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Having just finished the disappointing Halflife 2, I'm interested to get recommendations for fun mods. I don't want CounterStrike. I want interesting and fun, and I already know about RO.

PS, the Halflife gravity gun sucks compared to the tractor-beam mod someone made for ut2k4 ages ago based on the gravity gun hype. Ironic, no?

Empires is good. There are some issues, but it's still in beta and it's really fun even with them.
http://www.empiresmod.com/
Hidden Source is fun too, but I haven't played since beta 2 so they may have butchered it since then...
http://www.hidden-source.com/

The Hidden looks fucking cool. I'll definately give that a go, thanks.

Antlion Troopers Deuce is a helluva lot of fun, slightly moreso if you've seen Starship Troopers.
http://antlions.hl2world.com/

If you flat out don't like Half Life 2, I don't really think there are going to be that many mods that grab you, a lot of them are really based around the Half Life 2 style in most ways.

Of course for the majority of people who DO like HL2, this is a good thing

What, long, vague meandering storylines about chasing idiots rather than fighting a revolution? I doubt that. It's neat their tech-demo level Ravenholm had a gravity gun-immune pair of legs right at the start, though, and the ability to move cars but not sofas was excellent. The textured-on doors were a realistic touch. A final level with basically infinite health and an unlimited supergun? Why didn't they just make it a cinematic? The game refined 'linear' to a fine art, to the absurd point that you have to wait for the badguys to knock over a pillar to keep going in some sections. NPCs so totally useless they just keep spawning to help you, and whose weapons are less powerful than yours? Icing on the cake. The platform crate puzzles were also excellent, if by excellent you mean tedious. I'm not sure if you've even PLAYED The Hidden, but it's absolutely NOTHING like the vanilla storyline. Red Orchestra is likewise totally different to the 'walk down this corridor' vanilla story.

Best part: the interesting shootouts at random houses on the side of the road, and thinking 'gee, I hope STALKER is like this'.

Worst part: thinking 'man, FEAR was better' and 'some of this level geometry really sucks'.

FYI: Red Orchestra is Unreal not source. Day of Defeat is Valve's baby. Be on the lookout of Team Fortress 2 and Portal (check out the media section on steam for some very cool trailers).

Don't forget about Dystopia, great mod there. And, for something a little different try Troy: Divine Playground. If you're feeling a little nostalgic - why not give Goldeneye: Source a go, or maybe just try a good ol' game of dodge ball source. Though, maybe those are a little too modern; why not harken back to a simpler time with The Battlegrounds where it's always 1776! Maybe that isn't your thing, maybe you want something a little less original, something like say... Source Forts, it's like capture the flag, but you build your own crazy bases out of bits of metal and stuff, I haven't played it much, but it does kinda sound neat. Under this category see also Neoforts.

There is also some good stuff 'on the horizon' as it were, Iron Grip looks cool, as does Eternal Silence and a whole host of other mods which will, hopefully, come out at some point in the future...[/url]

Stark, I'm not going to argue the point with you, whenever you decide to stand ranting about a highly subjective subject, it would take a planetary collision to get you to shut up again.

All I am going to say is if you don't LIKE HL2, then I suggest you look for another game a try, then come back in a year. Some mods are looking very interesting, but still a good 6 months - 12 months away from being polished enough to be really released.

Empires mod has come a LONG way, I have to admit; though I haven't heard anything from Dystopia in forever. All the mods do feel incomplete, I admit. However there is currently nothing which can honestly give you the same sort of 'game' as Empires. Though Empires suffers from a dwindling community and suffers from the same problem Natural Selection does; bad commander can ruin a game, of course 2 good commanders can make for a hell of a game.

Some specifics:
Troy Mod - It's different; spears, swords, slingshots, it's just a different sort of game. It is also very incomplete, I think there is one map and development has stopped. Still, it is cool to try for a while.

Battle Grounds - It's a revolutionary war mod, and it's pretty cool. It's entirely different from anything else thanks to the era, and on a server with a decent number of people (20+) I find it to be refreshingly different.

Dystopia - Is just all sorts of cool. The guns are all pretty cool, the classes and such are all very different and each is fun to play. Cyberspace is pretty cool too; if you only play 1 mod, make it this one.

Hidden Source - Its a cool mod, but I think you may find yourself tiring of the hunt if it isn't... interesting enough.

MINERVA: Metastasis?

DPDarkPrimus wrote:MINERVA: Metastasis?

I'll concur to this suggestion. It's a much less linear scenario, with level design using the principle of creating a logical location first and then devising various methods of navigating it and dealing with the threats found there. Some tedium there involves backtracking, but not in a 'where's the fucking red key in this damn adventure game?' degree of irritation.

Chris OFarrell wrote:Stark, I'm not going to argue the point with you, whenever you decide to stand ranting about a highly subjective subject, it would take a planetary collision to get you to shut up again.

