Home / Gaming News & Opinions / Valve is Fixing Half-Life Bugs, 20 Years After Original Launch

Valve is Fixing Half-Life Bugs, 20 Years After Original Launch

Last Updated September 23, 2020 1:07 PM
Thomas Bardwell
Last Updated September 23, 2020 1:07 PM

Here’s an oddity; Valve has updated  Half-Life with a slew of fixes and updates 20 years after the game’s release.

Half-Life Fixes and Updates

The update, which was pushed out late yesterday over on Steam, includes some pretty underwhelming changes, but ones that should nevertheless improve the experience for the, on average, 300 to 400 players who dive back into the Black Mesa Research Facility daily.

Those figures are pretty steady too. In the last 24 hours alone, over 450 people played  Half-Life, and you’d be hard pressed to find a Steam account holder that doesn’t have the game in their library. Not bad for a game that launched back in Nov. 1998.

The changes include a handful of security fixes, a resolution to a weapon reloading bug that surfaced when players jumped into a save game, multiplayer rejigs, and a few technical changes linked to monitor refresh rates and texture re-scaling among seventeen total changes.

Valve Is Fixing Bugs, 20 Years After Half-Life Release
Source: Half-Life/Valve

The Franchise Gets Some Love

Valve has seemingly been throwing some love towards the franchise as of late. Half-Life 2’s glaring unblinking NPC bug finally received  a fix late last month. As for Half-Life, the latest patch dates back relatively recently to April of this year.

If anything, it’s a testament to just how seminal Half-Life is the pantheon of gaming history and how the legacy of arguably Valve’s greatest feat reverberates to this day.

Half-Life 3, Please

The big question is with resources to spare on patching up two-decade-old games and pushing out sweeping Steam updates, why doesn’t Valve just given in and work on the game everyone wants, Half-Life 3?

It’s wishful thinking, we know. But, it’s that kind of blind hope that spurs on a dedicated community of expectant Half-Life fans.

Every time Valve proffers up any news, regardless of whether it’s a patch that reads like a toaster’s technical manual or something more substantial, there’s a sense that one day, maybe, Half-Life 3 will be a reality.