Valve Releases Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update

[Developer12]

"I thought for a whole five minutes about it, and could not come up with a solution for this problem, so it won't ever happen!"
C'mon, it is not that hard to imagine how Valve's provisions look like.

There is nothing stopping Valve from releasing a Steam client which does not require connection to Steam servers. In fact this is how in case of bankruptcy, Valve could ensure that people can still play their games.

Then additionally set aside funds for prepaid hosting of the game files for one year and traffic costs for (game size * number of owners), and everyone is covered with all their games.

Could do, or they could just be like GoG and not use DRM in the first place. But they don't. And they won't.

[Developer12]

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam#Valve

Half-Life 2 is one of the DRM-free games on Steam, there are thousands of them. You know nothing.

And how are you going to install these games when the steam servers shut down?

[rabcor]

Supposedly, there's something relates to half-life currently in development.Might be HL3, might be a sequel to HL:Alyx, who knows. Honestly, I'm more hoping for a new official Portal game, but sadly there doesn't seem to be any publicly-visible movement in that regard. I guess the upcoming Portal: Desolation fan game will have to fill in, though that is also a ways out. AHHHH I JUST WANT GAME but I know they need time to cook but AHHHH I JUST WANT GAME

there were i think plans to make hl3 and portal 3 the same game at some point, it would be interesting to see them mixed.

[Jabberwocky]

Awesome! More studios should do this.

Not enough gets said about this these days. When HL2 came out it was a big deal that the only way to play it was putting up with DRM. (Except on consoles like the 360, though I could be wrong?) If you bought a boxed copy, all those CDs it came with were useless frisbees without an internet connection and a copy of steam.

VALVe have made some vague references to an "emergency plan" or "contingency" to enable.........something, who knows what. If the company suddenly died overnight I doubt you'd be able to install the games anymore like you can with a downloaded GOG archive, and considering the shitpile that is Steam's "offline mode" I doubt you'd be able to play most of the already-installed ones for very long either.

If we're honest, all those mumblings were a total fairytale being spun by VALVe to mollify steam buyers and keep them buying, without worrying about whether there was an end-of-life plan.

I won't ever forget the day we loaded multiple CRTs into an old broken small car and drove to someone's office to download HL2. I still had 56k dial-up.

You're right initially the CDs made the downloads smaller but it became useless after the first few updates.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam#Valve

Half-Life 2 is one of the DRM-free games on Steam, there are thousands of them. You know nothing.

Welcome to Phoronix.

I'm not sure if this is true for HL2 multiplayer even when on LAN. It's still cool to be able to play it if Valve servers vanish but you will still miss some features.

If you're someone like me who enjoys half-life co-op then it's a showstopper. I'm sure it's fine for most people though. I actually played it earlier this year with some kids. I just had to show them half-life and playing on their own would have been too difficult or boring for most of this specific group (GenZ / GenAlpha).

[Developer12]

Why not allow offline play? It's a disease of the ages and even valve is infected.

Valve basically INVENTED online-only DRM. Steam is and always has been.

When steam came out everyone had a shitfit over how it was DRM. The only reason people use Steam at all is because Valve made it mandatory to play Half Life 2. Even if you bought a "physical copy" in a store, those 4 CDs were useless frisbees unless you installed steam and let it call home.

[QwertyChouskie]

Half Life 3 when?

Supposedly, there's something relates to half-life currently in development.Might be HL3, might be a sequel to HL:Alyx, who knows. Honestly, I'm more hoping for a new official Portal game, but sadly there doesn't seem to be any publicly-visible movement in that regard. I guess the upcoming Portal: Desolation fan game will have to fill in, though that is also a ways out. AHHHH I JUST WANT GAME but I know they need time to cook but AHHHH I JUST WANT GAME

[TheLexMachine]

Half Life 3 when?

Whenever they decide to finish the game they have or do a new one, for VR, which hasn't and never will, catch on. They have a working version of HL3, in their company network, but it's just not finished. The reason we never got it years ago, is because they felt the game was nothing innovative and they decided to abandon it for L4D.

[ssokolow]

Its not a bad approach. Though an issue with what your friend does is that if he pays for the game, how does the publisher know that he does not approve of the DRM? I feel it would be better to damage them financially by not purchasing it. It is a hard one because (some) of the team I do want to reward financially for their efforts. Even purchasing art books and other merchandise doesn't seem to make the correct statement. Perhaps normalizing paypal'ing random key developers directly?

It's not about sending a message for him. It's about reconciling his sense of morals (pay for what he plays) with his desire to maintain agency over what he plays (no DRM).

I'm the one who refuses to financially endorse their behaviour by sticking to games I can buy DRM-free from somewhere like GOG.com... or at least as eBay'd pre-2005 CDs or DVDs that Alcohol 52% Free Edition or Alcohol 120% Retro Edition can image and either that or CDemu can mount on a PC with no Internet access. (Preferrably the former, since that helps to send a message that there's money to be made by publishing on GOG.com.)

I spent a lot of time back in the day working on various steam.dll cracks and also some of Valve's open-source projects on GitHub, as well as maintaining some FreeBSD ports of various Valve development tools for FreeBSD, so I feel I "gave back" to the community over the years, just not the developers unfortunately. Weirdly I spent longer (and enjoying) doing that than any actual game I was going to play.

Reminds me of how I seem to spend more time (and get more fun out of) setting up my my retro-hobby PCs and "game console except not a console"s than actually playing games on them.

(What's my favourite classic Mac OS game? It's called "How pretty can I make /srv/retro look when viewed via Netatalk and AppleShare?" :P ...now that I've more or less given every folder a custom icon and made sure the HFS Creator/Type codes stored in POSIX Extended Attributes are all correct, I'm thinking I'll start to add descriptions to all the .sit, .bin, and .hqx files using ResEdit and my recent discovery of how Finder lets files have custom Balloon Help text. Heck, given how often I'm going to repeat that task, maybe a quick little "Set balloon help for this file" utility will be my first non-tutorial project as I work through Programming Starter Kit for Macintosh.)

[FireBurn]

Did they update lost coast too?

[L_A_G]

Found myself playing it for a few hours yesterday. Still as good as I remember, but like Black Mesa* its got inconsistent frame pacing, even with vsync enabled, and that always makes me queasy a few hours in.

*Fan-made, Valve approved, remake of the original Half-Life in the Source engine