Half-Life 2 NPCs Can Finally Blink Again After Five Years

After nearly five years, the tortured citizens of City 17 can finally blink again, thanks to a small official update.

Blinking in Half-Life 2 came to an end shortly after the Steampipe update five years ago, when Valve moved all the games on the Source engine to a new distribution system. 

Key characters would still blink if they were told during cutscenes, but normal NPCs walking around would no longer have the ability to shut their eyes naturally.

This issue affected many Source-based games in the Half-Life series, including Episode One, Episode Two, tech demo Lost Coast and kinda-remake Half-Life: Source.

The troubled city of a thousand-year-old stare may be completely in line with the urban dystopia of Half-Life 2, but it still needed a fix. With a game as large as Half-Life 2, there were, of course, unofficial fixes floating around.

The update also fixed some more important issues such as missing NPC sounds, a save-game hitching problem, and a Steam VR-related problem. All of these came with a surprisingly small-sized update.