Original Half-Life gets new patch 19 years after release, probably has nothing to do with a Half-Life 3

By Sherif Saed

The first Half-Life, the one released in 1998, has received a new small update out of the blue.

The patch was made available on Steam last night, and it fixes a few issues that I honestly don’t remember if they were a big deal back in the day.

Curiously, some of the patch notes address problems that occur when using the developer console and other files that mods often rely on. This could be Valve’s way of indirectly making life easier for certain mods, though it’s hard to think of any that require the original Half-Life rather than the sequels.

You’ll also notice that most fixes come with thank yous for the community members who identified the problems. Here are the patch notes:

• Fixed crash when entering certain malformed strings into the game console. Thanks to Marshal Webb from BackConnect, Inc for reporting this.
• Fixed crash when loading a specially crafted malformed BSP file. Thanks to Grant Hernandez (@Digital_Cold) for reporting this.
• Fixed malformed SAV files allowing arbitrary files to be written into the game folder. Thanks to Vsevolod Saj for reporting this.
• Fixed a crash when quickly changing weapons that are consumable. Thanks to Sam Vanheer for reporting this.
• Fixed crash when setting custom decals

The rational among you will think this has nothing to do with whether or not Valve is ramping up work on a Half-Life sequel, seeing as the patch was made to address specific problems. However, without thorough datamining of every file in the update, we can’t say for sure.

Someone inevitably will though, and when they do, you’ll hear about it here.