This past weekend saw the celebration of the 20th Anniversary of one of the greatest story-driven shooters of all time, Half Life 2, and with it came a free price tag for the weekend, a new documentary and a whole bunch of new updates to the game. All the episodes are now neatly packaged as one, meaning you can seamlessly play the whole game and expansions in one go, graphics got slightly updated and of course plenty of bug fixes.
The documentary too showed a lot of interesting things, including the reasoning why Episode 3 never came out. Turns out, the team helped work on Left 4 Dead, and then after it released they felt as though the time window for releasing the next game passed them by. For now, they have stated the next Half Life game will only come when they feel a significant technological leap requires a new game to be released, and until then Mr Freeman will remain on ice. We did get some very early footage of work in progress stuff with Episode 3 though, that was cool!
In the end though this celebration feels a bit bittersweet as now we know that not much is happening in the world of Half Life and the reasoning doesn’t help us feel better that we are still stuck on a cliffhanger. I guess we will just have to wait and see if Valve eventually decides to come back and show off how one of the best shooter franchises got to be known as such. That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.