Earlier today, Marc Laidlaw posted a photo of a whiteboard sent to him by a fellow Half-Life 2 developer, Randy Lundeen.



In it, a whole bunch of info can be seen. Most importantly, the proposed chapter order for late 2002; seeing what chapters were still considered for the story; and various developer assignments, such as what prefab maps to work on.

The chapters listed are:

• Train ride : City 17
• Station
• Terminal Square
• Arcade (or other)
• Kleiner's Lab
• Back alleys/Factory
• Breen Plaza
• Sewers
• Canals
• Quarry
• Ravenholm
• Eli's base
• Junkyard or Wasteland
• Sub - Lighthouse
• Depot / (Train Ride?) / (Alyx + Train?)
• Air Exchange
• Borealis
• Kleiner's Lab - Redux
• Factory
• Breen Plaza
• City Streets & Museum
• Gate to Inner City
• Inner City
• Citadel
• Interior

Among other curiousities, it shows that the Airex and Borealis stayed relevant enough to be included up until late 2002; the WC Mappack's most recent Airex map is from February of 2002, and it is usually believed it was dropped in early part of that year.

There's also nothing between Borealis and returning to Kleiner's lab.

As noted by Marc, it also contains Viktor Antonov's 'trademark slogan', "This is bullshit". It is said to have been applied to everything "liberally and hilariously". 

A new mod for the beta version of Half-Life 2 has been released.



The main goal of this mod is to gather the most interesting ideas from the development of the Ravenholm chapter and bring them to a quality state.

After spending many hours studying map sources and sketches from 2002-2003, I found that the old town had a well-designed infrastructure with a railroad, power plant,
a mining cave system with digging machine, material transportation system, warehouse, a residential part with a large church and more. The player's path was much more interesting, more traps were planned.

Much of this has been radically simplified or removed in the release. These ideas were separate fragments among the many unfinished prototypes and test maps.

I put these disparate ideas together, refined and polished them to make a complete chapter with its own unique gameplay and mechanics.

Details in the forum thread

So, today is October the 7th 2023, which means we celebrate a big anniversary! Exactly 20 years ag, October the 7th 2003 Half-Life 2 development build was leaked into Internet. Besides this build some other content was also released, including Source engine source code. This build named "Half-Life 2 beta" by the fans gathered many of them around it. And even now, after 20 years, many of us continue to study it, create our own mods, fixes and content based on things cut from the game. Literally tons of content were cut from the game - locations, characters, enemies, various features... And all this gave us base for study and discussion.

Just like a little later for S.T.A.L.K.E.R, all this led to the fact that many of us tried to restore “the original Half-Life 2”. There were just tons of mods started (and most of them not finished). Just for fun, on our forum you can find a thread with an incomplete list of about one hundred such mods!

On such a big day, we didn’t want to leave you without a gift and planned to prepare two rather big surprises at once, namely new versions of the Mega Patch and Mega Build. In them we are planning to return most of the content that was missing even in beta, especially textures and models. But unfortunately, no matter how hard we try to prepare everything for release for the 20th anniversary of the leak, we are not ready to release the Mega Patch 5 and Mega Build today. We decided not to rush an unfinished product for the exact anniversary date, but instead finish everything that was planned first and thoroughly test it.

Happy Beta Anniversary everyone!

As some of you may have realised. This year will mark the 20th anniversary of the Half-Life 2 Leak.
While this event is not fondly looked back on in many ways, it is the genesis of the cut content community that has managed to eek by for this long.

To celebrate this, the Valve Cut Content Discord server will be hosting a variety of contests over the course of the year!

(and yes, there will be prizes!)

More details in the coming weeks. Definitely be sure to brush up on your mapping skills in the meantime.

Contests will be posted in ⁠the Valve Cut Content Discord server, in the #2023-hl2-leakmas-contests channel.

Currently, the first competition is currently underway, where people have to make their own fake HL2 beta soundtracks, with appropriate images associated with each song. It's an easy contest to contribute to, but there are more ambitious contests happening soon.

Beyond the Bar Competition #1: Bringing Concept Art to Life

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A new Hl2-beta themed mapping competition is here and its goal is simple, create a playable level from any of Half-Life 2's concept art, and flesh it out with visuals and gameplay.

Unlike the 2019 and 2020 mapping competitions, this competition is not affiliated with the HL2 Project Beta team, but is being hosted by Zapagoogas and Marco198. They have a channel in their discord server for it.

Maps are to be created for Coterminus, not Hl2 beta. Submissions are due June 16th.

Judging information, rules, and more can be found in this Google Doc or by asking in their discord server.

Have fun and good luck to all who enter!
(if someone wants to translate this and repost in the Russian section, feel free to do so.)

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Edit:
The Competition has ended and you can download the maps for Cotermius Here!