchases you’re making now—but I’m also worried about GoG’s future long term. They are owned by CDPR, and we all know how that company is going….
Agreed.
Gogs filled with the woke too and their games aren't exactly preserved either.
You mean Counter Strike. It was the game that got me hooked on it.
Forcing people to use steam to play CS and other games did that just as much.
Is this Valve's way of announcing that they're finally come out with Half Life 3?
I’d say waiting over a decade then releasing a prequel is a sign the story will never continue.
God dammit now you just delayed it another year.
HL: Alyx is probably the closest thing we will ever get to a HL3.
HL2 RTX is coming soon, but I found Portal RTX was shit even on my new high-end rig (i9, RTX 4090) so I wonder if that will be any good.
Answer is no. Lightning was part of the visual design of the game. It will look somehow bad compared to the originally crafted look. It would be as dissonant as adding some reshader thing that oversaturates all colors.
RTX of older games is a tech demo, not an improvement.
Jesus will return before Gordon does.
Thanks for the heads up.
That's not what the last week of porting data out of my old rig and into the new one suggests...
I dread the day I will retrieve the old computer at my parent's house and try to do something to salvage what's on it. Lots of nice old games. Almost unplayable in the state the computer is in.
Takes ages to boot, takes ages to respond to any request. Full of bugs. Was used by parents who click ''YES I WANT TO DOWNLOAD MORE RAM TO MAKE MY PC FASTER'' adds and install everything.
Just cloning the disk on an SSD would fix nearly all the ''drag its feet for everything'', but I have to open the thing first to see if it's compatible with an SSD, and which gen.
And it would still be packed with Internet STDs. But it would be usable.
Is that the game Skibidi Toilet is based off of?
Yes!
Cool. Never played it. Need to check it out
I should get my wife an account. I've had this since Steam was started and ugly green.
If you play all the way through to the end of EP2, try not to get too upset at the cliffhanger. Us old school guys who played this at release have come to acceptance that there will be no EP3, and so should you.
The original HL, Opposing Force & Blue Shift are all on sale 85-90% so it's about a buck each. Half-Life 1: Source is not, oddly enough.
GoldSource HL is superior to HL: Source anyway. They took the gibs away.
Black Mesa sounds like the modern HL to go for anyways.
It's a nice game, but the original has its charm.
I played original HL1 for the 1st time a few yrs ago (I had tried playing it long ago but got stuck early on and stopped) and honestly I found it to be extremely overrated.
Will give HL2 a chance at some point though.
hahahah.
I guess that would happen. Like watching an old movie classic. Still, it's pretty good for what it is.
If you have a question about this game, the answer is yes.
Yes, yes, yes. You should play.
Never played it. Downloading now.
copped. thanks.
THANK YOU! I was already going to buy it cheap on Black Friday or Christmas because I plan to play the franchise next year. You just saved me some money.
Yay, an unfinished game.
So you got me curious, and I'm now looking at what the Steam store offers for free for Half-Life. But the thing is that I never played either the first or the second one, so I'm not sure what I should be getting. If I wanted to properly experience this series, which ones should I download, or in which order should I play them? The options are:
"Half-Life: Caged", "Half-Life: Restored", "Half-Life: Before", "Half-Life - The Freeman Chronicles"
At least, for Half-Life 2, it's more straightforward. The only options I can see are: "Half-Life 2: Downfall", and "Half-Life 2: Update". All the rest of the options seem to be soundtracks, demos or plungers. But the first one's options just make it confusing.
Edit: Oh. Seems that all of those were just "partial matches" and there was an "exact match" above that with the actual game. But that still confuses me a bit. Does it mean that everything I mentioned above are DLCs or patches?
Mods, and a fan video (there was a time were steam were seeming to look into hosting movies videos, you can find some of that on the store as a legacy stuff i guess).
There is only the orginal half life series
Which started with the Half life, then come the stand alone expansions Blue Shift and Opposing Force and then Half life 2 with it's stand alone expansions Episode one and two.
You got a remake of Half life called Black Mesa not made by valve.
You can play Half life 2 without knowing the first one, although some refs will go missed, but nothing of grand importance.
HL2: Update is a sort of remaster by a fan. It has updated lighting and some bug fixes as I recall. I played it a long time ago, its the original game just with improvements to the visuals.
I remember spending the first hour of the campaign just throwing bottles at NPC's. I also remember how much fun HL2:DM was; all everyone wanted to do was launch furniture at each other.
Gabe.. do hl2 episode 3. before you die. If it sucks, we wont blame you. Honestly. Why the hell are they making something like deadlock. But like most game companies, most of the good devs are gone. However, seems the work culture at steam seems better than most game companies.
Half-Life redacted confirmed!