Fifteen years after its launch, Valve has fixed NPCs not blinking in the legendary Half-Life 2 (and its assorted sequel games).
And that’s not all! Valve has also fixed missing sounds on Combine soldiers, a hitch when saving games, and SteamVR running when entering the settings menu. The update is for Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, and Half-Life: Source. Basically, all official Half-Life 2 products.
Half-Life 2‘s NPCs have struggled to blink for five years after Valve moved all the Source engine games to the SteamPipe contribution distribution system. The move is why NPCs across all the Half-Life 2s were affected, so at least they haven’t been experiencing dry-eye for the full fifteen years.
It’s nice to see evidence that Valve is actually doing work on a game or two (Artifact? What’s that?), though, obviously, Half-Life 3 is not in the pipeline. Needless to say, enjoy this funny little story while it lasts, because we’re not going to see much more game news out of Valve for a while.
