April 1st - Skill Showcase: Driver I/II news - Firearms: Source mod for Half-Life 2

Hi folks, today we are finally ready to reveal to you the biggest shake-up to Firearms gameplay that you’re ever likely to see. In order to strengthen the mod and give something unique to you all we have been working hard behind the scenes these past months to implement a feature that we're sure you'll all welcome. We are proud to announce our latest addition the Firearms, the new skills Driver I and Driver II. Adding drivable vehicles to Firearms Source was no easy task, and we decided the best way to implement them, was to make it a skill that the players can earn. Now, make yourselves comfortable and prepare to feast your eyes on what we've achieved so far and how we got where we are today. I will be going through the design process starting from the first vehicle prototype.

When we first began to include the vehicles, they were not planned to be part of a skill, but the vehicles would just be placed in the map to begin with. Our first addition was the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, which seemed like a perfect choice, as it both included weaponry and armor. However, one of its set back was its maneuverability which we felt balanced out nicely. As we tested the Bradley, we noticed that it was much overpowered as the cannon ripped through groups of rushers on the bridge of Durandal.

That is when we decided to ditch the armaments on the vehicles. We switched over to the M35 Deuce and a Half. We felt the Deuce was a nice design choice, though is still lacked maneuverability. Many Firearms Source maps rely on chokepoints, which tend to be narrow areas that make driving a truck through very difficult. We liked the fact the Deuce and a Half could also be made into a troop carrier, but its large size we had to think smaller.

Wanting to keep our troop carrier idea in game, we moved onto a more urban choice, a Toyota pick-up truck. It provided more maneuverability than the M35 Deuce and a Half, but allowed player to sit in the bed of the truck for progressive spawns. Since there were many bugs with the progressive spawning with the Toyota trunk and other balance issues, we again had to throw away another prototype.

Since we felt that the Toyota was very unfitting of a military game, we decided to get back on track. We also ditched the idea of progressive spawning with our vehicles since it was often buggy and ended with a lot of spawn killing. So we kept the vehicles strictly to increase troop movement to the front lines, so what better choice than the Land Rover Defender? It’s medium size seem to fit nicely in the game, but we often found very few people using the vehicles as it really didn’t do anything but provide cover for teammates behind you.

This is when we finally found our perfect vehicle and implementation of vehicles. We decided to add a driver skill and include 2 new vehicles, the Armed Recon Bicycle (w/ Mounted Vollmer) with Driver I and the Armed Recon Tricycle (w/ Mounted MG3). With Driver I, you will be able to use the bicycles in spawn and use the mounted Vollmer on it to gun down enemies while racing for the intel. These light weight vehicles were perfect for maneuvering through the battlefield and have some deep historical background, which you can view at the bottom of this news post. Without further adieu, I present to you the Armed Recon Bike and Armed Recon Trike.

Vehicle Historical Background:

PPAVs (Personnel Powered Assault Vehicles) initially limited action in the Second World War where the French resistance would jury rig Sten guns to their bicycles in order to ambush German patrols in occupied French towns. This unique form of guerilla warfare was never widely adopted though and laid dormant in the minds of military strategists for many until the cold war, where both sides revisited the concept of attaching fully automatic weaponry to bikes, trikes and even in one notable instance - a scooter. This coincided with a unique and indeed somewhat worrying thread of research into threat detection and response by troops whereby military hardware was increasingly disguised as innocuous everyday objects. The vehicles you see here are no exact replicas, but rather game play balanced progressions of the concepts explored by the Russians, British and American forces. The MG trike is loosely based on an American trike system with a suppressed MP5, but for balance purposes we have fitted a heavier weapon to it. The BMX is an expansion of a British design whereby a Bren gun was fitted to a Raleigh grafter - our interpretation is lighter and more maneuverable and re-uses the Vollmer asset that we have already created.