Steam UI update beta now live; Half-Life 2 achievements spotted

by David Hinkle on Feb 24th 2010 5:00PM

Click image to take a tour of the new Steam.

Active Steam users will likely find the first half of this post to be a bit on the old hat side, but we soldier on: Valve's flipped the switch on a new and improved beta version of Steam. If you've already got a Steam account, you can download the new version by hitting up this page. The beta adds all kinds of nifty stuff, like accessible lists of what games your friends have downloaded (along with their personal stats for each title) and some new ways for you to sort and organize game libraries. There's also cross-game achievement tracking -- and Valve's finally done away with Internet Explorer rendering, swapping it out for the friendlier open-source WebKit engine.

But, that's not all! Our sister site Big Download was cruising around the new achievements interface and noticed that Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One now have achievements listed under them. As you know, Half-Life 2 released right around the time achievements were finalized, so it never arrived on Steam with them. Sadly, there's no news other than the icons -- which look a lot like those found in the Orange Box on Xbox 360. We'll be sure to keep you posted.

New Steam Update (Beta)

Source - Half-Life 2 achievements spotted
Source - Steam beta update news

Tags: achievements, beta, half-life-2, half-life-2-episode-1, steam, steam-beta, ui, update, valve

Reader Comments (63)

Protip: Changing to the beta made it delete MW2 and CoH, so back those games up if you have them.

I really wish they allowed plugins for the ingame UI. So I could have my media players/im clients integrated.

The UI really did need a refresh.

I disagree, if only for the ditching of Internet Explorer use. Cross-program dependencies like that should be eliminated whenever possible.

Some while ago I was setting up a machine with a certain piece of pro audio hardware\software that, on my hardware configuration, would not run while a certain version of IE was installed\active. Being a firefox user, I gladly disabled\removed what I could.. Then, on running steam, I found that half the stuff in there wouldn't display without it. Sure, a rare circumstance perhaps, but like I said those sort of dependencies are never ideal.

On the achievement front, any excuse to play HL2 again is a good one.

Whoah, brain fart. I dyslexically thought you said "..really did not need.." . So.. uh, change my first line to "I agree wholeheartedly" :p

The looks, sure, but the backbone definitely did. The stuff that goes on behind it. It's not a drastic update anyhow, so it doesn't really hurt anything.

Same here. Wow, thought you said didn't. =P

Eh what can I say, I simply expect pessimism from the internet.

I don't know about others, but imo, Steam achievements are completely pointless compared to Xbox Achievements and PSN Trophies. The latters have some values.

...

They're all equally valueless. My guess would be that you have fewer people on your Steam friends list to share and compare them with.

I agree, the Steam achievements are pointless.

But not any more so than XBL achievements and PSN Trophy's. The only difference is that Steam doesnt add up your trophies so you can show off how much of a life you don't have. It all seems silly to me, games were always about the games themselves not jacking off to how high I can get my gamerscore. Achievements are nice when they are fun challenges to complete. (Like putting the gnome in the rocket in HL2:2) but achievements for the sake of achievements are pointless to me.

IMO they're all fairly pointless. But people still attach value to them.

The ego dude, the ego. Why do you think people write their opinions/comments on the internet? Ego's everywhere.

Dude, the gnome to rocket transferal process was not fun. It was sheer pain all the way!

I admit, that was a bad example. That achievement is masochism at its finest.

I hope Steam never does the gamerscore whoring garbage with achievements. I like that they have no numerical value, and are just there for fun and nothing else.

Yep I agree. I like some achievements that encourage certain ways to play the game. Perhaps ways one person wouldn't have thought of. They can also be useful to mark your progress along a game, but most are just pointless, "HEY! YOU DID IT, SPORT!!!!" crap. It's not like in GTA and similar games where if you collect/do certain things in the game (unrelated to achievements/trophies) you unlock something bad ass and fun.

My competitive edge has been inspired once in a while with friends to whore them out on certain games, but overall if they never existed I wouldn't care or even really notice them being gone.

News flash: achievements are pointless on all of the systems.

I do agree that they're not of any value, but I also enjoy achievements. Some of the more whacky or difficult ones are fun to get after you've completed a game, because it might help you squeeze out a couple more hours of play time.

