Last year, Valve brought the original development team back together for a 20th anniversary Half-Life 2 update. It integrated the post-launch episodes, added a new developer commentary track, brought in Steam Workshop support, and added a heap of map and gameplay updates. All of which was great—except for one progress-blocking bug it introduced to the Entanglement level.
Near the end of Entanglement there’s a setpiece where you use turrets to defend Alyx while she resets a teleporter, then jump in with her to escape the waves of Combine soldiers flooding in. Which worked fine, until the anniversary edition. Possibly as a result of said update fixing an existing bug that could make the teleporter leave early, a new bug meant that sometimes you wouldn’t be able to enter the teleporter after Alyx—and if you raced to get inside first, she wouldn’t follow you.
Inventive solutions to this problem involved jumping onto Alyx’s head, perhaps by dropping a grenade at your feet or leaping off one of the turrets. Now, you won’t have to do either—or open up the console and mess around with cheats—as the latest patch should have the sequence working as intended once again. It also prevents enemies from being able to shoot through some of the level’s walls.
The other change in this update is a tweak to the train setpiece on Highway 17. Where originally, when faced with an oncoming train while driving the buggy, you had a choice between reversing the hell out of there or flooring it and escaping through a gap between it and another train (or dismounting the vehicle entirely, if you’re a buggy-hater). Winning the race became much harder when the muscle-car physics from Episode Two were retroactively applied to the buggy.
This one wasn’t actually down to the anniversary update, but an earlier patch. If you played Half-Life 2 at release you probably found it easy to beat the train, but after it was patched you needed to be on-point with your boosting to stand a chance. Now Valve has “Restored speed of the train near the end of Highway 17 to better match the original shipped difficulty.”
I think Half-Life 2 is still one of the best first-person shooters around, though whether that’s because it’s a timeless classic or because it’s all been downhill since then is a matter of how cynical I feel on any given day. Still, nice to have an excuse to replay it again.
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