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I've never used Mods: Help me catch up
Professor Snugglesworth
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Registered User regular
So I finally decided to update my 5 year old PC, sparing no expense on making it powerful enough for today's generation of PC games (or at least, according to my friend, good enough to run Crysis on very high). I've never paid much attention to PC gaming, but I'm willing to take a look at what I've been missing the last decade or so.
It starts first with mods. I find the whole mod idea pretty sweet, basically taking a game that works and enhancing it, adding to it, or just plain changing it into a completely different game. It's like getting a bunch of free expansions on an old favorite.
So at first I wanted to make a thread where you can recommend me some mods for Half Life 2 (which I plan to be purchasing via the Orange Box in the near future), but now I'd like to take it a little further and ask for mod recommendations on other PC games. I know there's a big community for HL2 (both singleplayer and multiplayer) and Oblivion (mainly adding new textures and monsters), but what other PC games have a healthy supply of mods? The only other one I'm familiar with is a Matrix mod for Max Payne.
Please recommend as many mods as you can, or a repository where I can start downloading them.
It starts first with mods. I find the whole mod idea pretty sweet, basically taking a game that works and enhancing it, adding to it, or just plain changing it into a completely different game. It's like getting a bunch of free expansions on an old favorite.
So at first I wanted to make a thread where you can recommend me some mods for Half Life 2 (which I plan to be purchasing via the Orange Box in the near future), but now I'd like to take it a little further and ask for mod recommendations on other PC games. I know there's a big community for HL2 (both singleplayer and multiplayer) and Oblivion (mainly adding new textures and monsters), but what other PC games have a healthy supply of mods? The only other one I'm familiar with is a Matrix mod for Max Payne.
Please recommend as many mods as you can, or a repository where I can start downloading them.
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Now this is very important. Please, please include links to any mods you want to suggest.
I also have pretty much no idea of how to install/uninstall mods (please don't laugh) and I end up getting a mate to do it for me. I would very much like to learn for myself.
http://halflife2.filefront.com/file/HalfLife_2_Minerva_Metastasis;83319
For oblivion, there's a thread all about mods for it, I'd suggest checking it out.
Most mods have readmes which tell you how to install/uninstall them
At least that's what I'm hoping for.
And yes, links would be ideal, but so would screenshots and/or videos.
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I actually heard about a pretty interesting Back to the Future mod for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, but I don't think it's out of late alpha/early beta and the author gets really irritated about people asking him when it's finished.
You could check out www.moddb.com, though. The entire site is a repository for the kind of user-created goodness you're looking for.
EDIT: Installing HL2 mods is dead easy, because the ones I've played come with installers.
Actually, that reminds me that there was a pretty good mod that ran on the original Half Life engine. Now I have to think of the name. -- Wait, it was Poke646. The sequel was Poke646: Vendetta.
Come to think of it, I also played Cargo Cult's Someplace Else on the HL engine, which was good (if bloody difficult).
In terms of production values, how far have mods come? Voice acting? Original music? Graphics? Just for reference's sake.
I also hope the majority of these mods support gamepads, because I'm still not a fan of the keyboard/mouse control scheme.
Also, is there certain restrictions on what games could or couldn't be modded? Could we, for example, see a bunch of Gears of War mods, or is that too much of a graphical powerhouse to attempt? I also don't see many mods for RPGs like FFVII (on PC), aside from texture packs and such.
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Activating mods themselves also depends on the game. Mod-friendly games will often allow you to select the mods to activate right from the main game menu. Mods with installers may also create shortcuts on your Start menu to boot it up directly. Oblivion allows you to select multiple plugins from the data configuration utility. Source mods for Half-Life and co. will appear right on Steam as third-party modifications.
I can't link, but off the top of my head I can heartily reccomend:
Half-Life 1: They Hunger, Outlaws, and DarkStar One if for some reason you haven't played them, being zombie apocalypse/western/space sci-fi respectively. Most of these are .exe's, but they don't alter the core game so you can pick it up again after installing them.