All I am going to say is if you don't LIKE HL2, then I suggest you look for another game a try, then come back in a year. Some mods are looking very interesting, but still a good 6 months - 12 months away from being polished enough to be really released.

Nothing 'subjective' about terrible AI, absolute linear maps, and selective physics. And physics was supposed to be a selling point. Further, your constant contention that all HL2 mods are like HL2 is obviously false, so what's your fucking problem? It's not the 'shooty' part I don't like, and thats all the mods are using.

However, I'm surprised most of the mods aren't finished. What gives? ut2k3/4 had the mods (uninspiring, to be sure) cranking out, and HL2 has been out for years.

IB, what's 'not source' mean? Didn't they release a source version of RO? Or are they just distributing through steam? And please, DoD is hardly 'RO for HL2'.

Modding HL has been both easy and hard. HL mods have never occured quickly.

Most modding for HL2 right now involves changes that don't affect the gameplay itself.

Anyway, if your interested, go to Wikipedia and look up Blackmesa Source. Its a mod to HL2 that brings the original HL to life in the HL2 engine, but reimagined with the new technology.

Hey that'd be fun, I found myself missing Black Mesa playing HL2. I get to kill Doctor Kliener like, a dozen times.

EDIT: zomg, coop. I'm sold. However, it's been going for two years, and it's still alpha. Given their huge staff (by mod standards) I guess I've got a lot to learn about HL2 mod timelines.

Its going to be longer then the original. They are going to put the demo satelite uplink level back in the game. The game will also start out earlier.

What I really like is they are going to put in coop play.

Coop is excellent, but I wonder how they'll do it. The Freeman twins? Freeman plus one?

I notice Alien Swarm:infested isn't out yet either. This is crazy - they've been making AS:I for longer than the full development time of the ut2k4 version. Damn the source engine!

Stark wrote:IB, what's 'not source' mean? Didn't they release a source version of RO? Or are they just distributing through steam? And please, DoD is hardly 'RO for HL2'.

Not source, as in, not being of The Source. Obviously

The guys who made Red Orchestra (fantastic game btw) got their hands on the UT engine liscence (some sort of contest I think?), cleaned it up, and it is now available through steam. DoD is nothing near Red Orchestra, however it is Valve's world war 2 game, which is what I meant. However, I would love to see Red Orchestra on the source engine, despite the graphics still feel pretty dated. If Valve would do something about server side vehicle prediction I'd wager Red Orchestra would do fantastically on source. Of course if scalability isn't as much of an issue, I'd wager the Doom 3/Q4 engine would be good too, though I don't know how moddable it is...

I see. I checked the RO site, and it's pretty uninformative these days. I guess they're selling it now?

BTW, I think Valves rush to get DoD and CS ported to HL2 is a poor decision. I can see the attraction, with them being big names on HL... but they're just the same-old, same-old, nothing like the crazy original interesting shit that you can get for ut2k. Air Buccaneers? Checkmate? Alien Swarm? Pffft, no, Counterstrike. Bah.

I do prefer playing the Source ports of CS and DOD over the original games, so I'm glad they released them. Honestly though anything different would probably have been too much content for them to get out in any reasonable time; it took them forever to come up with different player models for CS:Source, the maps that get released are often buggy (some of them are horribly optimized and drag the framerate way lower than it should be) and not even done by Valve itself.

Hell, remember the year-long delay for Half Life 2? Remember how Team Fortress 2 got announced in 1998 and only now have we seen anything resembling TF2 content?!

Valve is slow, dude. You're expecting too much. I enjoyed HL2 and I currently enjoy playing the derivative multiplayer modes, but Valve just takes an ass-long time to get anything out the door.

I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, I remember hearing about TF2 waaaaaay back. It's odd that they're slow, the engine is apparently hard to code for, etc. The engine is very nice: HL2 runs a perfect 60 at max settings on my machine. Almost everything I look at for it is beta, or alpha, or otherwise unfinished.

Uraniun235 wrote: Hell, remember the year-long delay for Half Life 2? Remember how Team Fortress 2 got announced in 1998 and only now have we seen anything resembling TF2 content?!

Lies! I've seen screenshots of it before in a magazine back in 1998!

Stark wrote:I see. I checked the RO site, and it's pretty uninformative these days. I guess they're selling it now?

BTW, I think Valves rush to get DoD and CS ported to HL2 is a poor decision. I can see the attraction, with them being big names on HL... but they're just the same-old, same-old, nothing like the crazy original interesting shit that you can get for ut2k. Air Buccaneers? Checkmate? Alien Swarm? Pffft, no, Counterstrike. Bah.

Alien Swarm, Air Buccaneers and the like are made by 3rd party developers, not Epic, while CS and DOD, originally being 3rd party, are now Valve franchises. So it's an unfair comparison.

Unfair how? Valve being slower than unpaid modders, or corporate software being unoriginal? Poor widdle Valve, all those millions of dollars must be such a drag!

Sucks how no one actually plays Air Buccaneers though...