Half-Life 2 Anniversary Update Irritated Speedrunners, but Valve Came to Their Rescue
Half-Life 2 spoiled players with an update for the 20th anniversary of its release, but speedrunners had reason to complain. Fortunately, for a short time.
Valve has removed one fix from the anniversary update to Half-Life 2, which irritated speedrunners.
The patch for the 20th anniversary of the release of the second chapter of Gordon Freeman's story brought a lot of changes, which fans of the cult series welcomed with open arms. Especially since the update integrated both episodes with the "base" and made new documentary materials and information available about the history of the creation of the second Half-Life.
Barrel climbing through the canals
However, one group of players was irritated by an apparently minor change. In the third chapter of HL 2, players must solve a simple puzzle: Gordon must open a valve to raise the water level, which will allow him to reach another pipe and continue his journey through the sewers.
However, speedrunners had a much faster way of doing that. They simply took a barrel with them and used a technique called wall climbing to "climb" up the wall with the help of the barrel to the very top and from there they jumped into the pipe. Just a typical unusual glitch that saves a lot of precious seconds for players trying to break the record (via SourceRun Wiki).
Old glitch and new-old hotfix
What is interesting, however, is that only the PC version allowed for such skip. In the Xbox version, the entrance to the channel was blocked by an invisible wall - and this change was also introduced by the anniversary Half-Life 2 update.
We could argue that this shouldn't be a major problem for speedrunners. The original version of the game is still available on Steam as a beta version, so those willing to beat old records can still use this shortcut.
However, Peng, the current record holder, stated that while it is true that most of the speedruns are done on old versions of HL 2 (mostly from 2012-2013), the community gathered around this type of challenge is also eager to check out the anniversary edition of the game. This introduces a lot of other changes that can help speedrunners complete the game even faster (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun).
Valve is helping speedrunners
Clearly, Valve agreed with these opinions. The latest hotfix for Half-Life 2 removed the invisible wall that was blocking the entrance to the pipe in the 3rd chapter of the game. The announcement on Steam explicitly stated that this glitch "was liked by speedrunners."
Besides, the new patch mainly consists of updates to files for various language versions and minor improvements. These include adding a slider to adjust the sensitivity of gamepad sticks and the possibility to display the name of the campaign from the Steam Workshop on the friends list.
More:Half-Life 2 RTX Improves More Than Just Lighting; Remaster Will Avoid Mistakes of Portal RTX
