Half-Life 2 Gets Its Biggest Update In Over 10 Years For Steam Deck

Half-Life 2 was released in 2004 and hasn’t had many updates for it in a long while. However, 17 years after, Valve Corporation has released its largest update for the game in over a decade for the company’s upcoming handheld console, Steam Deck. Half-Life 2 is one of the most important games to come out in the history of PC gaming and the company is taking it very seriously.

With it, Half-Life 2 brought one the finest demonstrations of visual quality and in-game physics that challenged even the most high-end CPUs and GPUs at the time. Still, the game, while still receiving updates to this day, hasn’t had a game-changing update in a while; that is, until now. As highlighted by Tyler McVicker in one of his most recent videos on YouTube, Valve Corporation has secretly released a beta update for Half-Life 2, which can be downloaded through the game’s beta tab in Steam.

The new beta update supposedly introduces many bug fixes that have remained unresolved for over a decade, an increase in the FoV cap to 110, and support for ultra-wide resolutions. However, the feature that stands out the most is the support for Vulkan API, which means that the game can now run much better on Linux-based operating systems, such as SteamOS 3.0.

Back in February, Valve Corporation added support for Vulkan API to its 2011 puzzle-platform game, Portal 2, and Tyler McVicker says that we can expect the company to bring back most of its previous games to work well on the upcoming Steam Deck. The beta update for Half-Life 2 isn’t ready to be released just yet, as there are still some micro-stuttering issues with the current version. However, you can try the beta update out yourself through Steam.

Valve Corporation has been taking the release of its upcoming handheld console very seriously and has already started planning an iteration to the Steam Deck. With LinusTechTips and even Phil Spencer, the Head of Xbox, commending the handheld console for its performance and optimisations, we’re very anxious to see what the company has come up with to compete in the handheld console market.

What do you think about this? Do tell us your opinions in the comments below!

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