The developer added the wall to the game with an anniversary update but recently removed it.
Valve
With the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary update, Valve has inadvertently added a blocker that messed up the speedrunners' gameplay with an invisible wall in a sewer pipe in the Route Kanal section of the game. Recently, the developer fixed the issue.
You've got to flood the large pipe in the sewers of the Route Kanal sequence with water to pass through:
According to SourceRuns, the blocker was present only in the Xbox 360 version: "The pipe near the end of the level has been blocked off by an invisible brush which was previously only present in the Xbox 360 version of the game. The brush disappears once the player solves the puzzle in the intended way." Some players found a solution and jumped across the level, flooding the area sooner instead. Thus, the update closed other strategies for speedrunners.
However, in the update post, Valve stated that it "removed collision from an underwater tube that speed runners enjoy."
To celebrate the anniversary, Valve released a documentary in which developers revealed the previously canceled Half-Life 2: Episode 3 for the first time and shared other insights concerning the development of Half-Life 2, for instance, how an intern undergoing a summer practice helped Valve in a legal case.
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