Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Guide: The Mode Valve Never Stopped Patching

Half-Life 2 has not shipped a new campaign since 2007. Half-Life 2: Deathmatch shipped a 64-bit build, a client-side prediction rewrite and a raised player ceiling in February 2025.

That is the strange fact at the centre of this game. The multiplayer spin-off Valve released two weeks after Half-Life 2 — the one whose store blurb is still, verbatim, "Toss a toilet at your friend today!" — got a substantial engineering pass twenty years after launch. It also plays nothing like the campaign, because the physics puzzle box you spent Ravenholm learning is here a weapon that other people are aiming back at you.

Valve stopped selling it, then rebuilt it

Two dates matter and both are muddled by Steam itself.

The store page for Half-Life 2: Deathmatch lists a release date of November 1, 2004. Combine OverWiki and PCGamingWiki both date the actual Steam release to November 30, 2004, citing Valve's own "Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and SDK Update" announcement — released alongside the Source SDK, two weeks after the campaign, following what the wiki records as reviewer disappointment at Half-Life 2 having no multiplayer at all.

The second date is November 15, 2024. Valve pulled the standalone digital release on the same day the 20th Anniversary Update landed. Query the Steam store API for app 320 today and the only two purchase options that come back are a "Half-Life 2: Deathmatch - Commercial License" at $4.99 and The Orange Box at $19.99. There is no consumer buy button. PCGamingWiki records the current state plainly: no longer sold individually, bundled with Half-Life 2. If Half-Life 2 is in your library, so is this.

What the anniversary update gave it was a full HDR lighting and tonemapping pass across every Deathmatch map, plus a fix list that reads like a decade of accumulated jank: SLAMs that could not be detonated if you stood too close to a wall, gravity gun grenade yo-yos that could crash or disconnect the server, out-of-bounds spots in dm_runoff that were safe from the map's airstrike, and player spawn counts increased across many maps.

What you spawn with, and why your player model picks your melee

You respawn instantly at 100 health, and you lose every weapon you were carrying. Per Combine OverWiki's weapon table, the standing kit is:

• A melee weapon
• The gravity gun
• The 9mm pistol, 18 in the magazine and 150 in reserve
• The SMG, 45 loaded plus a 45-round spare
• Two frag grenades
• 6 rounds of .357 ammunition and 6 shotgun shells — without the guns

That last line is worth reading twice. You spawn holding ammunition for two weapons you do not have, which means the first .357 or shotgun you walk over comes up loaded and ready rather than empty.

The melee weapon is not a choice you make in a menu. Rebel models spawn with the crowbar; Combine models spawn with the stunstick. PCGamingWiki puts it bluntly — the player's character model influences their starting weapon — and notes a long-standing quirk where your chosen model is forgotten when you join a new map. The trade is real: 25 damage on the crowbar with a faster swing, 40 on the stunstick with a slower one.

The damage table that decides every fight

Half-Life 2: Deathmatch reuses the campaign's arsenal but not the campaign's balance. These are the numbers from Combine OverWiki's weapon table:

Read the body column down and the map design starts making sense. The crossbow does 100 damage to the body and 100 to the head — the same number as a fresh spawn's health pool — so it does not reward flicks, it rewards patience against someone who has committed to a direction. The .357 headshot is 225, more than double a fresh spawn's health, which is why one clean round changes a fight even against someone who has just topped up at a charger. The shotgun fires 7 pellets on a single barrel and 12 on a double, so its ceiling is a close-range burst and its floor at distance is close to nothing.

The pulse rifle's energy orb is the outlier. It bounces elastically off surfaces, corrects its trajectory toward targets on the bounce — the wiki puts that deviation under 10 degrees — and disintegrates whoever it touches. In Deathmatch it also takes out the weapon the victim was carrying. On a tight map, controlling the orb spawns is the whole game, which is exactly why Combine OverWiki's dm_lockdown write-up names the pulse rifle and orb spawn points as the pivotal factor on that layout.

