The popular Sven Co-op mod for Half-Life is officially coming to Steam as a free stand-alone game.
Are you a fan of Valve’s Half-Life? Would you want to play through it cooperatively with a few buddies? Would you want to play through it cooperatively with a few buddies for free? Then Sven Co-op is just the thing for you.
Despite being roughly fifteen years old, the popular co-op mod for the original Half-Life is still receiving regular updates and now Valve is bringing it over to Steam as a free stand-alone game with a number of new improvements. The Sven team made the happy announcement on their official forums and even said that Valve has gone so far as to give them total access to the GoldSrc engine which powered both Half-Life and its expansions.
Not only will the Steam version of Sven Co-op include the original single-player campaign, it will also come with a whole host of other features including:
- 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.
The Sven team is currently unable to give an accurate reading on when the stand-alone Steam version of Sven Co-op will be available but their forum announcement assured fans that they’d be updating the forums with new progress updates regularly. They are also continuing to support the original version of Sven Co-op so if you want a preview of what the stand-alone version will be like and you’ve got a spare copy of Half-Life lying around, you can give Sven Co-op a whirl right now.