Valve quietly reworked the Half-Life 2 interface

Valve continues to actively prepare for the upcoming launch of the Steam Deck portable console, and quietly released a beta update for Half-Life 2 that modernized the user interface, making it more accessible to upcoming devices and modern monitors.

The update was noticed and then posted on Twitter by a user named gabefollower, who also talked about how to access it. At the moment, the update is not available to everyone, so you will have to open the properties of Half-Life 2 in Steam, right-click on the name of the game, go to the "Betas" tab, and then select beta updates from the drop-down list. You will also need to add "-gamepadui" to the launch options under the "General" tab.

Once you've done that, launch the game to notice a couple of big changes. Probably the main incentive for such processing was the Steam Deck console. It's also good news for 4K monitor owners. The standard interface is almost unusable for modern displays.

Gabefollower also suggested that the update was made by someone in the modding community, or someone in the community "helped Valve finish it". Names are not called. Gabefollower said it leaves the creators free to express themselves.

Valve announced yesterday that the first batches of Steam Deck will ship to customers on February 28th.