Mods for the Half-Life series often create either single-player or multiplayer games, giving players the choice to play alone or with friends. The mods can expand upon the Half-Life story or offer an entirely new experience, such as medieval warfare or zombie survival. Here are 10 of the best mods for Half-Life.
Best Half Life 2 Addons To The Game
While Half-Life 2 modding has been a constant almost since the day the game launched, the game's code base has not been. Valve have updated, tweaked, tuned and repacked it a half-dozen times, breaking some older releases. Most of the mods below from the past five years require the Source SDK Base 2013 Singleplayer package, which you can find under the 'Tools' header in your Steam library.
One of the best places to be for fresh Half-Life 2 these days is fan-site RunThinkShootLive, maintained by Phillip Marlowe. As well as hosting a review database of maps and mods for several games, he organises annual Half-Life 2 map-jam competitions, complete with prizes. Each year features five challenges, with a limited time to produce a single level to that theme. Philip then packs all the maps up into a single themed mod, easy to install and play. Here are the big releases of the past three years.
Updated on April 2, 2022, by Chris Birsner: It has nearly been 18 years since the release of Half-Life 2. The genre-defining first-person shooter still ranks among the best games to come out this century, which may be why the community around the game is still as active as it is today. Specifically, mods continue to be created and downloaded by players to try new ways of experiencing a game they've loved for a long time. Whether it is simple aesthetic changes to complete overhauls of the game's story or gameplay, there's no limit to what Half-Life 2 modders can do with a game like this in the Source engine. As such, it's worth highlighting even more of the best Half-Life 2 mods.
The Research and Development mod arms players with a Gravity Gun but has been described as being a similar format to a point-and-click adventure game. Players must use the few tools given to them to traverse through the world and solve as many puzzles as possible. This is one of the best Half-Life 2 mods for people who enjoyed the puzzle side of the original game.
Sometimes, it's fun to take on the role of the bad guy in video games. Luckily, players can fill those shoes in one of the best Half-Life 2 mods, Entropy: Zero. Specifically, players take on the role of a Metrocop that is serving the Combine regime.
Many of the best Half-Life 2 mods listed thus far feature completely new stories in the game's world, or at least made in the Source Engine. However, those who are just looking for some significant upgrades to the original game should look no further than the SMOD.
Half-Life 2 has always been known for its first-person gameplay. However, players have a character model that they could see from a third-person perspective. With Water, players will get to see their character from the over-the-shoulder camera angle in one of the best mods for Half-Life 2.
The game revolves around a non-linear narrative that allows players to explore the office however they see fit. There are multiple choices that you can make that lead to various different endings, some more serious than others. The game is probably the best version, but the mod isn't far behind.
Half-Life 2 was released on Steam on November 16, 2004, and received universal acclaim. It won 39 Game of the Year awards and has been cited as one of the best games ever made. By 2011, it had sold 12 million copies. Half-Life 2 was followed by the free extra level Lost Coast (2005) and the episodic sequels Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007). In 2020, after canceling Episode Three and several further Half-Life projects, Valve released a prequel, Half-Life: Alyx.
