In the following blogs I'll cover two upcoming HL2 mods. In this blog I will cover
World at War; in the next I will cover Firearms 2. Firearms 2 and World at War are two very different mods who share the same background. Both modifications share their backgrounds from the original Firearms modification for Half-Life. Upon the release of Half-Life 2, the original Firearms team announced that they would not make Firearms source and that they'd be transferring over to a new type of game, that being World at War.The Firearms community was still strong and desired a new Firearms for the source engine. Thus, from the player community arose a team which decided to take on the task of producing Firearms for the source engine.
World at War
World at War will be one of the first massive multiplayer modifications for Half-Life 2. It will have Battlefield 2142 feel to it, infantry and and vehicular combat will be a part of the game. WaW will not include air or naval combat, though air strikes can be called in. The gameplay of WaW will revolve around teamplay, to get better weapons, to advance your position and to improve your score will all require one to play as a part of the team. The WaW website describes the general goal of the gameplay as follows:
"Map gameplay will revolve around capturing and defending
CPs:
Control Points. The amount of CPs each team controls determines the amount of Resource Points that every squad on that team is awarded at certain intervals. Also, CPs act as a base of operations. From there, players can spend their Resource Points. Purchased vehicles will be choppered to CPs. Ultimately, squad leaders can spend Resource Points to upgrade their CPs and equip them with artillery, medic facilities, support radios, the ability to respawn there, and more."
A few members of the WaW recently gave an interesting
interview to Planet Half-Life.Much of the team is comprised of the best members from the original Firearms team such as AlejandroDaJ and Sulsa, creators of the most played maps for Firearms. Therefore, I expect WaW to be particularly strong in terms of mapping. The maps in this game will be huge, very similar to that of Battlefield, I'll be interested to see how this game can perform in terms of netcode. Long distances in the Half-Life 2 engine usually present netcode problems.
Finally, the game has an interesting leadership system. Upon joining a team you can chose to create or to join a squad (or to go solo if you wish). Being in a squad provides a player with many benefits due to the CP system. The squad leader(creator) will receive additional benefits and will be crucial to success. World at War appears to be an incredibly intricate and detailed modification. My beef with Firearms was the length between updates, I suspect that this could be an issue with WaW as well. There is no current release date for the mod and as was true for Firearms, it is on a "it will be released when it's done" type of timeline. However, once this mod is completed, I believe it will be a mod which will grow substantially within a short period of time. Next I will cover Firearms 2.
