Over two decades ago on 19 November 1998, the original Half-Life released and the game hasn’t seen any updates in quite a while. Now, Valve has decided to deploy an update to the original Half-Life on Steam. We won’t blame you if you are wondering what is going on with Valve updating the classic FPS title in 2019, especially when you consider Valve also updated Half-Life 2 late last month, fixing a five-year-old NPC blinking issue. Half-Life 3 confirmed?
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The update notes have been revealed on Steam, fixing several bugs including the “inability to reload a partially empty weapon after reloading a save game” as well as several other bugs. Further, speedrunners might be a bit disappointed with the update, as NPC turning speed while playing the game at a lower FPS has been fixed. NPCs turning slower meant that they could open doors faster, cutting precious seconds off the speedrun time.
Check out the full notes for the Half-Life update below. Note that many of these fixes have also been deployed for Opposing Forces, CS 1.6 and Team Fortress Classic.
- Fixed setting monitor refresh rates through -freq when used with -nofbo
- Fixed unnecessary texture rescaling with NPOT textures
- Fixed slist command, will now show servers on the local network
- Fixed erroneous return in SV_ClipToLinks (HL #1685)
- Fixed inability to reload a partially empty weapon after reloading a save game
- Fixed MP5 spread factor, multiplayer factor was being used for single player and single player for multiplayer
- Fixed progress bar for individual files in resource download always showing at 100%
- Added auto-saving of several cvars (HL #2237)
- Fixed missing localizations in spectator UI
- Fixed NPC turn rate when running at >60FPS
- Reordered columns in server browser to prevent game descriptions from being used to fake server player count
- Fixed sv_cheats from being settable by players in a multiplayer game (sv_cheats is controllable by the server)
- Added cl_autowepswitch cvar with values 0/1 to disable/enable auto weapon switching when a new weapon is picked up
- Fix various weapon animation/sound issues
- Security fixes to console commands
- Security fixes to resource loading
- Security fixes to saving/loading
It is a bit strange to see Valve deploying a Half-Life update after all this time and one can’t help but wonder why and if this is the start of something like Half-Life remasters. According to SteamCharts, the game only averaged 344 players per day in the last month, so it’s not as if a lot of players have been playing the classic FPS.
Keep in mind that this update was released on 9 October. 9 divided by 3 is 3. There are 3 months left in the year. Half-Life 3 confirmed?
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Do you think there is anything more to the Half-Life update by Valve on Steam? Let us know in the comment section below.
