New Half-Life 2 development lore drop!
It’s a wild ride to read. It’s about a very niche bug that softlocks the game but somehow the bug can travel back in time and even affect the original retail version of Half-Life 2.
TLDR: the bug
The softlock happens because an NPC is standing in the way of a door. This didn’t happen in the original because it was compiled using the old-school Intel x87 floating point handling and not the (relatively) more modern SSE behaviour, which does cause the softlock. The bug managed to time travel to the retail build because modern compilers use SSE instead of x87.
I had a similar softlock in Skyrim at release that wasn’t fixed until the toolset came out and I was able to go in and see that the script that was meant to fire was never actually added to the trigger. So a dude is supposed to come up to a door and open a little window to talk to you, but he would just stay sitting down in the room since the script telling him to go to the door and begin the dialogue that leads to the trigger that opens the door was written and available, but wasn’t tied to the trigger of activating the door. I just put the script into the trigger and Bam! finally was able to get through the MQ.
Ever since, I have been salty AF about Bethesda’s ability to build games. This was such a stupidly simple mistske and it persisted for months only to be fixed by modders with a simple 5 second change.
That piece of shit, Esbern! I had the same glitch, thankfully there was a mod that fixed it pretty quickly.