The gravity gun is a primary weapon here

In the campaign the gravity gun is a lever for puzzles with a combat mode attached. In Deathmatch it never leaves your inventory and the maps are stocked accordingly — dm_lockdown alone is described as carrying explosive and regular barrels, carts, sinks and toilet bowls.

Two mechanics make it more than a joke weapon.

First, thrown explosives keep their damage. Combine OverWiki's table lists a frag grenade held in the gravity gun at 225 damage and a S.L.A.M at 200, against 250 and 300 respectively when they detonate normally. The standard play is to drop a grenade at your feet, catch it with the gravity gun, and time the release so it goes off next to someone rather than under them.

Second, you can catch what is thrown at you. Objects and grenades both come back off a gravity gun catch, which turns a physics-prop duel into a genuine reaction test rather than a first-mover advantage.

The February 2025 update added a console convar, hl2mp_allow_pickup, to allow picking objects up without the gravity gun at all. Worth knowing before you join a server and wonder why the props behave differently.

The SLAM is the weapon the campaign never gave you

The Selectable Lightweight Attack Munition is the one weapon Combine OverWiki flags as exclusive to Deathmatch — it was built for Half-Life 2 and cut, most likely because a mine is close to useless when you already know where the enemies come from.

It has two modes on the same key. Aim at a nearby surface and you plant a tripmine: a charge-up sound, then a red beam that detonates on being broken. Aim at nothing and you drop it as a physical object, remote-detonated with secondary fire after a short delay. The weapon table gives it a maximum of 300 damage, 5 carried, and a 192-unit blast radius — though the wiki's dedicated S.L.A.M page lists the per-mode figures lower, at 150 remote and 200 tripmine, so treat 300 as the ceiling rather than the expectation.

The placement rules are where it gets interesting. A S.L.A.M sticks to any solid surface including physics props, and if you move the prop without setting the charge off, the mine stays floating in mid-air. You can plant one on the back of another to build a four-way beam. And there is a genuine speed trick recorded in the wiki's trivia: planting against a wall uses a shorter animation if you already have a non-tripmine S.L.A.M deployed somewhere on the map.

The counterplay is simple and you should use it — shoot the mine, or throw a prop through the beam, from outside 192 units.

All eight maps, and what each one rewards

Deathmatch ships eight official maps. Seven use the dm_ prefix; the eighth is just halls3.

The two that shipped in 2004

dm_lockdown is d2_prison_03 from Nova Prospekt — the shower block where the campaign's second Antlion Guard turns up. Two levels, three zones (showers, cell blocks with the elevated office, back hallway). The office holds a Combine Dispenser acting as a supercharger that refills health and suit power up to 200 armour points; crouch under it and you can watch your back while you drink. The back hallway hides an RPG in a fan trap you enter through a vent, and the fan can be switched on by plugging in a socket, killing anyone inside.

dm_overwatch is d3_c17_09 from "Follow Freeman!", built around a collapsed building, minus the basement. Combine OverWiki groups it with dm_resistance as a medium-range layout, against the tight-quarters bracket it puts dm_lockdown in.

The 2005 additions

Five more maps landed across 2005, three of them through a Valve mapping contest — and the wiki records what the winners were paid.

Three of those carry a specific trick worth learning. dm_steamlab has a working teleporter that always drops you at the same spot — a room near the south hall with two SMG grenades and a shotgun under the stairs — plus two interactable valves: the maintenance hall's leaks gas and self-ignites, the north hall's needs you to shoot it and does considerably more damage. dm_powerhouse has a grated floor on the suit-charger hallway that hitscan weapons and the crossbow shoot straight through in both directions. And dm_runoff has a Combine control panel that calls an airstrike on the map, with the bunker doors closing behind an alarm once someone triggers it.

halls3, the map with a 1995 ancestor

halls3 was added in the April 3, 2013 SteamPipe update, more than eight years after launch, and it has the longest paper trail of anything in the set. It was built by Chris Ashton, later a co-founder of Turtle Rock Studios, during his time at Valve — and it is a remake of Halls2, a Half-Life multiplayer map he made in 1998, which was itself based on a 1995 netmap for Marathon called Halls of death. The map is internally named GreatHalls.

