Yesterday, Half-Life 2 received a 20th Anniversary Update on Steam, bundling content from the graphics demo expansion Lost Coast, as well as Episodes One and Two. This content was made free to claim until November 18. For other contents of The Orange Box bundle, which still includes all these titles standalone for certain mods, as well as Portal and Team Fortress 2, the entire bundle can be bought for just $1.99 until November 22.
Most Half-Life 2 mod support will now be rolled directly into the main game alongside the Episode One and Two expansions, including all the Achievements once included with those formerly standalone titles. While The Orange Box bundle still consists of the standalone for Half-Life 2 expansions, these store pages are now delisted in search results, and the standalone executables are now moved to the “Tools” section of Steam games.
This Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update does more than streamline expansion support, though— Half-Life 2 has been fully overhauled within the constraints of its original engine, seeing all Half-Life 2 content updated to the level of Lost Coast’s fidelity or better and even getting deeper integration with modern Steam features including Game Recording event markers.
Besides the updates to and past Lost Coast’s fidelity level, including the addition of a Source engine HDR pass to every map, the biggest signs that this is a 20th Anniversary update are the addition of a new High Quality mode that renders all models at full-quality LODs regardless of distance and bicubic filtering, which enables smooth shadows when Very High shader detail is enabled.
For those unfamiliar, “HDR” in the context of the Source Engine doesn’t refer to modern-day DisplayHDR (though you can still experience that when playing this update if you’re playing on a display and version…
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