It's always grand to get a peek behind the gamedev curtain at things that might have been. Former Half-Life level designer Brett Johnson has been digging through his old work, and his memories, to share some early Half-Life prototypes and some ideas that never came to be. Would Half-Life have been a classic if it had gotten the name "Belly Of The Beast"? I dunno, doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well, does it?
The probably soon-to-be-renamed Half-Life: Loop is an unofficial HL twin-stick shooter set in Black Mesa. It locks Gordon Freeman into a series of challenges to prove to the G-Man he’s the right man for the job, using the classic Half-Life enemies and crates to craft an endless, violent job interview. No wonder he was so handy with a crowbar. He’d already passed the test!
A Half-Life mod that's been in the works since the early 2010s has resurfaced, and it's close to the finish-line. The developer has put up some gameplay footage of the FPS game, and says that the fanmade spinoff could release this summer.
Half-Life: Delta follows a maintenance engineer, Nick Farell, who gets caught up in the whole Black Mesa cross-dimensional invasion debacle. His campaign includes around 30 stages, stretched across four chapters, and a host of new weapons, models, sounds, and so on. Going by ModDB, the first Half-Life: Delta preview occurred in 2016, and we've had sporadic updates since, until now, where a fresh gameplay trailer has been uploaded.
The post has few words, just saying that creator XF-Alien thinks "the release will be in June/July." The near-five minutes of footage looks as good as any other Half-Life mod, featuring plenty of exploration through the grey corridors of Black Mesa, and its overcast New Mexico locale. Zombies, drones, and headcrabs appear, as well a few other alien nasties, and overall it seems to capture that early-2000s Half-Life feel, while still having a slightly modern sleekness to it.
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The FPS genre blossomed into life like a bloodstained violet in the faint heat of spring when id Software released Wolfenstein 3D. At the time, the genre was mostly about picking up guns, mowing down bad guys, and getting the best score possible. 1998's Half-Life embodied a lot of that, but it was also one of the first FPS games to bring puzzle-solving and narrative to the mix.
It boasts a (sort of) seamless world, wide-ranging interactivity, and manages to tell a captivating story in the process. Floating armour icons are replaced with HEV Suits and charge stations, grounding them in the world of Black Mesa. There are no cutscenes or dialogue screens, so you're always experiencing the story from Gordon Freeman's perspective. It was genuinely revolutionary.
Valve did it again in 2004 with the sequel, which integrated realistic physics simulations into combat and platforming. Just a brief 16 years later and Valve did it again, revolutionising VR via Half-Life: Alyx. However, that nearly two-decade-long hiatus left a void that modders have worked tirelessly to fill. Their works keep momentum going for the series, and are worth diving into while we wait for the Half-Life 3 release date to never materialise.
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