Valve added an invisible wall to this sewer pipe in Half-Life 2 in their anniversary update - but it only annoyed speedrunners

Tubular

Half-Life 2 just got a small update, mostly to fix a long-running music bug. But hiding in the patch notes is an apology of sorts, a nod to that most tenacious of bunnyhopper: the Half-Life 2 speedrunner. It seems the recent 20th anniversary update for the classic first-person shooter messed with some beginner speedrun strategies by introducing an invisible wall to a big sewer pipe. Valve have now corrected that, removing the offending blocker and restoring order to the universe. Well, almost.

"Removed collision from an underwater tube that speed runners enjoy," write the developers in the update post, with traditional Valve inscrutability. They're talking about a large pipe in the sewers of the Route Kanal sequence, which you've got to flood with water to pass through (you can see said pipe in this playthrough). It seems Valve always intended for this pipe to have a big "player clip" over it - an invisible wall you can see in the map editor image below. The clip would be set to vanish once you solve the puzzle by turning a nearby valve to flood the room.

Yet, for whatever reason, this invisible wall was previously only present in the Xbox 360 version of the game, according to speedrunners at SourceRuns, who've been diligently tracking recent changes to the game. PC players have always been able to indulge in the speedrunning act of skipping the puzzle by, say, glitchily clambering up the wall with a barrel. Oh, you clever little speedos.

But the anniversary update two weeks ago "fixed" the original oversight by plopping the wall into the PC version too. As you can imagine, this made the usual speedrun trick impossible.

It's only one example of the many changes that make the anniversary update a no-go for the most furious of fastbois. Plenty of other bug fixes have effectively confiscated an arsenal of glitches that speedrunners use to zip through the game. One such nerfed trick is called the "Item Save Glitch" which I won't explain in detail but basically allows the player to blip through solid surfaces by using a cursed object to push themselves through locked gates like a fucked-up playdough man. That doesn't work in the new shiny version of the game, and so many serious speedrunners simply stick to older versions of the game anyway.

"We do primarily use older builds, most often ones from 2012-2013, especially at the top level," says speedrunner "Peng", who currently holds the world record for completing Half-Life 2 in under 38 minutes. "But at least I do find it unfortunate that we're missing out on some of the new changes, as some actually benefit speedrunners..."

In the end, Valve recognised that at least this one pipe should remain open for sprinty business, and yesterday's brief patch has fixed it by simply disabling collision on the player clip. It won't be quite enough to entice record holders to switch to new version, says Peng. But it's a decent gesture to novice speedrunners.

"We still likely won't be able to run on the latest build even with this pipe being open again, as the update seems to have made Item Save Glitch... harder, and for some people seemingly impossible (we don't know for sure yet). The reversal does make the latest version viable for beginners at least though, which is a good thing."

Okay, if you really want to know, the "item save glitch" is explained in this (very good) video that gives a full rundown of speedrunner strats for the shooter, and features Peng performing a lot of the tricks of the trade.

For ordinary players, meanwhile, the Half-Life 2 anniversary update was broadly good news, since it added Steam Workshop support and some developer commentary to the decades-old first person shooter. It also made a bunch of smaller changes in various levels, including bug fixes, texture corrections, and lighting tweaks. It's kind of bonkers that Gordon's great galumph is still having minor things like this tweaked, but it's also proof of the shooter's lasting appeal.