Also I highly recommend Black Mesa, which is the remake of HL1 in the HL2 engine. The Xen levels went from what they were to possibly some of my favorite levels in the game, and the music scoring is top-notch. It feels great to play.

I think they are also merging Ep1 and Ep2 together into HL2 now and have gradual progression of HL2 to E1 and then to E2. I just browsed my Steam game library and can't find separate copies of E1 and E2 there because of being merged with HL2.

Inside the trash can is the garden gnome from episode 2.

Also try playing with the can and the trash bin.

So if I already own HL2, that means I'd automatically be able to access those sequels / episodes?

That's pretty much exactly the logic that got me to buy a Valve Index + Half Life Alyx and it was totally worth it. VR turned out to be cooler than I expected and both the game and the Index were just so satisfyingly well-executed. It's nice to have products which clearly had far more attention to detail and quality than was economically necessary. It's clearly the result of a different philosophy than I've seen at most tech companies.

I had the same experience with the Steam Deck: just very well done, including side things like the case that came with the device. I've grown used to accessories bundled with electronics ranging from basically garbage to okay (but not great), while Valve's case was as good as I'd expect from a high-end third-party product.

My theory is that there's a period when a studio has huge early success (plus in the case of Valve, they started with huge amounts of money from being former MS employees) that lets them devote themselves to their mission of making games, before either mission creep or dilution with new hires occurs over time either from staff naturally changing over time or expanding. Another factor is that when aiming to 'go big' and realize what they can do with lots of resources, they need to partner/join with others that don't work the same way and will influence them.

From 1995, Blizzard released one of the best games of all time every year for a decade (if you count expansions, which, for that time, you should). I don't think anything like that can happen again until we invent a new medium.

I’ve been following Larian trying to build a game of their dreams since early 2000s. It’s been immensely satisfying to see they finally succeed and achieve the popularity they deserved with the release of BG3.

I also highly recommend Divinity OS 1 and 2 for the same level of dedication to every single detail and free post-launch support, even if they didn’t have such an enormous blockbuster budget behind them.

Is it possibly because you were much younger back then and thus likely less jaded? I hear of people even back then who for example hated Microsoft with a burning passion, who were already older, even as today their image has been largely rehabilitated among many young devs.

> Not a single company has my loyalty anymore.

FromSoft

Public companies are slaves to the shareholders

Same here when the Raising the Bar reprint releases. I never managed to get the first edition, so I'm beyond excited they decided to make a second one after all this time. And as a fan, I need to have it.

I will buy the next few games by Larian Stuidios after BG3 no matter what they are

Bethesda is the saddest example.

I've played through HL2 and its expansions so many times as a kind of meditative relaxation thing I couldn't tell you how many times.

I could never get used to Ravenholm though. Thinking about it even now years later stresses me out a tad.

8:54 Holy shit I don't even know one could do something like that, jumping back to the room and hide in complete safety, very smart.

Also, at 0:30, turning off that living place hazard is very kind of you. And you also saved Bob and Jim from being cut in half by doing that. Father Grigori might not like it, but he's crazy too.

I watched the whole thing. Impressive!

Heh I like the 'pascifist' angle.

> gems such as one of the commentators having their entire section skipped by the speedrunner

The day that dev looked at player time-location heatmaps, investigated outliers, and then cried...

That was hilarious, thank you

It should work in Wine, although I haven't tested this update yet.

(disclaimer: I work for CodeWeavers, we sell CrossOver which should be a great and easy way to play)

edit: tested out the 20th anniversary update on M2 Pro, it works great!

I just installed* it. It run well, although I don’t recommend playing it with a Magic Mouse.

* I first installed Whisky, a Wine/Game Porting toolkit/app thingy (https://getwhisky.app). Then I installed Steam for Windows inside Whisky, then downloaded HL2. The download was a little bit hiccup-y, but it worked. Testplay of HL2 was great, apart from the mouse.

Are these new windows releases also 64 bit or still 32 bit?

For a while their stated reason was that they felt they couldn’t live up to the hype and the gaming community was too toxic and would have crucified them for it. True or not, I can see why they’d think that.

However it’s also worth noting that they were spending that time on other projects making them likely even more money. HL3 isn’t going to have live service or esports applications that make money like their other games do. It probably won’t be a big earner compared to those other games.

Valve are also a privately held company and the rumour is the top people there are crazy rich, and even those further down the ladder earn a lot more than they would elsewhere. They don’t need HL3.

The documentary on this page does explain why they didn't make it, at the very end (it's half the section on the HL2 episodes).

In short, they started working on episode 3, and made it about the point where the game development progresses from "here's demos of what could be set pieces in the episode" to putting together the sketch of the game narrative [1] when the developers were pulled to crunch for Left 4 Dead. After Left 4 Dead released, Gabe felt the window for an HL2e3 had closed, so it would be HL3 instead... and that because HL1 and HL2 had both heralded genre shifts, HL3 needed something to push that shift as well. But there weren't any such ideas for that shift (except maybe VR, which hasn't exactly panned out), and Gabe also felt that releasing a HL3 just to complete the story wouldn't cut it, so it never got made.

