Did you know that in 2004 Valve launched Half-Life 2 [official site]? And did you know that Episode 1 followed two years later and Episode 2 a year after that? Ghost hunter game free download for pc. Did you know it’s now been ten years and besides a mass of rumours, bad jokes and conversations with unverified sources, Gordon Freeman’s elusive third Half-Life outing – be that Half-Life 3 or HL2: Episode 3 – is still Not A Thing?
I’m sure you did. Let me now ask you this: do you know about Half-Life 2’s modding scene – a community which has been producing consistently brilliant tweaks and tinkerings to Freeman’s Combine-killing shooter for over a decade? Built from Valve’s Source Engine, the following list is comprised of single and multiplayer mods for the Seattle-based dev’s seminal and ever-enduring FPS – some of which are set in Freeman-familiar worlds, others which take on completely new looks entirely.
How To Install Mods On Cracked Half Life 2
I know it’s hard to swallow, but Half-Life 3 might never happen. Play these mods instead.
Get a Life
By Cide
Get a Life was one of the first Half-Life 2 mods I ever played, and I instantly loved how different it was from its source material. Playing as Alexander Zemlinsky, you assume control of a vulnerable subway technician suffering from leukaemia and are tasked with taking on an unscrupulous agency and waves of otherworldly beings.
As an everyday civilian, Zemlinsky can barely handle the mod’s 13-weapon arsenal and afflictions such as bleeding, dizziness, shaking while aiming, and limping make combating its 60+ enemy types across its 24 maps less than straightforward. Add that to the mod’s limb damage system and you’ve got your work cut out for you. Upgradable weapons and drugs that trigger a special bullet-time mode work in your favour across Get a Life’s ten hour or so runtime.
GoldenEye: Source
By Team GoldenEye: Source
Designed to reimagine the Nintendo 64’s wonderful GoldenEye FPS from 1997, GoldenEye Source is a fan-made Half-Life 2 total conversion mod with one goal in mind: “To bring the memories and experiences from the original GoldenEye64 back to life using Source technology.” Mass effect controller support.
It’s been around for almost 12 years and has been consistently updated along the way – having launched its version 5.0 last year. Classic maps such as the Bunker and the Dam return, however while its team promise to maintain the “original feel” of the game now two some decades old, naturally it’s been brought up to speed with ten multiplayer game modes, 25 maps in total and all 28 weapons from the original. Here’s its latest trailer:
Neotokyo
By Studio Radi-8
Set in a fictionalised cyberpunk Tokyo some 30 years into the future, Neotokyo is best described as a class-leaning Counter-Strike mixed with the Japanese fantasy/sci-fi manga series Ghost in the Shell. Government corruption is said to have turn the Japanese capital as we once knew it into a dystopian nightmare where war rages between the military sect Jinrai and the National Security Force. In practice this means loads of twitch shooting and relentless warring across Team Deathmatch and Capture the Ghost – the latter of which is portrayed by a female robot and is, as you probably expect, this mod’s version of capture the flag.
Once housed on ModDB, Neotokyo now exists on Steam and can be downloaded without owning Half-Life 2 itself which is pretty neat.
Minerva: Metastasis
By Adam Foster
Perhaps Minerva’s greatest achievement is that much of its sprawling levels play out in tight corridors and confined spaces, yet it rarely, if ever, feels cramped or claustrophobic. And this is testament to lone creator Adam Foster who, through this wonderfully designed three-episode mod, wound up with a full-time job at Valve.
Filling the boots of an unnamed hero, you’re tasked with uncovering the mysteries of the heavily Combine guarded island you’ve been held prisoner on. “Something is going on here,” suggests the mod’s blurb. “Your goal is to uncover what that is and destroy it.” Doing so will lead you into the island’s central mine shaft and with the help of the titular Minerva – who only exists via on-screen text messaging – you’ll set about taking down whatever it is that’s keeping you trapped on the archipelago.
First released in 2007, Foster launched Minerva on Steam Workshop on 2013. You’re required to already own Half-Life: Episode One to play.
Research and Development
By mbortolino
A non-combative game before non-combative games were cool. Crafted in 2009, two years after the aforementioned Minerva, R&D was often uttered in the same breath as Adam Foster’s work by way of its originality and ambition. Minus guns, besides the Gravity Gun, Gordon Freeman must here rely on his wits as you guide him through a series of tricky, often mind-building and sometimes infuriating puzzles. Occasionally, you’ll face the odd baddie who wants nothing more than to see you dead, but only by leveraging your surrounds can you see them off.
“You’re definitely not Edward Pistolhands,” said Alec not long after R&D’s release, before saying this:
“The best comparison, oddly, is the original Half-Life – a game whose noble puzzle values its sequel largely abandoned in favour of super-atmospheric action. There is very much that sense of strange tricks and traps born of scientific experimentation, and your largely non-combative persona is in many ways more in keeping with the mind-over-matter character we’re often told Gordon Freeman is than the openly, incongruously murderous role he dons in Valve’s games.”
Games such as the Talos Principle have since performed the idea better, but R&D was well ahead of its time some eight years ago.
