
Some weapons are clearly useless, such as the fire extinguisher and binoculars that were clearly usurped by the suit zoom. Weapons are different: the Leak has a huge number weapons ranging from the overpowered sticky launcher, to the then-futuristic OICW concept rifle, to the innovative physics gun. Some NPCs remain virtually unchanged, with only slight differences in style. For instance, the Combine soldiers have odd yellow uniforms. NPCs are different: they are either totally unique NPCs or are different versions of the NPCs we now know and love. The leak contains different features in almost every single regard. It is very buggy, very unfinished, and very interesting.Ī lot of stuff is different in the Leak. The Half-Life 2 Beta is unique in that it offers a fascinating insight into the development of Half-Life 2 that we may otherwise not have. It was stolen along with the source code of the Source engine by Axel Gembe, a German black-hat hacker. The Half-Life 2 Beta, or "Leak" as it is commonly referred to as, is an unfinished build of Half-Life 2 from 2003. I've been in the Beta community for a number of years and I am currently an admin on several prominent Beta communities, so I hope this qualifies me to speak about it. This guide is intended for absolute beginners who may be interested in getting the Half-Life 2 Beta up and running. Hopefully at some point they will upgrade Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive too. When they do put up full patch notes we'll let you know. Right click -> Properties -> Betas (on the left) and then select it from the dropdown box. To try it out all you need to do is opt into the Beta branch for the games on Steam. Other improvements noticed include some big bug fixes to a few scenes, UI improvements with resolution scaling with the HUD now having its own scaling option - which has resulted in the UI being a much better fit, ultrawide support, FOV now goes up to 110 instead of 90 and likely more we've missed. This changes the game to use Vulkan, instead of OpenGL, if you launch it with "-vulkan" in the launch options. However, we do know for sure they now have DXVK Native which is the port of DXVK to Linux which allows it to be used natively without Wine.


We don't know yet all the exact details, as this update hasn't even been announced by Valve yet but the Betas are up and you can try them out right now. Valve has put up a Beta for Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two as they prepare more of their own games ready for the Steam Deck.
