Half-Life 2 is available for free on Steam

Valve is giving away the full Half-Life 2 experience for free on Steam this weekend

If you have never played Half-life 2, now’s a great time to play this classic FPS. Valve has released their 20th anniversary update for Half-Life 2 on Steam, and to celebrate, the company has made the game available for free on Steam until November 18th.

Now, Half-Life 2 contains the content of the game’s Episode 1 and Episode 2 expansions. Additionally, the game now includes Steam Workshop support, giving players access to a wealth of mods, and entirely new campaigns from community creators.

With the game’s new 20th anniversary update, Half-Life 2 now features a range of visual improvements. For starters, the game now has better support for high-resolution displays. Furthermore, the game’s shadows have been improved, and radial fog has been added to the game. Further changes have been made to deliver better support for ultra-wide displays and fix several graphical bugs.

If you want to redeem your free copy of Half-Life 2, all you need to do is log into Steam and grab the game here. Note that Valve’s other Half-Life games are heavily discounted on Steam to celebrate Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary. Not only are Valve’s Half-Life games discounted, but also fan-made Half-Life games like BLACK MESA (the fan remake of Half-Life) have heavy discounts.

rrr

If you redeem a free copy of Half-Life 2 now, you will be able to play Orbifold Studios’ Half Life 2 RTX mod when it releases on Steam.

You can join the discussion on Half-Life 2 being available for free on Steam on the OC3D Forums.

Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update

New Content

• Added 3.5 hours of Developer Commentary by members of the Half-Life 2 team.
• Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two are now playable from the Half-Life 2 main menu.
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast has been added to the Extras menu.
• Added Steam Workshop support. Play entire campaigns or replace weapons, enemies, UI, and more with content created by the community.
• Added custom Steam Game Recording gameplay events and phases throughout the game.

Rendering and Graphics

• Fixed issues causing props or entire maps to be fully bright or fully dark depending on settings.
• Added bicubic filtering for lightmaps to produce smoother shadows. Note that this is enabled by setting Shader Detail to Very High.
• Fixed missing grass detail sprites in many maps.
• Added settings to enable Classic Effects that were originally in Half-Life 2. These effects can also be enabled using r_classic_blood or r_classic_fire.
• Added support for radial fog.
• Specular reflectivity has been adjusted throughout Half-Life 2 to better match the original release.
• Updated models for the Crossbow and RPG weapons to support ultrawide displays.
• Fixed camera clipping into vehicles at high FOV settings.
• Fixed lambda cache indicators and other decals vanishing when backtracking through map transitions.
• Setting Model Detail to High will now always display the highest detail version of a model and never swap for a lower level-of-detail.
• Set Antialiasing to 4x MSAA by default.
• Fixed teeth shader rendering fully white on some GPUs.