The Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update includes the Episode One and Episode Two expansions, so they are now in the main menu and you automatically go to the next expansion when you finish one of them. It also adds support for the Steam Workshop, while Valve's level designers have revised all Half-Life 2 maps to fix old bugs, restore content and features, and improve the quality of things like lightmap resolution. and the fog. Additionally, updated graphical options have been added, including playing only with higher-detail models in high-quality mode or very high-level shading with bicubic filtering.
The news continues with the update of the controller controls to coincide with the anniversary update of the first Half-Life, a renewal of the aiming aid so that it is more comfortable to use and can be configured, while the main menu of the game for Steam Deck has been updated.
Regarding the documentary with interviews with the Half-Life 2 development team, it is a work of Secret Tape, the same ones who made the Half-Life 25th anniversary documentary. «It's a story that goes beyond the creation of a game: running out of money, hacking and the leak of the first version on the Internet, lawsuits from the publisher, trying to create Steam… It's all there!» he says Valve. In addition, videos of old demos such as the one from E3 2002 have been rescuedE3 2003 y SIGGRAPH 2000.
In the documentary several developers talk about Episode 3. The Half-Life 2 team stopped working on this expansion to help in the development of Left 4 Dead and the project was abandoned. Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, assures that they could have finished Episode 3, but that doing so just to conclude the story would not have been the right thing to do, since in his opinion players should be offered something more. Newell admits that he got stuck and didn't find anything in Episode 3 to move the game forward. It seems that a new enemy as well as an ice gun capable of freezing enemies, building barriers and creating ramps to run on them as if the player were the Silver Surfer, were not enough.
Finally, Valve has announced that it will reissue the illustrated book Raising the Bar. The second edition concludes the story of the development of Half-Life 2, with previously unpublished concept art for Episode One and Episode Two, as well as ideas and experiments for the third episode.