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PC Games (Games)

Dystopia Mod Released for HL2 46

Posted by Zonk from the a-dark-day-for-gordon-freeman dept.
fistfullast33l writes "Dystopia, a Matrix meets TRON mod for Half Life 2, has finally been released to the public today. This has been one of the more beautiful and original mods under development for HL2 so far. Files are available all over the place but check out their homepage for more details." From the article: "After 9 long months of heavy development and another year of planning and designing before that, it has been a long and challenging road to this point. We're extremely excited to let the public see what we've been so busy working on all this time and hope that you enjoy it as much as we do. This demo version is limited to only 1 map; Vaccine, but features all of our high powered weapons and extensive range of implants."
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Dystopia Mod Released for HL2 More

Dystopia Mod Released for HL2

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  • Matrix meets TRON? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ikkonoishi ( 674762 )
    I thought that the Matrix was already TRON inspired.

    TRON had a better plot at least.

  • Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Satertek ( 708058 ) <brian@satertek.info> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:11AM (#13529688) Homepage
    This mod is amazing. The production values are on par with most (and above many) retail games. Looking forward to its full release.

    • Re:Amazing (Score:2, Informative)

      by ZeroPost ( 792045 )
      I'll second that. Definitely worth a download, as it's the best third party mod out for HL2 now. (Although there isn't much competition...)
      • I'll second that. Definitely worth a download, as it's the best third party mod out for HL2 now.

        Well, I had much more fun with Minerva [hylobatidae.org] and Antlion Troopers [hl2world.com], but I would agree those are not so much mods as sophisticated maps and scripting.

  • This is amazing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mukaikubo ( 724906 ) <gtg430b@pris m . g atech.edu> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @12:13AM (#13529699) Journal
    I've been playing this mod for most of the night, and I have to say I'm absolutely loving it. The balance on the map's a little off, but it's very fun on either side.

    Heavy with minigun = doom

  • *Demo* Version (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, it mentioned at the bottom of the summary in the quote, who but read who reads the whole thing! Slashdot topic titles are worse than Fox news headlines... Impeach Zonk!

  • This may be worth noting. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Elyscape ( 882517 ) <[elyscape] [at] [gmail.com]> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:04AM (#13529876) Homepage
    While noted on the website, the /. post neglected to mention that this is merely a demo. I do not mean to deprecate the Dystopia team's work in any way, but people should bear in mind that this is not yet the finished product.

    • Demo or Beta (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Bios_Hakr ( 68586 )
      So, a demo leads me to belive that the expect people to pay for a finished version. I can't really see myself paying for a mod for a game I already paid $60 for.
      • That's not what I meant. I simply meant that they haven't finished the development process yet. I imagine that it'll be free, upon completion.
      • They put effort into the develpment, so they could ask money for it if they wanted to.

        After all, most sequels to computer games are just "mods" in a a way aren't they, and you don't object to paying for them, do you?

        However, I think they should sell mods as standalone, the concept of selling an add-on for the same money that requires the previous version just doesn't make sense - it is practically asking for abuse.
        • Do you consider Frozen Throne a ripoff for just being an add-on to War3? I think that it added so much that it's absolutely worth the extra money.
        • No, I don't think they can, simply because they're using Valve's code to make their game, without having paid for it.

          This is obviously fine with Valve (hell, why wouldn't it be, it adds to the value of their game for no cost), but it wouldn't be ok if they were selling it, and Valve would have good grounds to sue them for profiting off their code.
          • The point is they put work into it, and they control the sources to their game, so yes, they can ask money for it.

            Whether Valve asks them for a part of the money, or whether they make them release the game under the GPL is up to Valve. As you wrote yourself, its up to Valve, and Valve seems to be fine with it

            By the way, you are still allowed to ask money for programs under the GPL, it is just harder to continue finding people who pay your price.
      • Yeah, all these game developers do is mod the DirectX libraries. Why should I have to pay?
         

    • Re:This may be worth noting. (Score:5, Informative)

      by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbender AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @07:24AM (#13530726)
      The developers say:
      Dystopia will always be free if you're running it on top of HL2.


      We've called our first release a demo because we wanted people to realise that we've got a far more polished and stable release than a normal mod beta. Dystopia has been in a closed beta for 6 months now, and the demo release is being released to the public to let everyone get a taste of Dystopia.

  • A cyberpunk game? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Evil Couch ( 621105 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @01:58AM (#13530031) Homepage
    Sign me up!

    While this game doesn't look as deep as I'd like to see from a cyberpunk setting, the graphics are really well done and it seems as though they've put a great deal of work into getting the one map that they have really well set up. It looks to have a fair amount of depth, as far as team-based FPSes go.

    The fact that they actually have deckers and allow for the deckers to be put to good use in cyberspace makes for a really great concept.

    I don't know why the article summary references the Matrix. Shadowrun and other cyberpunk sources are clearly much bigger influences on the development team. Their portrayal of cyberspace does look a lot like TRON 2.0, though.

