Long-Life: Valve developing new UI for Half-Life 2 as Steam Deck approaches

Error 52 · January 27, 2022

Summary

Half-Life 2 (and its two episodes) is looking to see a pretty significant update soon that'll be a pretty massive overhaul of the UI. It can currently be accessed by installing the game's beta branch on Steam and using the -gamepadui launch parameter. Here's a comparsion between the old and new GUIs, the new one is the one where the text is actually readable:

Quote

My thoughts

Well, the new UI is pretty ugly right now, and maybe too big, but it's certainly a lot more usable than the painfully dated old one with no scaling. Something like this was probably inevitable, as Valve would probably like to ensure that their own games, especially flagship ones like the Half-Life games, are able to pass their own "Steam Deck verified" programme. As such, this will inevitably come to other Valve games like Portal 1, and maybe even the GoldSrc titles. Get ready for that big Ricochet update!

Really though, it is still cool to see games this old getting new updates, 17 years later.

Now, Valve, if you could just fix that awful server browser that you use for your games that's barely changed since 2003, that would be dandy.

Sources

PCGamer - Half-Life 2's UI is being quietly redesigned

@Gabefollower on twitter (this link has footage of the new UI in action)