System Shock 2: None specific, but there are some high-res graphic packs and custom campaigns going around, worth checking out
Freelancer: There was a big fancy Star Wars mod that had a pretty active online , as well as a whole bunch of other neat mods and tweaks worth checking. Lancer's Reactor is the place to go for this.
Half-Life 2: I believe that there's a big zombie multiplayer mod for this (or maybe Counter-Strike) that was along the lines of a SWAT vs. Zombies thing, as well as a different one where players can control entire zombie hordes against other human players. Can't give many specifics on this, though.
It goes to great lengths to scare the shit out of you and sometimes it succeeds. If you decide you like Half Life horror mods you should also try They Hunger trilogy which is one of the best sp mods for the game, I hear.
I'm now trying a mod called Paranoia which seems to be a realistic shooter mod set in the Russian military. I'll post impressions later.
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It depends if the original game does or doesn't support gamepads, though that doesn't really matter if you use something like JoyToKey that maps keyboard commands to your gamepad. Whether that handles well at all is a different question, though.
The number of mods (and thus the number of quality mods) is largely based on how easy it is to create and install mods. Oblivion and Morrowind, for example, make it extremely easy, because when you buy the game you get The Elder Scrolls Toolkit in the same box, which is basically what the devs used to make the game. The Orange Box comes with the Source SDK, which (depending on the games you have installed) can make mods and use resources from any game in the pack.
Sometimes I Stream Games: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/italax-plays-video-games
Holy crap. That has better graphics than the original game. Does a project like that really run without any bugs or anything?
Also yes, I am very interested in horror related mods, as there's been a bit of a dry period for console horror games.
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I also really hope that UT3's mod community on PS3 will be the start of user-created mods appearing on more console games. I don't see why developers don't embrace the idea, since it basically means that people will keep playing their games for years and years.
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Sometimes I Stream Games: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/italax-plays-video-games
Jawesome list of source engine mods in the OP of that thread.
Filefront also has sites dedicated to particular games - like http://halflife2.filefront.com/ - that will often have spotlights on big mods, or you can just browse the mods by category and sort by the highest downloads.
Half life 2 mods are plentiful... Im not as hip on that scene as I was with Half Life 1 mods (Battlegrounds FTW!) but I'm sure there are entire websites dedicated to such things.
It's like Call of Duty light which I think is the highest compliment I could give a realistic war mod. The only problem is that there are some graphical issues but that could simply be my computer.
Highly recommended unless I see a drastic drop in quality.
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See http://www.pocketplane.net/mambo/
It's gotten a lot hard to do over the years, but you should know that BG2 mods are of the variety that if something does go wrong or you do something you shouldn't, they can and will break your game. An increasingly large number of checks and better tools have made it pretty unlikely to happen if you don't try to screw around with things too much yourself, though.
Best way to sum it up is as Deus Ex multiplayer. They have released a single player level that works as a tutorial to the game. There is also some easter egg in it relating to some other cyberpunk story that I have never read.
Quick summary. You have 3 classes (light, medium, heavy), each class has 4 weapons (ranges from sniper type to large damage amounts, each class also gets different amounts of space for implants (lights get most space, heavies get least space).
Maps are broken down into a series of objectives, each objective requiring a certain amount of decking (hacking with a cyber implant) to complete. You can always see a glowing icon indicating where the object is and when you put the targeting reticle over it, you can see more information about it.
Each map requires a certain amount of teamwork and coordination to win. Not every objective requires decking but decking can make it easier and you will always need backup to make sure you are not stabbed in the back of the head while decking.
Red team is punks and blue is Corp. They each have their own models for their classes so less friendly fire incidents.
More on the website, there is always a full server going. Heavy production on this mod with its own voice acting.
I'm looking around, but it looks like all the mirrors for Metastasis 2 were nuked when the complete package came out. 2 was the last version you could play without Ep1.
