Valve Updates Half-Life 2 and Finally Allows NPC’s to Blink

Ben Bayliss September 27, 2019 9:14 AM EST

Imagine not being able to blink for 15 years, then your Valve deities finally allow you.

It might not be a large update, but for the NPC’s in Half-Life 2 who have wandered around the game unable to blink, this is a huge win for them.

You might not have noticed it while actually playing, but for the past 15 years, those NPC’s in Valve’s Half-Life 2 have been incapable of blinking. Yesterday, however, an update from Valve introduced a small number of fixes with one allowed the NPC’s to finally blink.

No doubt those civilians are now walking around fluttering their newly introduced eyelids.

The other fixes include a hitch when saving games, some missing sounds on combine soldiers, and a fix for SteamVR running when entering the settings menu. It isn’t just Half-Life 2 that got the update treatment, it’s every title in the Half-Life 2 series.

That includes; Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, and even Half-Life: Source.

So thank you to the team at Valve who finally decided that 15 years of non-blinking was enough for those poor digital souls. There does however seem to be no hints that Half-Life 3 is being worked on, even in 2017, Gabe Newell said “the number 3 must not be said” during a Reddit AMA. Who knows, perhaps this blinking introduction could be some fancy blinking AI for Half-Life 3 being testing on older titles. I’m joking of course. But imagine.