The Stanley Parable
By Cakebread
How to explain The Stanley Parable without spoiling it? And how to explain it without sounding mad? Two tough questions that I’d honestly rather you worked out for yourself because The Stanley Parable really needs to be experienced to be believed. You probably already know this mod went onto become a fully realised paid-for game – which is absolutely worth paying – however its less sophisticated, rougher-around-the-edges, and free mod version can still be played and enjoyed today.
Exploring themes of 9-5 culture, the illusion of choice, and the contradictions of self-fulfilment, The Stanley Parable takes you on a journey where your only friend is an omnipresent, overseeing narrator. But do you trust him?
“You will make a choice that does not matter,” suggests the mod’s description. “You will follow a story that has no end. You will play a game you cannot win… it’s actually best if you don’t know anything about it before you play it.” I agree.
Black Mesa
By Black Mesa Dev Team
Put simply, Black Mesa is a mod project that started in 2012 with the aim of reimagining the original Half-Life in its sequel’s Source Engine. Having somewhat grown arms and legs since, Black Mesa now exists as a free mod which its creators the Crowbar Collective are no longer progressing, and a paid-for Early Access game, which will receive the most attention.
For example, this means Xen – the otherworldly zone Gordon Freeman visits towards the end of the original game – will not feature in Black Mesa’s mod version, and the premium version plans to add ten or so hours which won’t feature for free. That said, about 85 percent of the single player game does exist in the mod and is for the most a beautiful reinterpretation of Freeman’s first outing. Perhaps the best testimonial I’ve spotted for Black Mesa is tied to generational differences: “Now I understand what people felt like in 1998,” said ModDB user HunteR4708 which is probably absolutely right, even if it makes me myself feel old.
Silent Hill: Alchemilla
By White Noise
There are loads of horror-inspired Half-Life 2 mods kicking around these days, however 2015’s first-person Silent Hill: Alchemilla is my favourite. While it claims to tell a “completely original story”, Alchemilla is heavily inspired by the first game and reimagines its world – particularly the titular hospital and the outside otherworld areas – to terrifying effect.
Without spoiling anything, its puzzles are a little on the light side, so it’s perhaps best to avoid diving into this one expecting a revolutionary first-person modern day retelling of the 1999 debut – a la Resident Evil 7. That said, while Alchemilla promises to entertain “fanatics of the original game”, there’s definitely enough meat on this ‘uns bones to impress series fans of all understandings.
Synergy
By Synergy Team
If co-operative multiplayer is your bag, look no further than Synergy. Another long-standing mod that’s since been housed in the Steam Workshop, Synergy was born from a number of other mods – DC Co-op 2, Dev Co-op, Tim-Coop, for example – and stands to let players play through Half-Life 2’s otherwise single-player campaigns with friends.
Be that Half-Life 2’s base game, Episode One and/or Two, you and your pals can take down Headcrabs, Gunships and Striders to your heart’s’ content – and Synergy now even works with other user-made mods such as the aforementioned Minerva: Metastasis. Synergy also brings a handful of its own levels to the table, which means there’s plenty here to hold you and your pals’ attention.
Half-life 2 Mod Manager
Dino D-Day
By Digital Ranch Interactive
Besides having the best name on this entire list, Dino D-Day almost certainly has the best premise: during the second World War, Hitler has discovered a way to resurrect dinosaurs and, by fighting online, players can either choose to side with the Allies or the Nazis.
Now, a war-based Deathmatch-style shooter that lets players ride around on dinosaurs is probably enough to sell those of you inclined, however Dino D-Day offers a host of classes which vary on each side, a range of dinos, and an impressive arsenal of weaponry.
Dino D-Day is another mod which has since graduated to paid-for Steam release, however the original freebie itself is still available to download and packs five maps and three game modes – the latter of which includes team deathmatch, king of the hill, and objective mode.
Honourable Mentions
Garry’s Mod
By Garry Newman
By Garry Newman
The archetypal mod – Garry Newman’s Garry’s Mod offers players a sandbox and tools to make it their own. There are no rules or objectives, but tens of thousands of players and game modes.
Prospekt
By Richard Seabrook
By Richard Seabrook
Prospekt has received middling reviews on Steam, however is a fun one-man project which furthers the story Adrian Shephard, star of Half-Life 1 expansion Opposing Force.
Dear Esther
By The Chinese Room
By The Chinese Room
The non-combat exploration game, or Walking Simulator if you prefer, that started it all.
HL2: Capture the Flag
By MeNtHoL
By MeNtHoL
Simple, yet necessary. The Half-Life 2 Deathmatch mode than never was.
Nuclear Dawn
By GameConnect
By GameConnect
A lovely FPS/RTS hybrid.
As noted above, Half-Life 2’s modding community has now been operating for well over ten years. This means I’ve definitely missed some crackers, but the above list should more than get those of you new to the scene started. Again, these are my own favourites but, as always, I’d love to hear which ones I’ve missed in the comments below.
Project Borealis is a fan-made Half-Life 2: Episode 3 based on the Epistle 3 script posted by former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw. It's been in development since 2017, and today the team showcased the first footage of some new maps, along with a shootout with some creepy homunculi still awaiting their textures.
