Half-Life 2’s twentieth Anniversary replace has sparked a brand new concurrent participant rely report on Steam.
Valve’s influential shooter hit a peak concurrent participant rely of 64,222 over the weekend after the studio launched an upgraded expertise with new options alongside a documentary that exposed gameplay of the canceled Episode 3. It helps that Half-Life 2 additionally went ‘free to maintain’ till at the moment, November 18.
Half-Life 2 launched on November 16, 2004, a 12 months after Steam itself. Public information for the sport’s concurrent participant rely solely start in September 2008, in response to SteamDB, so we don’t know what number of performed Half-Life 2 at launch 20 years in the past. However we do know that at no level since September 2008 has Half-Life 2 been as widespread on Steam as it’s now. Half-Life 2’s earlier recorded finest was 16,101 in August 2021 after a neighborhood occasion sparked a resurgence of curiosity.
The anniversary replace means Half-Life 2 now consists of the whole Episode One and Episode Two expansions together with the bottom recreation. They’re accessible from the principle menu, and also you robotically advance to the following enlargement after finishing each.
There’s additionally a brand new Builders Commentary for the Half-Life 2 base recreation, after Valve acquired the crew again to report three-and-a-half hours of recent behind-the-scenes commentary.
Maybe most fun is built-in Steam Workshop help, which lets gamers browse, set up, and play user-created content material for Half-Life 2 with out ever leaving the sport. In the meantime, there are bug fixes and new graphics choices that allow gamers push the visible constancy of Half-Life 2 additional than was allowed within the authentic launch.
All these updates, the documentary and its related headlines, and the ‘free to maintain’ provide have mixed to spice up curiosity in all issues Half-Life 2, and ship 1000’s of gamers into Metropolis 17 to combat again in opposition to the Mix.
The query now’s, will Valve lastly observe it up with Half-Life 3?
Wesley is the UK Information Editor for IGN. Discover him on Twitter at @wyp100. You may attain Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.