Half-Life: Absolute Zero - Now Available in Active Development news

Yeah, yeah it is…

It’s hard to believe that it IS out, I’ve been working on it for so long that I’m honestly in shock that it is out. Obviously, it is not quite done, just a little pink in the middle…

Eh, who am I kidding, it’s raw. You guys now get to see the final months of development live, every up and every down. This ride is going to be a bumpy one, so strap in! Once you’re on Half-Life: Absolute Zero’s wild ride, there’s no getting off of it.

All kidding aside, yeah Half-Life: Absolute Zero is now available to download and to play, so be it in an early capacity. We’ve been putting our all into this project for several years and we do genuinely hope that you’ll enjoy what’s there and what’s to come. Of course, certain chapters will be rough around the edges and won’t be representative of the final product or even Half-Life’s original designs. Certain chapters are already being reworked from the ground up that will hopefully be more accurate to what Valve had originally intended and be more fun than what’s actually in the mod itself. These revised chapters will be released when they’re in a more completed and playable form in those milestone updates I mentioned in the prior update.

Obviously, I should preface and say that Half-Life: Absolute Zero is NOT fully an accurate representation of what Half-Life would have been in back in development. We have to go off of a lot of old previews of Half-Life and read what was revealed to the public about the game and go off of screenshots (and even in some cases, try to figure out what certain screenshots even belonged to.) This mod is all relying on what information has been archived and had been said in the past. There’s a lot of cases that we have to guess and hypothesize what Valve had intended based upon screenshots, information, and even leftovers in the map sources.

Along with that, we’re not out here replicating (most) bugs seen with-in the beta and we’re even trying to fix bugs with the final game. We’re trying to develop this ideal version of Half-Life if they committed to what they had made up until E3 1998 and decided to focus on cleaning up the game.

You can download it directly on Steam!

So why exactly are we not uploading it to ModDB? Well, it will be uploaded to ModDB in due time but right now we will be pushing out constant active development, which Steam provides a much better platform for you to access the mod and keep it maintained and up to date. We would rather not ship something here that will likely require you to come back daily for the latest bugfix or new content that has been added to the mod.

The mod WILL be uploaded onto ModDB on October 12th, when it hits the 1.0 version! Along with every bugfix for that version. We only target two versions of the Half-Life client, which is the original retail release from 1998 (the WON client) and the Steam versions before the 2013 updates that came with the new Steampipe system. If you are using the Steam version then you’re likely to just get it off of Steam anyway and if you’re still using the WON version then we would still suggest you to wait a bit before you want to sit down and play the modification. If you can’t wait and you gotta have it now, nothing is stopping you from somehow downloading the Steam release and mounting the mod directory into the WON client.

If you’re on any client that wasn’t mentioned above, then Half-Life: Absolute Zero doesn’t officially support it and we can’t guarantee any stability or for it to work flawlessly. We don’t target those versions of the engine and we can guarantee that Half-Life: Absolute Zero does not work correctly on the current live Steam release engine and definitely does not work on Xash3D Android.

Right now, a lot of maps are from November 2018. We did take the time to compile all of our map revisions from 2019 but however, there’s some strange issues with the maps that prevents us from releasing all of the latest revisions. A lot of the chapters with the strange issues are maps that are already deep into getting full reworks, so to spend time fixing up old revisions of the maps instead of finishing up the latest revisions isn’t in our best interest, especially since there’s not much major changes between the versions from 2018 and the versions from 2019.

The first of our revised chapters will be available from the start! We decided to clean up “The Portal Device” first as it’s the chapter from our original demo that is the closest to the original as we could get it. With tons of previews of it and even the blueprints of the first map, we were able to get it as close to the original as possible even back in the demo! Now, that doesn’t mean it's all roses and daisies. Being one of the earlier chapters we got playable, it's full of strange mapping mistakes and artifacts from using a very early version of J.A.C.K. So… We took the time to go ahead and clean up the map. Now, there’s still things to be addressed as there’s certain sequences that aren't complete and are just placeholders so we can get it playable.

It won’t be a carbon copy of what you found in the demo, as there’s sections that have changed majorly since the demo. Such as the laser hallway being completely removed from the map!

Half-Life: Absolute Zero is our love letter to Valve Software’s Half-Life. We’ve learnt a lot from Half-Life and the game means a lot to us.

Half-Life has its flaws, but for every flaw it has, Half-Life has done something that has completely changed the landscape of the first-person shooter as a whole and for it to be all from Valve’s first try at a game, man… People wish they could create a genre defining game in their first swing.

Half-Life gave us the opportunity to learn game development and gave us the tools to do so. We’ve deconstructed Half-Life so much with the project that we know so many little quirks and details about the game that no normal person should know. We hope to be able to use what we’ve learnt with Half-Life: Absolute Zero and apply them to future projects we plan to work on.

We hope you enjoy Half-Life: Absolute Zero, even if it’s currently not in the best shape right now.