Maybe there's a version sitting around dusty on a server somewhere, but I'm having trouble finding it.
Try hitting up the OB donation thread?
If you're interested in trying something like this out, I'd be happy to point you to any modding resources for the games you own. Though, I mostly mod RTS or ancient games so depending on what you've got, I may or may not be familiar with it's resources.
while were on the subject, i wanted to try Garrys Mod for source games, but i can only find version 10. can you not download older versions for free anymore? i thought v9 was left for people who didnt want to pay?
My Backloggery
Quake Rally - Quake as an arcade racer with guns! Amazing fun over a lan
Quake Slide - A hoverboard game where you can spin and jump and also mow friends down!
Reaper Bots - No friends? Then play deathmatch against these fantastic AI bots. The guy responsible moved on to do the AI in several High Budget games
Painkeep - Still one of my favourite ever deathmatch experiences. Keeps the basic Quake look and feel but changes each and every weapon! Adds bear traps, sentry guns, a chain lightning gun (see a bunch of people fighting, fire a shot in to the middle and lightning will spring out to each one!) and favourite of all, the gravity well. Pick it up, chuck it in a room and RUN LIKE HELL. Anything nearby gets sucked in to it. It also had neat features like a level vote, where you start in a central room and each player runs in to a level portal. The portal that gets the most people in it is the next level played!
Quake Chess - Does what it says on the tin! Battlechess but with Quake bad guys. Awesome.
Air Quake - Take to the skies in helicopters and planes and blow the crap out of people!
Alien Quake - Was forcibly taken down for breaking copyright laws but is still floating around. A very good Total Conversion creating an Alien (Ie HRG xenomorph aliens) game that rivalled any that were out at the time.
So yeah, I'm horribly horribly out of date with mods, but when I can I still like to get a LAN game of Quake 1 going and bung Painkeep on!
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
My PC is up to speed now, I just need to buy Orange Box for PC. I'm trying to look for a real cheap price, preferably $20-$30, but the cheapest I'm seeing is $37 after shipping on Ebay. I already bought the game once for the 360, and I spent a crapload of money on upgrading, so my budget's a bit tight for now.
Also, I've read that there are a few texture packs for HL2. Are any of them worth looking into? A friend says the majority are crap and put Alyx in a tank top with bigger tits.
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It makes things much simpler if you want to play it or Oblivion like that, do the balancing on paper and then make your plugin accordingly.
I should do that with my current charming hooker incase I try again on a new computer and I find a prostitution mod for Morrowind that I like (romance mod wouldn't let me be bisexual and pimp myself and always gave me an exquisite shirt after wards :P)
With Source mods, you should be able to start them up from steam if you installed them right. If they don't show up right away, close steam and login again and steam should find them.
Most total conversion mods require you to reinstall if you want to play the full game and i think that is the same for texture packs. Plugins (which are most source mods IIRC) shouldn't require you to reinstall. But most of what I just said depends on the game and the way the mod was created for it. More than likely you will have to reinstall if the mod overwrites core game files.
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Gmod 9 isn't really worth getting. Apart from the fact that it's missing loads of neat new features the multiplayer servers are full of people who either can't afford version 10 or think Garry "sold out" and won't buy it. Better to pony up the $10 for the latest version, especially if you have the Orange Box, since an update came out today allowing you to use the new stuff from it, like TF2 and Portal models.
Also, if you want System Shock 2 missions I HIGHLY recommend anything by the mapper Christine (http://www.thiefmissions.com/search.cgi?search=%2bauthor=Christine%20Schneider#m). Her first major mission, Ponterbee Station (http://www.thiefmissions.com/info.cgi?m=PonterbeeStation), is fully voice-acted, several maps and hours long and in some places better than the base game. Ponterbee Station certainly feels more like a spaceship than the Von Braun did. I hear good things about the others but I haven't played em yet.