After 5 months of on-and-off work, Spec Ops: Eternal Penance has released! As mentioned in the previous news post, it was a real touch-and-go sort of situation, so I'm glad I got everything in working order. I'm excited to see what players make of the new atmosphere, guns, and enemies!
Players used to playthroughs of SO:TL will have to learn new strategies and methods for survival, particularly with automatic weapons being less common and ammo being scarcer. Underpowered guns like the M9 and W1300 have new leases on life with improved range and damage values, while stronger weapons like the P90 have gotten some nerfs to keep them competitive but less-overpowering.
Multiplayer stats are not affected by this mod, so you can hop right into a Chaos/Attrition/etc. match without issue. The guns will still have their different appearances, but that's the only real change to carry over. No need to worry about guns suddenly being underpowered or overpowered if you play the game for its MP modes!
Everything has been organized to make installation easy. It helps that Spec Ops actually has some support for modded UPK files in its DLC1 folder, allowing the game to prioritize modded files in custom folders there without overwriting the regular game's files. The only exception is the SRGame file, which must be overwritten no matter what. In theory, this would also make uninstalling the mod less taxing - just remove or delete the Eternal Penance folder, restore the original files in My Games/SpecOps-TheLine, and have Steam verify the game's files.
When finishing a project like this, one of the first questions that comes to my mind is "what now?" It's a tricky thing to answer. I've tossed around some concepts, particularly involving the co-op levels, but I don't have any immediate plans to pursue another large-scale mod like this. I would prefer to focus on smaller projects, like seeing how some seemingly unused weapon stats work or trying to import the MP-exclusive weapons into the campaign. We'll see how those go.
For now, I'm just going to kick back and have some fun with the mod. I hope you all will do the same!
-Yossarian
I'll give you my thoughts on this, as soon as I get around to it since I got personal things to do first. I'm sure you spent ages working on something like this.
It took a lot of patience and perseverance, that's for sure! I'm excited to see what you think about it. No rush, though!