Valve celebrates 25 years of Half-Life with feature-packed Steam update

Enlarge / It’s been a while since I’ve seen some of those once-ubiquitous logos… (credit: Valve)

This Sunday, November 19, makes a full 25 years since the original Half-Life first hit (pre-Steam) store shelves. To celebrate the anniversary, Valve has uploaded a feature-packed “25th anniversary update” to the game on Steam, and made the title free to keep if you pick it up this weekend.

Valve’s 25th Anniversary Update page details a bevy of new and modernized features added to the classic first-person shooter, including:

Four new multiplayer maps that “push the limits of what’s possible in the Half-Life engine”
New graphics settings, including support for a widescreen field-of-view on modern monitors and OpenGL Overbright lighting (still no official ray-tracing support, though—leave that to the modders)
“Proper gamepad config out of the box” (so dust off that Gravis Gamepad Pro)
Steam networking support for easier multiplayer setup
“Verified” support for Steam Deck play (“We failed super hard” on the first verification attempt, Valve writes)
Proper UI scaling for resolutions up to 3840×1600
Multiplayer balancing updates (because 25 years hasn’t been enough to perfect the meta)
New entity limits that allow mod makers to build more complex mods
A full software renderer for the Linux version of the game
Various bug fixes
“Removed the now very unnecessary ‘Low video quality. Helps with slower video cards’ setting”