News | 7/17/2013 at 9:16 PM

Official Half Life (Sven Co-Op) Game Announced to Arrive on Steam

Relive one the best FPS's of all time as a free, stand-alone, non-mod version.

Half Life (Sven Co-Op), the cooperative version of the original Half Life is coming up on its 15th anniversary soon. To celebrate the occasion, the developers of the mod have recently announced their plans to provide the game’s co-op experience as a stand-alone version via Steam.

Posted on the official mod website, huge improvements to the stand-alone version are stated to be coming, and everything will be completely free through Steam. Valve themselves have also given the Sven devs their blessing in making this version a reality, providing their permission to post onto Steam. Not only will the game include the original Half Life campaign mode, but Valve has given the developers access to use GoldSrc (used for the original Half Life game and its expansions: Opposing Force and Blue Shift). This new support will give the Sven devs many more tools to use the original game engine to make the mod as close to the original as possible. Here’s what the Sven team stated will be included in the project:

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.

No official date has been announced for the stand-alone version of the mod just yet, but those that don’t mind downloading mods can still try it now here (requires Half Life to play). The devs hope to give us more news on this project in the near future, so stay tuned!