The developers of Sven Co-op, a nearly fifteen-year-old mod that lets you play Valve’s original Half-Life cooperatively with friends online, announced that their creation is heading to Steam as a free stand-alone game with huge improvements.
In a post published on the mod’s official website, the team revealed that Valve not only agreed to put Sven Co-op on Steam as a separate game, but also gave them access to GoldSrc, the engine powering Half-Life and its expansions, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. This allows them to greatly improve user experience by making modifications and improvements directly to the game engine. Here’s what all this exactly means, in the team’s own words:
- The next version of Sven Co-op will run as a standalone game using a custom build of the Half-Life engine.
- The game will be FREE for all Steam users, including the official Half-Life campaign. A Half-Life purchase will not be required.
- Automatic updates will be available using Steam’s content delivery system dubbed SteamPipe. This will allow us to perform more frequent and rapid updates as needed.
- Updates and new features will be added to the Half-Life engine, as well as a series of improvements to Half-Life’s level editor called Hammer.
- Increased Half-Life engine limits to allow for much larger and more detailed worlds.
- Stability, performance, and gameplay improvements for everyone.
Currently there is no ETA for the stand-alone version of Sven Co-op, but the developers assured everyone that “more news and progress updates will be posted in the near future.” Of course, if you can’t wait and got a copy of Half-Life lying around, you can always try the mod as it is right now.
The Big Announcement [Sven Co-op Forums]
Top image courtesy of the Half-Life Wiki.
Comments
7 responses to “A Free, Improved Version Of Half-Life With Co-op? Where Do I Sign Up?”
This is awesome, Svenny is some of the best co-op fun I’ve had, though I always enjoyed the new maps created just for it rather than the campaign.
I was under the impression that the original “Sven” died tragically in a car accident a few years ago, was unaware that this project was continuing.
It’s still fun today, played through the original HL using Sven Coop with my wife just last year seeing as she’d never played it before and we had a ball.
*Obligatory HL3 is confirmed based on the number of things in something post*
Beat me to it!
I hope they include Decay, was very short but a very good and fun ‘alternate’ side of the story, specially seeing freeman being dragged down the hall by the grunts 😛
so is this just going to be the exact same as sven regular just standalone (and a few more tweaks)?
Im down for this, Sven coop was amazing, and while it wont look amazing these days, it will still bring back memories and great coop, also access to the engine code itself will greatly improve it
talk about whipping a dead horse. valve might as well outsource all their IPs. it’s not like they’re a game company anymore.