Half-Life 2 patched to help NPCs who couldn’t blink for five years

Half-Life 3 may be too radical, too commercially unproven of an idea for a tiny, barely viable company like Valve to gamble on developing it, but hey, at least they’re supporting its 15-year-old predecessor by making sure NPCs can blink again.

This had been a problem for the past five years, apparently (thanks, Eurogamer). After a 2014 update moved all Source engine games to the SteamPipe distribution system, all non-scripted actor NPCs stopped blinking. Maybe it sounds like a little thing to you, but when the G-Man goes through one of those monologues without blinking, you’ll be reaching for some Visine in sympathy.

The update went out on Thursday, Sept. 26 and covers Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two: Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-Life: Source. The absolute newest game among those came out in 2007.

Valve updated the original Half-Life in July 2017, and that thing launched in 1998. Half-Life 2: Episode 3 was once an actual-factual announced game, but everybody shut the hell up about it almost 10 years ago.

Valve’s most recently developed game is the Twitch sensation Artifact, which saw a 10 percent increase in average players this past month.