Mod News: Stalking Differently
Hello! Welcome to another week of Mod News. It's probably no secret by now that I like my STALKER un-modded: there's something weirdly beautiful about the ever-so-slightly-broken nature of those games. Except for Clear Sky, but let's pretend that didn't happen. So this mod, this Call of Pripyat total conversion, is catching my eye for doing something other than the standard bugfixes, graphical updates and general rebalancing that mods of GSC's strange series tend to go for. Read on for information on that, and on other tremendous happenings in mods over the past seven days.
NEWS
Way of the Wolf is the first total conversion for Call of Pripyat, supposedly. Delightfully, its developer is hoping to document the complex development process as he plods on through it. Here's a bunch of stuff he's been doing lately, as well as some new information about the mod. It's an exciting one. I'm looking forward to it.
A closed multiplayer beta of Stargate: Adventures in the Galaxy has begun. The team is looking for testers to eradicate a load of bugs from this upcoming Men of War mod, so if you're interested, here's where to look.
Speaking of testing, but probably of a different kind, Portal: Deep Chambers has released a charming letter to its community, inviting them to test out the Creative Futures Handheld Portal Device. Commenting on any similarities with technology from Aperture Science can lead to death, so be careful. Is this a suggestion of an imminent release? Who knows? I'll keep an eye open.
Super-shiny Doom 3 mod, the bonkers Thievious, is looking for additional team members to help the thing get made. Are you a programmer, a modeller, an animator or a mapper? Familiar with id Tech 3? Get in touch via the link above, if you fancy.
Along the same lines of crossing Doom 3 with Thief, The Dark Mod has spawned a new custom mission. It's called The Transaction, and it's the fourth release in the Thomas Porter series, following on from third episode The Glenham Tower. Sound interesting? There's a trailer below, and you can grab the mod from here.
RELEASES
The first episode of Half-Life 2 mod Underhell has been released. It's a single-player mod about a police dude whose wife mysteriously dies. He probably ends up shooting some things. I haven't played it yet, but I'm going to, so I'll probably report back next week or something. In the meantime, this is where to get it.
Meanwhile, a short Crysis mod called Dam has been released. The mod's level design is based heavily on GoldenEye's dam level, although Dam drops in a bonkers story about the Crysis 2 leak, it would seem.
And as Dragon Age 2's release arrives, the original game has got a new five-hour-long mod. It's the sequel to Fragments of Ferelden, which I mentioned here before, and while I've not played it, because my copy of Dragon Age is for a console toy, it's supposedly rather good. The BioWare Social Network is where you'll find it.
UPDATES
Goodness, we're going back in time here. Here's a mod for Daggerfall called DaggerXL, which updates a whole load of assets and engine stuff to make things prettier. This particular update adds back in the explorable dungeons. It's great to see people still working away on mods for older games. Grab DaggerXL from here if you agree.
And version 6.9 (six point nine! That's a lot of versions) of DarthMod Empire has been plonked onto the internet. This Empire: Total War mod attempts to fix all the stuff the team felt was wrong with the original, and this latest update primarily optimises the AI, by the looks of things - which, as any Total War fan will tell you, is something that Empire was pretty much in dire need of, despite being otherwise excellent. ModDB has the download you desire.
There's also HL2 mod Blade Symphony, which has added a new game type as well as a new type of map. All the details are over here, should you be interested.
AND THE REST
I guess this isn't really about a mod any more, but since a big chunk of it is about Dear Esther's journey from mod to indie, I reckon this big feature I wrote is still relevant enough to link to.
'Til next time, humans.