We may never see a third Half-Life game, but Half-Life 2 continues to thrive—not least by way of its ever-intriguing community and catalogue of player-made mods—despite its age.
Gunship Mark II’s work-in-progress Half-Life 2: MMod has been around for some time, however is now gearing up for release and has a new trailer. Let’s check that out first:
Despite first announcing the mod back in 2014, the creator says real life distractions have since hindered their progress—before Mark Laidlaw’s ‘Epistle 3’ bombshell kickstarted their interest. Learning of what could have been has now inspired the mod’s third and final iteration, which is now due in 2018.
“Development of v3 started right after Epistle 3 from Marc Laidlaw. You can guess, I was devastated, as many of us were,” says Gunship Mark II on the mod’s ModDB page. “People were saying ‘That’s it, Half-Life is over, Half-Life is dead’. But then it struck me: ‘Bullshit’, I said, ‘We’ll show ’em how dead it is’. I got fresh Source 2013 code base set up, I’ve got my tools ready, I’ve got Visual Studio installed, and I’ve started porting features from older iterations of HL2MMod, while simultaneously enhancing them and cleaning up the code.
“Some parts of the code were rewritten from scratch, some features are totally brand new, a lot of features were ported from City 17: Episode 1 mod, for which I am super grateful. I’ve made brand new particle effects for everything, I even did a couple of live streams to show some features off and to tell people that I am not dead.”
Again, Half-Life 2: MMod is due at some stage next year. More can be read via the mod’s ModDB page, and can be seen via the following GIFs: