Last year, Nvidia announced that a group of talented modders were working on fully remastering Half-Life 2, including adding new textures, models, and ray-traced visuals. And now, a new trailer shows us more of this impressive looking project that turns Half-Life 2 into a sleek looking modern FPS.
Half-Life 2 RTX was first officially revealed in 2023 by Nvidia. The project is a collaboration between multiple modders and fan developers who have worked on previous Half-Life related projects, including Half-Life 2 VR and Project 17. Their goal is to create a mod powered by Nvidia’s Remix tools—modding tech created by the GPU company that lets people add ray-traced features to old games easily and quickly. However, HL2 RTX isn’t just adding some fancy shadows and calling it a day. Instead, the team’s goal is to remaster the entire game and every asset in it. And so far, it’s looking really good.
In a new behind-the-scenes trailer released on November 14, Nvidia sat down with some of the modders working on Half-Life 2 RTX and let them talk about why they are remastering this game and what it means to them 20 years later. (Yeah, Half-Life 2 turns 20 on November 16.) And in the new trailer we see a lot of HL2 RTX in action and it looks phenomenal.
The team’s goal isn’t to change how Half-Life 2 plays, but instead to add a new coat of paint to the old shooter to make it look better than ever. This means remaking many props and assets to be higher quality, replacing textures with new ones that react properly to lights, and much, much more. It’s honestly one of the best looking remasters I’ve ever seen.
Nvidia says Half-Life 2 RTX is still in early development, so no idea when we’ll get a chance to play this mod. You can now find a new Steam page for the mod on Valve’s storefront, which shows that while Valve isn’t officially involved, they are cool with the project. (Which isn’t surprising at all.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch that trailer again and dream of playing HL2 RTX while trying to not think about how old the game is in 2024.
.