It was choppy, unreliable, and populated almost entirely by screamy mic spammers, but my word, do I miss the days of Half-Life Deathmatch Source. It’s one of the enduring images of my own PC gaming past – a team of HLDM Source players, all wearing the G-Man skin, sprinting through the Black Mesa lab map and coating the walls with satchel charges. Half-Life 3 may very well be in the works, but Valve hasn’t forgotten about the classics. Counter-Strike Source, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, and my beloved my HLDM have all gotten sudden, surprise patches.
It seems like almost every Valve game that uses the original Source engine has been updated, as the developer retroactively ports over some of the quality-of-life tweaks that were introduced for the base game of Half-Life 2 on its 25th anniversary. 64-bit support, peer-to-peer Steam Networking, radial fog, bicubic light maps, and new native resolutions have been added to Half-Life Deathmatch Source, Counter-Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source (this is a lot of Source), and Half-Life 2 Deathmatch. While many of these are legacy titles, Valve’s tentpole multiplayer FPS game Team Fortress 2 has also been updated with similar features.
There are even some bug fixes – in HLDM, CS Source, and DoD, Valve has made an update to ensure that breakable props will now ‘gib’ correctly, i.e explode into chunks when they’re hit hard enough. For Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, the fixes are more extensive. Weapon sounds and bobbing animations have been rectified, some disappearing HUD icons have been restored, and the RPG’s laser dot, which would sometimes vanish, is now firmly in place.
A similar litany of fixes has arrived for Team Fortress 2 – as well as the full SDK (software development kit) now being available, which opens the door for much more community material like mods and custom maps, server issues, in-game lighting, and problems with voice chat have all been addressed. Collectively, this is a series of updates designed to make classic Valve shooters smoother and more playable in 2025. If you’ve been waiting for a reason to replay CS Source and co., this is ideal.
Otherwise, you might want to try some of the other best multiplayer games, or maybe hop back in time to the best old games that you can still run on PC.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or join our community Discord to stay in the know.