Mechanically it is unusually legible. Red and blue buildings on the lower level, a centre building with health and HEV chargers above, and five hallways connecting red to blue — each with a teleport that lands on a different weapon. The ammunition type sitting in front of a teleport tells you which weapon is on the other side, so the map hands you a route-planning language most arena shooters make you memorise.

What the February 2025 update actually changed

Valve's patch notes for February 18, 2025 are long. The parts that change how the game feels:

• 64-bit binaries, launched automatically on a 64-bit OS.
• Default maxplayers raised from 2 to 24, and the hardcoded ceiling raised to 100 — Valve's own note says this is "to allow for more chaotic times".
• Steam Networking support, plus improved networking precision for local player positions.
• A client-side prediction pass across most of the game: the SMG, AR2, crossbow and basic gravity gun prediction implemented; sprinting and AUX power, crouching, duck-jumping, ladders and prop-walking all predicted; crowbar and stunstick animation prediction fixed.
• The game now launches at native resolution instead of 640x480, with a borderless window option and UI scaling for high-resolution screens.
• Bicubic lightmaps and radial fog carried over from the 20th Anniversary Update, plus that update's HUD and UI changes.
• Scoreboard avatars, and kill, weapon-equip and health-pickup event markers for Steam Game Recording.

The prediction work is the substantive one, and the notes name the case precisely: the player hull was being mis-predicted in certain instances, causing rollbacks every frame when crouching or standing against a wall. That is fixed.

One older wrinkle to know before you shop for a monitor setup: PCGamingWiki records that servers running sv_restrict_aspect_ratio_fov at 1 or 2 force aspect ratios wider than 1.85:1 into vert-, so an ultrawide can be a downgrade depending on where you play.

How many people are actually playing

Small, stable, and not dead. SteamCharts has Half-Life 2: Deathmatch averaging 129.57 concurrent players over the last 30 days, peaking at 237, against 129.17 average in July 2026 and 123.55 in June.

The interesting part is the shape of the curve around the anniversary. September and October 2024 sat at roughly 120 average. November 2024 hit 316.36 average and an all-time peak of 1,546, a gain of 165.80 percent. December fell to 225, January 2025 to 185, February to 151. March 2025 — the first full month after the 64-bit update — ticked back up to 164.36 average with a 346 peak before settling.

So the anniversary bump did not hold, but the floor moved: the game is running a little above where it sat before Valve remembered it existed. For a twenty-one-year-old arena shooter with no matchmaking, direct-IP connect in the console and dedicated servers, that is a functioning population rather than a memorial.

Quick Action Checklist

• Check your library before buying anything — Deathmatch is bundled with Half-Life 2 and is no longer sold to consumers separately.
• Pick your player model deliberately: Rebel models spawn with the crowbar (25 damage, fast), Combine models with the stunstick (40, slow).
• Remember you spawn with 6 .357 rounds and 6 shotgun shells but neither gun; the first one you find is already loaded.
• Treat the pulse rifle orb spawns as map control, especially on dm_lockdown.
• Practise the grenade catch: drop, grab with the gravity gun, release on a timer. 225 damage in the gun against 250 loose.
• Use S.L.A.M tripmines for area denial, and clear enemy ones by shooting them from outside the 192-unit radius.
• On dm_lockdown, crouch under the office supercharger — 200 armour and a view of the door.
• On halls3, read the ammunition in front of each teleport to know which weapon it lands on.
• If your game still opens at 640x480 or feels like it is rubber-banding, verify your files: the February 2025 build fixed both.