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(Image credit: Valve)
Lovely! Except perhaps if you’re a Half-Life 2 speedrunner, one of those freewheeling souls who’s long ago stopped seeing the G-Man and looks at City 17 like the Matrix, pinballing the Freeman from checkpoint to checkpoint on Valve’s hidden flippers. It turns out that, when improving everything, Valve’s current designers added an invisible wall to a large sewer pipe. And speedrunners promptly started slamming right into it.
And what use is that to a speedrunner? Someone at Valve clearly noticed the disquiet because, a few days later, an update for Half-Life 2 reverted this fix with a direct nod to the reason why: “Removed collision from an underwater tube that speed runners enjoy.”
The weirdest thing about this is that Valve’s original fix was legit. It seems obvious in the context of the 360 version that this invisible wall should’ve been in the PC version of the game, and the fact it wasn’t until now was an oversight on Valve’s part. But I suppose the unforeseen consequences were judged to have merit in their own right.
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There are, however, a few consolation prizes. Witness the delight of changes to “d3_c17_05” where “the door which the player is meant to use to enter a building has been made into a hole instead and significantly widened, making being fast a lot easier. Additionally, the floor texture in the apartments was changed from concrete to normal floor tiles. Makes sense!”
Half-Life 2 is not unusual among popular speedrunning games in having a community that splits over which exact version of the title is being used. The most popular era for Half-Life 2 seems to be the versions that existed just over a decade ago.
“We do primarily use older builds, most often ones from 2012-2013, especially at the top level,” speedrunner “Peng”, a HL2 world record holder,told RockPaperShotgun. “But at least I do find it unfortunate that we’re missing out on some of the new changes, as some actually benefit speedrunners…”
The main thing with the anniversary update for us mere mortals is the wealth of Half-Life 2 material that came alongside it. Valve ’s documentary serves as both of a making of the game and a time capsule of an era where Valve wasn’t yet Valve:No-one thought Steam would work, Testers were going stir-crazy andplaying with gnomes to make their 47th runthrough more bearable, and for the first time we get some real insight into what went onwith the unshipped Half-Life 2: Episode 3.
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