Development of Half-Life 2 began in June 1999, six months after the release of the original Half-Life. It was developed by a team of 82.[3] With voice actors included, this number is 100.[4][5] Valve's president, Gabe Newell, wanted to redefine the FPS genre, saying: "Why spend four years of your life building something that isn't innovative and is basically pointless? If Half-Life 2 isn't viewed as the best PC game of all time, it's going to completely bum out most of the guys on this team."[3] Newell gave his team no deadline and a "virtually unlimited" budget, promising to fund the project himself if necessary.[3] The game was built with Valve's new in-house game engine, Source, developed simultaneously.[3]
Half-Life 2 has an aggregate score of 96/100 on Metacritic. Sources such as 1UP,[34] GameSpy,[40] The Cincinnati Enquirer,[46] The New York Times,[47] and VideoGamer.com[45] gave it perfect scores, and others, such as PC Gamer,[44] IGN,[42] GamesRadar,[41] and Eurogamer,[36][37] gave near-perfect scores. It was the fifth game to receive ten out of ten from Edge.[35] Critics praised the advanced graphics and physics.[38][47] Maximum PC awarded Half-Life 2 11 on their rating scale which normally peaks at 10, calling it "the best game ever made".[43]
In the United States, Half-Life 2's PC version sold 680,000 copies and had earned $34.3 million by August 2006. It was the country's 17th best-selling PC game between January 2000 and August 2006.[48] It received a "Platinum" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA),[49] indicating sales of at least 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom.[50] Forbes reported on February 9, 2011, that the game had sold 12 million copies worldwide.[51]
Edge awarded Half-Life 2 with its top honor of the year with the award for Best Game, as well as awards for Innovation and Visual Design. The game also had a strong showing at the 2004 British Academy Video Games Awards, picking up six awards, more than any other game that night, with awards including "Best Game" and "Best Online and Multiplayer."[55] Computer Games Magazine named Half-Life 2 the fourth-best computer game of 2004. The editors call it "a masterful single-player experience that plays a constant game of one-upmanship with itself." It won the magazine's "Best Technology" (beating out Doom 3) and "Best Writing" awards, and was a runner-up in the "Best Sound Effects", "Best AI" and "Best Voice Acting" categories.[56]
Half-Life 2 was selected by readers of The Guardian as the best game of the decade, with praise given especially to the environment design throughout the game. According to the newspaper, it "pushed the envelope for the genre, and set a new high watermark for FPS narrative". One author commented: "Half-Life 2 always felt like the European arthouse answer to the Hollywood bluster of Halo and Call of Duty".[59] Half-Life 2 won Crispy Gamer's Game of the Decade[60] tournament style poll. It also won Reviews on the Run's,[61] IGN's[62] Best Game of the Decade and Spike Video Game Awards 2012 Game of the Decade.[63] In December 2021, IGN named Half-Life 2 the ninth-best game of all time.[64]
Since the release of the Source engine SDK, a large number of modifications (mods) have been developed by the Half-Life 2 community. Mods vary in scale, from fan-created levels and weapons, to partial conversions such as Rock 24, Half-Life 2 Substance and SMOD (which modify the storyline and gameplay of the pre-existing game), SourceForts and Garry's Mod (which allow the player to experiment with the physics system in a sandbox mode), to total conversions such as Black Mesa, Dystopia, Zombie Master or Iron Grip: The Oppression, the last of which transforms the game from a first-person shooter into a real-time strategy game.[65][66] Some mods take place in the Half-Life universe; others in completely original settings. Many more mods are still in development, including Lift, The Myriad, Operation Black Mesa, and the episodic single-player mod Minerva.[67] Several multiplayer mods, such as Pirates, Vikings and Knights II, a predominately sword-fighting game; Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat, which focuses on realistic modern infantry combat; and Jailbreak Source have been opened to the public as a beta.[68][69] As part of its community support, Valve announced in September 2008 that several mods, with more planned in the future, were being integrated into the Steamworks program, allowing the mods to make full use of Steam's distribution and update capabilities.[70] In Sept 2022, after a decade of development, a fan made full-VR mod was released titled "Half life 2: VR".[71]
Going all gung ho is the fastest way to get yourself killed, so tread carefully and use cover to your advantage. Without going into spoiler territory, the story alone makes Get a Life worthy of postponing getting your own life, at least until the game credits roll.
Available for free on Steam, Entropy: Zero 2 is further proof that the Half-Life community is alive and well, and that the demand for Half-Life 3 remains as high as ever. Earlier this month, players of the original game set a new record for Steam concurrent users, and there was recently launched a fully-acted prequel for the 1998 Half-Life, where you play as Gordon Freeman during a day in the life at the Black Mesa lab.
This article is designed to explain some of the basic concepts behind the Half-Life: Alyx engine and development tools to get started. Users arriving from SteamVR Home's content creation tools will have a head start since the utilities are powered by the same framework which other games like Dota 2 provide. A quick summary of differences: lighting is vastly improved, there's ModelDoc which is a completely overhauled version of the Model Editor, the standard shaders are different and there are a lot more entities and content to play with. While it won't all be directly applicable the SteamVR Home Workshop Tools documentation on this Wiki may still have some useful information for people making Half-Life: Alyx addons to utilize. 2ff7e9595c
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