Which pretty much matches everybody's speculation for the past decade.

[1] About 18-24 months away from being releasable at that point, to give a sense of how far from complete it was.

I doubt it'd be the guaranteed best seller you think. Most people spending a ton of money on video games weren't cognizant when HL2 came out. And those that were have been burned before/changed and would probably need to see raving reviews to be that interested.

Portal 3 seems like the easy money grab. That had more lasting pop culture relevance, and "it's more Portal" would be enough for a bunch of people to buy it.

As everyone pointed out there’s lots of reasons Valve as a company hasn’t done it, but also the corner they wrote themselves into of convoluted story telling, everything about it was headed toward being a mess and unsatisfying. It’s almost better to be left undone so that nobody has to take responsibility for trying to tie all this randomly assembled stuff together

Half-Life: Alyx is as close as we got

For what it's worth, I never even wanted Half-Life 3. I just wanted Episode 3, which was what they originally promised. It didn't need to be some gigantic groundbreaking thing, just another episode to finish off the story.

They already make 7.76 bajillion dollars every hour from Steam, they don’t need to make anything for money.

Half-Life 3 would not align with Valve’s long-term focus on monopolising PC distribution, skins, microtransactions, and innovative hardware tech (hence Half-Life: Alyx instead of HL3)

I guess they could, if not flat structure and billion-dollar yachts and what else is there.

Gabe Newell speaks about it in the documentary. Here's an article about it: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/16/24298091/gabe-newell-hal...

Basically, they wanted more than just simply finishing the story, they wanted to make some cool new features, similarly to what HL2 was compared to HL1.

I thought the guy who was in charge of writing the story left, and published the plot for HL3 as a thinly veiled short story.

they made several money printers with cs and dota boxes

Because they live off the misery of others.

Does anything happen if you throw the can at the cop? Experience was kind of bugging out on me.

Heh doesn’t work on Safari for me.

edit: on iPhone

nice, thanks for the easter egg

I don't think dual core was that rare in 2007. Conroe was released the year before. For gamers, dual core was the standard at that point (at least from what I remember of the time).

Do you mean the start menu screen where they render a level in the background because why not?

  +map_background none

This was my experience too. IIRC they raytrace the lightmaps for the whole map on demand during loading instead of baking them ahead of time. But I might be misremembering

They already upgraded the game a couple of times since release. A big one was the Linux port which also saw many changes to the Windows version.

Regressions do happen which is why they opened a (public) bug tracker at the time, which is still in use: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Source-1-Games/issues

If you have any HL2 issues, now is probably a good time to get them fixed before the developers responsible for the update get bored and move to another project.

Valve can't count to 3!

Any idea how much earbuds are worth nowadays? I got the originals for being a first-day mac player, then traded them for some absolute nonsense… rip.

Portal will hit 20 years in 2027 as well.

HL1 is also good for a hobby, if not better. There are open-source alternatives to the engine and better editors, and the off-steam community still delivers!

Yeah, nope. But you can run it in CrossOver/Wine.

The Mac port seems to be missing, but the updated HL2 definitely has Linux support.

It's a bit dated now, but at the time it was revolutionary. A bit like the genre-defining movies such as Star Wars, the Matrix, or Terminator 2.

It's hard to put a finger on it, but it was a combination of a truly imaginative setting on-par with a decent science fiction movie or novel and the "show, don't tell" style of proper world-building. It presented a uniquely interesting dystopia, discoverable through a game instead of a movie or book.

I think it was one of the first games I played that was dark. For example, the "police" are cybernetically enhanced, but in a disturbing way ("transhuman"). The low-ranked troopers "just" have permanently worn facemasks a bit like Darth Vader, with an implication that they may not be functional without them. The higher-ranked shock troops have increasing levels of augmentations until some have only a single central "eye" in their visor. You shudder to think what's hidden underneath.

It was revolutionary when it came out due to its physics engine, character facial animations, graphics, and most of all it had a captivating story and great gameplay.

Kotaku:

> In a new two-hour documentary from Valve, current and former members of the company talk openly about the creation of Half-Life 2 as well as finally spilling the beans on what happened to Episode 3, and even showing gameplay of early prototypes of the canceled game.

The two hour documentary was just uploaded like an hour ago, so presumably nobody has watched it completely yet.

Haven't most of the old writers left Valve by now?

I think it might be free at the moment. That's what happened on the HL1 anniversary anyway, so maybe check.

It's free for the next few days.

Half Life 3 is out, dude. It's titled "Alyx".

Yeah I'm also saving my $0 for a better investment.

It’s literally free right now.

> pick up the portal gun thing

Didn't play Half Life 2 I gather?

Thomas E. Kurtz of BASIC fame https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42141761