Half-Life 2’s Characters Can Finally Blink Again

In one of the weirder Steam updates, non-player characters in Half-Life 2 and related episodes can now blink, after an update from Valve.

Valve put out a small update yesterday for Steam builds of the Half-Life games that includes the note “Fixed NPCs not blinking”. As explained by Rock Paper Shotgun, NPCs lost the ability to blink following a SteamPipe update five years ago. They could still blink in scripted moments, but they wouldn’t do it generally. I don’t blame you if you never noticed, but plenty of players did.

Now, we have a solution. NPCs will blink in Half-Life 2, Episode 1 and 2, Lost Coast, and Source. Here’s the G-Man’s opening monologue from 2015.

And here’s a grab from this morning:

It’s going to be a good day.