The update explores the level design process, showing off a chilly cave's development from a section of a script to an in-game map that's had its first art pass. We also get to see some of the progress the team's made with the episode's physics, and it's going to be switching to the new Unreal Chaos Physics system and AMD's FEM deformation tool when they're released, but they've already been doing a lot of experimenting with PhysX.
The gravity gun has received a pretty significant upgrade. Instead of just picking up individual objects, it will be able to gather up lots of them, and the demo lets Gordon create a huge floating mass made up from hundreds of objects. I look forward to summoning tornadoes.
OK, that's pretty cool, but that's got nothing on this adorable headcrab. It's fluffy! Because it's cold! Let's hope we can pet the headcrab. Expect to see familiar but slightly different alien nasties in Antarctica, and some new stuff, too, including a vehicle to help us get around the frozen wasteland.
The team's also been working on the audio design, using Steam Audio to handle reverb, occlusion and spacialisation, and new art has been designed that interprets the low resolution models from Half-Life 2 and creates more detailed versions of them that still look authentic. That process starts with creating concept art for things like Combine panels, and a bunch of new concept art has been added to the official site.
'This update is the result of a significant evolution in the team over the last year,' says project manager Florian Häsler. 'We refined our development workflows and adopted a new approach to structuring the work ahead of us. This has brought about great work, some of which we’re showcasing in this update; the team is developing some exciting tech, using modern technology to explore our gameplay options. We can’t wait to hear what the community thinks about our progress and direction.'
Laidlaw's synopsis sent Freeman, or 'Freemont', off to Antarctica, where he ends up on the Aperture Science ship, the Borealis. There are some problems with reality getting a bit wobbly, culminating in a big fight on a ship that's speeding across time and space. You can read the whole thing here. It's pretty wild.
- 2The SDK wizard
The Create a Mod wizard automates the process of creating a Source mod. It:
- Creates a new mod under
steamappsSourceMods
- Installs a copy of the source code, with associated Visual Studio Project File
- Creates a Game Configuration for your mod in the Source SDK
Note:You will need to restart Steam for a new mod to appear in your library.
Engine branch
Before starting a mod you need to choose which version of Source you will use. Change the SDK's engine version to the one you want.
- Source 2006
- Outdated - Original Half Life 2: Episode One mod. Only included for backwards compatibility reasons.
- Source 2007
- Original Orange Box mod. This is the most recent HL2-Based engine branch available. This is what most mods use!
- Source 2009
- Updated Orange Box mod. This is the current version of the engine with Mac support. However, you cannot make a mod for Source 2009; you can make a content-only mod of a 2009 game by following Creating a Mod manually.
- Alien Swarm (via Alien Swarm SDK)
- The oddball of the bunch. Alien Swarm is totally free to play and its SDK includes source code, but it's source code is for a top-down shooter. It also lacks many of the HL2-compatible code's peripheral tools (including custom shader support) and cannot access HL2's content.
- Source 2013
- In 2013, Valve phased out the Source SDK with the release of SteamPipe. With this change, they updated the source code to the latest version of the Source-1-Engine for the HL2-based engine branch. This time around, the source code is not made available via an SDK launcher, but is instead hosted on Github. See Source SDK 2013 for more information. However, you can use this custom launcher as an alternative to the old Source SDK.
Warning: Your Engine Version in the Source SDK must match the Engine branch of your mod! Failing to do this will result in Source SDK tools being unable to load required resources.
The SDK wizard
Project type
- This section only applies to Half-Life 2 Mods!
When you start the wizard, you will have to choose which project to work with.
- Half-Life 2 Single Player
- Projects for Episode One (2006) or Two (2007). If you do not own Ep1/2 this option will be greyed out.
- Half-Life 2 Multiplayer
- Projects for Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. This option is only available if you own Half-Life 2: Deathmatch; otherwise it will be greyed out.
- Multiplayer mod from template
- A specially-created SDK project that allows you to configure settings such as if your mod is team based, or if you have abilities such as sprinting and prone. This option does not require Half-Life 2: Deathmatch.
- Source code only
- Dumps the code without creating an actual mod. This option is handy if you are just creating a server plugin.
Whichever option you choose, you get the same actual source code files (even if you didn't own one or another game). You also get an 'everything' solution which includes a collection of development tools.
Mod Information
The first option on this page is where you want the source code extracted to. The second is the name you want to use, which also defines the output folder for your compiled content (does not appear if you chose source code only).
Creating a mod manually
It's surprisingly simple:
- Create a folder under
steamappsSourceMods
(A mod can actually reside anywhere, but placing it here allows Steam to detect and launch it.) - Create a gameinfo.txt in the folder. You now have a mod!
- Open the SDK launcher and switch to the relevant engine branch.
- Choose 'Edit Game Configurations' and click 'Add'. Enter your mod's name and folder.
To get the source code (or indeed any other files of Valve's that you want to modify) you will need to use GCFScape and access
depot_211_dir.vpk
in the SteamSteamAppscommonSourceSDKvpks
folder. Remember to change the custom build steps to point to your mod's folder. Retrieved from 'https://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/index.php?title=Create_a_Mod&oldid=211357'