  • MP ONLY (Score:3, Informative)

    by dbhankins ( 688931 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @02:24AM (#13530092)
    So that those who prefer SP games don't get their hopes up,

    IT'S MULTIPLAYER ONLY

    Not that that little nugget's on the front page or the Slashdot article summary... at least it's on the About page near the top.

    • Re:MP ONLY (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @05:46AM (#13530543) Homepage
      So that those who prefer SP games don't get their hopes up,

      IT'S MULTIPLAYER ONLY

      Of course, if you want some single-player HL2, there's always my episodic MINERVA [hylobatidae.org] (less cryptic site [valvesoftware.com]), which had its first chapter released just over a week ago.

      And yes, the first map is a bit of a homage to Halo's Silent Cartographer (it was originally nicknamed 'Flatulent Geographer' for a start), but they should all come with a liberally Marathon-flavoured dollop of mystery and intrigue, through text messages sent by an unnamed third party which guide, goad and cajole the player through the story.

      Entirely different approach to Dystopia too: while they've got some immensely talented modellers, texture artists, sound engineers etc., I'm repurposing existing HL2 content for my own needs. There is some new music, but that was an unexpected gift from someone who really liked the look of the mod when first publicised by Valve themselves [steampowered.com]. Everything else is done by me - it's the closest you'll get to a one-man mod these days... ;-)

      Still, there's half-an-hour to an hour of gameplay there, so do have fun!
      • Oddly, this is familiar to me, as if it were from and old dream... but I can't exactly remember...

        Accepting singular transmission with bated breath.
  • The gameplay is very similar Planetside. 3 Armor types, Light, Medium, Heavy. With scaled guns and abilities ( ie Light can Cloak, only Light and Med can hack ). Hack a point and spawn at/near it once hacked. Very much like planetside but smaller scale. and no lag/zerg.

    But its a pretty game, cool graphics. But plays much like any other Team Deathmatch game.
    • Okay, obviously you know nothing about Planetside and probably played it for your free week.

      First off, the minutiae of planetside is similar on paper. Yes, you have three armor classes. Yes you have kind of the same guns. Yes, there is cloaking and meds and so on.

      However, you say "smaller scale." That's the key to Planetside! At a small scale it's going to be very similar to games like Natural Selection and this. But on a larger scale there is a huge strategy in play constantly determining which base

  • Dystopia, my take. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kindgott ( 165758 ) <[soulwound] [at] [godisdead.com]> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @02:33AM (#13530116) Journal
    I downloaded Dystopia around the hour it came out, and jumped into a server as soon as one with an empty slot became available. While it doesn't have a unique concept, it's a fairly decent mod, so far.

    Releasing this as a demo may have been a mistake for the team, since there are a bit of "known issues" that cause the game to crash, or just slightly inconvenience people. In the day or so I've had it, the mod has crashed no less than eight times. Perhaps they should have called it a "public beta" instead. Another interesting issue I had come across was a server on which the doors on the level had more kills than the players.

    Teamplay, like on most internet games, is hit or miss. When you've got a good team that's working together, it's awesome. When you have a bunch of idiots that are doing things like monopolizing the hack points without knowing what they're doing, it's infuriating.

    The following forum post on their site, here [dystopia-game.com], gives me an uneasy feeling. I don't think the game merits a retail release, and fear if they license the Source engine it will be doomed to failure instead of being an enjoyable mod for anyone to enjoy. Most people I've talked to on servers do not forsee Dystopia being worth buying if it is not released as a free modification.

    Is Dystopia good? Yes. Can it be a lot of fun? Most certainly. But it has its problems which I hope can be hammered out between now and its "real" release.

  • Better than NS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AngryScot ( 795131 )
    This is the best mod since natural selection was released on 2001. I think there could be a few changes to let you know whats going on in cyber space but other than that I love it :D
  • Is there a list of HL2 mods anywhere? I'd like to play something like the Aliens Total Conversion that came out for Doom all those years ago.

    I'll check the MINERVA one mentioned in a post above when I get home.

  • Why do graphics that are supposed to simulate being "Jacked In" always look so lame?

    If, in the year 2005, we already have games which look nearly photo-realistic... ...in what possible future will a human-computer interface take a graphical step backwards to look like bad sci-fi movies from the early 80's?

    Wouldn't being "Jacked In" look ... well... sort of like Half-Life at least?
  • Update released for the demo, fixes many bugs etc, check the website http://dystopia-game.com/ [dystopia-game.com]

    -Fixed several crash bugs in server and in client -Bumping into a stationary team mate will push them a bit (this is to prevent people blocking spawn doors as heavies) -Added voicecomms spam protection -Added support for mp_autoteambalance (on by default) -Added dys_voicecomm_globals_silent convar, so you can disable the audio on global voice comms (eg. "I don't think so sister!") -Added dys_iff convar, to disabl

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