Half-Life 2 Is Free to Grab for the 20th Anniversary; GabeN Talks About Episode Three

Valve’s Half-Life 2 has just reached its 20th anniversary (we muse on its significance and that of other games released in that incredible month here). To celebrate the achievement, the developer is giving away free copies of the title (along with Episodes One and Two) until later today. You can get the game and its expansions by visiting the respective page on Steam, which can be done via the link here.

Valve has also uploaded a 20th anniversary documentary, which reveals many interesting tidbits about the game’s making. Perhaps even more interesting, though, is Gabe Newell’s explanation of why Half-Life 2 Episode Three was never released.

You can’t get lazy and say, oh, we’re moving the story forward. That’s copping out of your obligation to gamers. Of course they love the story. They love many aspects of it, but saying that your reason to do it is because people want to know what happens next… You know, we could have shipped it. It wouldn’t have been that hard. My personal failure was being stumped. I couldn’t figure out why doing Half-Life 2 Episode Three was pushing anything forward.

I think that Half-Life represents a tool we have and promises made to customers to capitalize on innovation and opportunities to build game experiences that haven’t been involved previously, and I think that there are no shortages of those opportunities facing us as an industry.

Moreover, Valve pushed out a minor title update for Half-Life 2. The patch mainly focuses on quality improvements, along with subtle graphical changes. Here’s the complete changelog:

• Fixed pops, holes in the world, fading-out and disappearing objects across the game.
• Rebalanced the lighting across Half-Life 2 to account for playing with HDR on or off, using the original release as reference.
• Cleaner, smoother horizon lines thanks to new radial fog!
• Added higher-resolution lightmaps across the game!
• Removed green glow from the G-Man model’s eyes in the opening of the game, and restored the reflective glint as seen in the original release.
• Fixed missing grass sprites and blacked-out models throughout the game!

Updated Graphics Settings

• Choose either the original launch day blood and fire effects, or those created for the episodes, when playing the Half-Life 2 base game!
• Play with only the highest detail models in High Quality mode!
• Get smoother lightmap shadows at Very High shader detail, thanks to new bicubic lightmap filtering!