They're not alllllllll pointless. Team Fortress 2, for example. Unless you really like RNG. I mean.. Really like.

I ended up changing back to the default steam skin. The new UI is pretty slick, but there are a few things that bother me too much to continue using it.

The gradient in chat makes the text seem blurry, and there isn't enough contrast to make it nice to read.

There is no more mini-games list, which is the window I use in steam 90% of the time. Unless they fix both of those things I really hope the switch to the UI isn't mandatory when it leaves beta.

no more mini-list? FFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.....

I hope they'll let us stick with "classic view" if we so desire.

It's in beta to get user feedback and then make changes as needed. You're silly to base a final decision on a simple flaw that I'm sure they'll fix easily.

My final decision? When the new UI goes out of beta it will probably be mandatory. And they probably will change it as needed. All I'm saying is that I'm keeping with the old UI until that happens.

It's there, it's just not as obvious.

Library > Games > View > Games List

Right-click the top category bar and select Icons, then go to View and set it to Small Mode.

I reckon that's what you be lookin' for.

The HL2 achievement icons aren't really news - those who have been poking around in the source sdk may have found them a long time ago.

LOVE the new Steam UI, the games library screen is so pretty now

WOW That looks great.

I hope a future update adds the icons back next to the games.

There is a + button above the games list, this allows you to display icons.

Also worth noting is that Steam now uses webkit for its UI, and is no longer dependent on crappy IE. A knock-on effect of this is that it opens the way for Valve to make a Mac client, and OSX UI assets have been spotted in the Steam UI files.

While yes, that could help with them making a mac client, it won't help much unless more developers actually start supporting OSX. A distribution platform with no games to distribute isn't exactly useful.

Chris Green's LinkedIn was looking for Mac and Linux devs. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/chris-green/5/b1b/827

Sent it to Joystiq but the didn't run it, still pretty cool news and Steam using WebKit now makes me hopeful we'll see something from it :D

hates the new Steam.
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It was a joke. Y'know, making fun of the people who get their panties in a bunch whenever Facebook changes something.

THIS DOES NOT PLEASE THE HIVEMIND.
REFRAIN AT ONCE.

Cool update, though the fact that it now shows me how many hundreds of hours I've spent playing my Steam games is a bit depressing.

That functionality was already there. I greatly disliked it for telling me I'd played Dragon Age for 90 hours, which is roughly twice my TF2 time. I love TF2, and disliked DA:O. I want those 90 hours back!

Is that all? I've played TF2 for 500+ hours!

Will this delete my save data? Last time I reinstalled steam, all my data was deleted...

No, it won't delete your save files. If you opt-in for the beta, this is just a simple client update that requires a Steam restart after it finishes updating. Everything will remain intact and just the same.

It looks bootyfull.

HOLY SHIT.

YES.

My first thought was "YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS."

This article confuses me a little bit.

Steam has had the ability to look at your friends' game list for ages. You also have always been able to track their achievements and even do a side-by-side comparison of theirs against your own.

As far as HL2 and Ep.1 achievements go, they're not listed under their respective pages in the game store, and they're also not listed under the game details in the library if you don't have the game installed.

I just installed Ep.1 to check and see if achievements were listed on the details page of your library if the game WAS installed and they are NOT. So I'm guessing either VALVe let them slip through the cracks and pulled that information, or it was a few isolated incidents.

There's no doubt in my mind that cheevos will show up for HL2 and Ep.1 soon, especially since they've been seen by a few people today, but who knows WHEN they'll get released. My guess is that they'll launch with some VALVe announcement, perhaps a launch teaser trailer for Episode 2? (fingers crossed)

You mean Episode 3...

Oops... Yes, I do mean Episode 3 :)

The new UI is uber-sexy; I'm quite satisfied with it.

Now looks to be a good time to actually start on The Orange Box. : )

By the way, why is it redownloading Modern Warfare 2 all over again? I'm not the only one affected. : /

SOOO glad they're dropped the I.E rendering. I'm on 64-bit windows 7 and since adobe are too lazy to write flash 64-bit I couldn't use the feature on the main page to show new games/deals. Also the UI is quite nice, it'll take abit to get used to since everything seems to be moved around quite a bit.

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Steam UI update beta now live; Half-Life 2 achievements spotted

New Steam Update (Beta)

Reader Comments (63)

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