Half-Life 2 RTX’s HEV Suit Has 34x More Polygons Than the Original; RTX Remix Update Adds DLSS 3 Support

What’s in a name? There are a lot of video game titles that just evoke memories or conjure up the idea of quality. Half-Life is just one example. However, Valve’s first-ever game could easily have been called something else.

Since its 2020 reveal at the Game Awards, the still untitled Mass Effect 5 has been shrouded in mystery. The cryptic reveal teaser, showing a familiar character exploring a frozen wasteland, ended with the words, "Mass Effect will continue." It's been almost three years since its initial reveal, and following N7 Day this week, we got another mystery teaser introducing a mysterious new character sporting a jacket with the familiar N7 logo on it. Fans immediately went on to speculate about the new video. However, Michael Gamble, the new Mass Effect's current director, told fans that a lot of work went into the original teaser from 2020 and suggested that not all of it had been decoded quite yet.

Dario Casali, who started working at Valve in 1996, has started his own playthrough of the original 1998 Half-Life on YouTube (thanks, Gamesradar). The episodes are coming out at a blistering pace, with Chapters 1 through 8 already released, but the Chapter 1 walkthrough comes front-loaded with a fascinating glimpse into the classic's early development.

There was a time when Valve could do no wrong, releasing hit game after hit game. While better known these days as the developer behind Steam, Gabe Newell and his crew got their start with the iconic Half-Life. Now, an update has been sighted, and the timing is quite suspicious.

A Half-Life developer has revealed that the game's potential list of titles included the names Crysis, Fallout, and more.

It turns out that legendary first-person shooter Half-Life could have been named Free Radical or Fallout back when it was still in development in 1997. As caught by VideoGamesChronicle, former Valve developer Dario Casali, who worked on Half-Life as a level designer, revealed a few of the proposed names for Half-Life.

Valve's Half-Life series almost went by a very different name, according to one of its developers - including a title now commonly associated with a Bethesda game. 

Half-Life is an iconic name at this point, forming the striking identity behind a defining '90s FPS game that would forever change the genre as we know it. But there was every possibility that, looking back 25 years later, we'd be calling it Fallout or Crysis. It's a strange thought given that those two names would go onto become iconic series from completely different developers.

Valve‘s seminal first-person shooter Half-Life could have been named Crysis or Fallout, according to one of its developers.

The first reactions to Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes are here – and they're pretty much unanimously blown away, with some even going as far as saying the prequel is better than the original movies. 

Techland has released the third Community Update for Dying Light 2. This is a series of patches featuring the quality-of-life improvements most commonly asked by the community.

Lords of the Fallen developer HEXWORKS continues its tireless efforts to improve the game post-release. Yet another patch was pushed to live last afternoon, updating the game to version 1.1.282.