Moral to the story: Everyone should just buy a copy of Opposing Force and follow the instructions of this guide. There are maps that are so short that if you did start to play immediately while your friends are downloading maps, you can easily finish the map before they connect! If you want to be polite you just sit and wait, waiting for your friend to connect. Unfortunately, people can play immediately once they enter the game, so that means the host can start playing right away. So you see, it can be a pretty painful wait if you have far away players. We both have high speed internet connections. A friend in Tokyo has to wait about 2 minutes for a typical Opposing Force map to download before he can play. A person on my home LAN in the same room downloads the maps and is ready to play in about 10-20 seconds on a standard Gigabit ethernet connection.The other players will download the maps from the host when the maps are needed.

This is why the host must follow these instructions and the players should follow them:

Anyone who doesn't follow these instructions won't have the Opposing Force / Blue Shift maps available, therefore, every time the map changes, Sven Co-op will download the map from the host to the player. We made the game maps available to Sven Co-op. All the other players ought to follow these instructions, but it's not mandatory. Back then developers would finish the entirety of their game before beginning work on additional content, as opposed to today’s practice of developing a full game and then cutting out specific portions to sell at an additional cost.The host must follow the instructions in this guide.

While originally a simple tech demo, continuous updates have transformed Lambda1VR into a fully-functioning Half-Life emulator, including online multiplayer as well as support for the popular Half-Life: Blue Shift expansion campaign, in which players play the role of a Black Mesa security officer. For our younger readers: expansion packs were the early-2000’s equivalent to DLC. While not an official release, players could download a free APK of the experience and sideload it onto their headsets for an immersive rendition of the classic Half-Life campaign. This past July, developer Simon Brown released the first version of Lambda1VR, an ongoing fan-conversion of the original Half-Life game for the Oculus Quest.

And while you could opt for a standard playthrough on PC or console, why not soak in all that 90’s nostalgia from a brand new perspective? With Half-Life: Alyx nearly a month away from release, there’s never been a better time to dive back into the original series. A new update to Lambda1VR adds support for Half-Life’s second and final expansion.

Half life opposing force guide