Good Single Player Mods/missions for Half Life 2

Games
1

EDIT: Here are the mod recommendations so far:

Awakenings (Intro + 5 levels)
Cinematic Mod (Final version 10 RC released) - Facelift for HL2, Ep1 and Ep2
Dear Esther (Interactive Story)
Half Life 2: Substance Gold (Combining HL2 and Metal Gear Solid characters)
Iris (Concept Prototype for adventure game)
Korsakovia (“mixes the abstract story-driven experience of Dear Esther with more traditional gameplay”)
Minerva: Metastasis (Now Complete! Half Life 2: Episode 1 is required for this mod)
Post Script (Exploration mod, requires HL2: Episode 2)
Radiator Short Story mods (requires HL2: Episode 2)
Riot Act
Rock24 (prison facility)
Ravenholm
Research and Development (HL2: Ep2 is required for this mod)
SMOD(download site) - more info here.
SMOD-Tactical. (Variation of SMOD featuring realistic weapons)
Stanley Parable. Free singleplayer HL2 mod. You only need Source SDK installed. Recommended by RPS.

Adding Portal mods to the list:
RenTest - probably the best downloadable Portal maps right now.
Portal Maps - site with a bunch of fan-made maps.

Hi everyone. I noticed on Bluesnews a couple of days ago that a new mod came out for Half Life 2 called Awakenings. I’ve been meaning to check out single player mods for Half Life 2 eventually, so I thought, why not start with this one?

Before I get to my troubles with getting the mod to work, I also thought this would be a great thread to find out if anyone here at QuarterToThree has any other single player mods they recommend. Or even if they know a website which makes finding good single player mods easy.

EDIT: Since my problem has been ‘solved’, the rest of this post is now in italics (size tags seem to be disabled in this forum).

[i]Now, to my problem with Awakenings: The instructions said to put the contents of the zip file in the /Steam/SteamApps/SourceMods/ directory. And then to restart Steam. It said that if I didn’t have the Source SDK Base installed, Steam would automatically install it when I restarted.

So I unzipped. And I restarted Steam. Nothing got installed automatically. So I installed Source SDK Base myself.

Then I tried starting awakenings from my games list (it shows up as a third party mod, and you can “launch game”). The error I got was “This game is currently unavailable. Please try again at another time”.

So then I thought, maybe I need to install Half Life 2, since its a Half Life 2 mod. At least, I think it is. (I only had Half Life 2: Episode 1 installed at the time). So then I downloaded Half Life 2. I tried launching Awakenings. Same error. So then I tried installing Half Life: Source. Same error. I installed Half Life. Same error.

Then I thought, maybe I needed to install Half Life 2, and THEN extract awakenings to the right folder, and then restart Steam. So I tried that. Wrote over the old files for awakenings, then restarted Steam. Got the same error.

Does anyone have any experience with third party mods? I’m probably just not doing something basic that the mod-maker assumes I’ve already done, something really stupid. Any idea what it could be? Maybe I need to play the original Half Life 2 first? Or something?[/i]

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I’ve just installed the lot via Steam, so I’ll give this installation a go. I have
HL2, Ep. 1, HL2 MP and both base and full SDKs. Just in case. I have no idea
what the difference is :)

3

I saw that mod the other day as well, and it installed as described, without a hitch. HL2 was previously installed, so I dropped the Awakenings directory under into the Sourcemods folder. Starting Steam, I noticed Awakenings was now present on the Steam games menu, and the SDK was automatically installed when I attempted to run the mod. Once the SDK install completed, I re-attempted the Awakenings launch and it worked just fine. Haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but the opening intro looked cool, albeit with terrible voice acting.

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It took a few retries before it launched. Exit, restart Steam, try again.

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Thanks for trying it out guys. I tried exiting/restarting, even rebooting a few times now, and still no luck. I always get the same error (try again later). I got so desperate that I even tried installing Half Life 2: Deathmatch, but no love there either.

I guess Awakenings just won’t ever work for me.

Are there any other mods I could try? I’m pretty sure some old issues of CGM used to mention Half Life 2 single player mods sometimes, but I can’t remember what they were.

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Anyone know the status of that Black Mesa mod that’s supposed to port Half Life over to the Half Life 2 engine?

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Apparently, they’re still working on it. A good one to keep an eye on. Although I did fire up Half Life: Source again, just to confirm that they’ve now switched to the higher resolution textures from Blue Shift. And indeed they have. HL: Source doesn’t look like complete shite anymore.

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Minerva: Metastasis is pretty cool.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/MINERVA

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Thanks KristianV! I just downloaded and extracted, and it runs properly, and looks really intriguing so far.

Now I’m really beginning to wonder why Awakenings doesn’t work.

Also: Minerva uses text to tell the story instead of voice acting, which is probably a good choice.

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Aha! I found a cure, hopefully this will help if anyone else has trouble.

I tried running Minerva: Metastasis again, this time through Steam’s games window just like I did with Awakenings. And it gave me the same error every time. Since the game launched fine through a desktop shortcut, I tried making a desktop shortcut for Awakenings too, but it gave me an error, saying there was probably already a desktop shortcut on my desktop.

So I deleted the Minerva desktop shortcut and created one for Awakenings. And it worked fine. So whenever I want to launch one of the two mods, first I have to delete the old desktop shortcut, create a new one, and then launch the game through that.

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Weird error. Report it.

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MINERVA kicks ass and is of high quality. Too bad it isn’t finished yet though. I wanted to keep going…down.

Das Roboss was merely okay. The end has you on a giant mech type thing that is pretty freakin’ stupid/weird.

Ones I haven’t played that look good:

Rock24
Ravenholm

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Rock8man make sure that the pathing looks like

C:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\SourceMods\Awakening\cfg

just one Awakening not HL2_awakening that line is with the cfg folder open in xp. Sometimes mods extrat so thatit looks like C:\Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\SourceMods\Awakening\Awakening\cfg that will usually result in a fail.

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How about we make a list of all good-and-high quality HL2 single player/multi player mods (that are actually out and more than a tech demo) and put em here?

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This is a good thread.

(I suppose I could have just subscribed to it.)

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Sure, I’ll modify my original post as people keep adding recommendations.

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I’ve played for about half an hour into Awakenings, and so far its really good. Like Mono mentioned, the voice acting in the intro is not great, but it sets up the scenario just fine. I always play Half Life games on Hard, which seems to be equivalent to medium difficulty in a lot of games.

My one wish at the end of Half Life 2 was that after I finished, I wish I had unlocked a new difficulty above Hard, which would make a second time through HL2 more interesting.

So far, Awakenings on Hard is really hard. I love it. The scenarios I’ve come upon already are really tough. Probably as tough as, if not tougher than, anything encountered in Half Life 2. So if you don’t want it to be too difficult, you might want to start on Medium.

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I remember reading sometime ago that someone was making they hunger source, is there any news on that?

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They Hunger: Lost Souls is supposedly going to be a commercial release, not a free mod. It does look promising though. Hopefully if the price is around $5 or so, it might be worth buying. It’s apparently still in the alpha stage. No releases yet.

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Really? Is it just the textures, or does it include the new models and weapon sounds?