Half-Life Free: Sven Co-op Reborn
People of a certain age (oh, alright: old people) will remember Sven Coo-op. It was probably the first action co-op game I played, back when my monitor had a degauss button. I degaussed the hell out of that boxy beauty. It brought co-op to Half-Life and its various mods. It was party co-op, though. Piles of players, bizarre maps, everyone having a good time. Well [record scratch] that good time is now OVER. The mod is now no more, shutting down after 14 year of development. Version 4.8 adds Blue Shift compatibility, but it'll be the last mod version. [pause for sad news to take effect] Come back here! It's not going away: Sven Co-op will be reborn as a free, standalone game on Steam, allowing everyone to play Valve's ancient single-player classic with friends, even if they don't own it.
I can't imagine there are that many people who don't own the original Half-Life on Steam, but the Sven Co-op team are still delighted at this. It means that the new game will be built on their own version of the Half-Life engine, allowing them to add functionality that was previously out of reach while still supporting all the work modders and mappers have done for the game. I'll let them tell you all about that.
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 news on when it'll be coming, but I'm downloading the mod right now. I remember some of those levels being pretty messed up.
