Resurgence: The Union mod for Half-Life 2

Hello there. Yes we’re still alive, against all odds. This year’s August update nearly didn’t come to fruition but it’s only fair for us to share with you what’s the state of the development at the moment, so let’s get straight to it.

As you know, we’ve been planning a large community update for quite a long time at this point. It has been delayed countless times and it seems like that trend is never going to end. Sadly this year is no exception despite our plans when we have entered the new decade earlier few months ago. Despite the efforts to finally escape the development hell we’ve been living in for years, a global crisis struck which to be entirely honest – did affect our productivity.

We have also found ourselves questioning our workflow as it became apparent that our no-deadline policy we’ve been adopting for a long time now – whilst providing a lot of breathing room for the developers – ultimately may have caused more harm than good. To make it clear: the game is in various stages of being done, some departments are falling behind the others which slows the progress towards our milestone goals and ultimately causes a logistical apocalypse. Because of this, we’ve agreed to rework our way of handling business, changes which are still yet to come to fruition as this summer has also caused a massive drought in progress in our team.

In short: we haven’t been able to make progress on the game evenly, because of this we are still not ready to properly showcase what we have developed so far. There is a lot in the pipeline, and with the small team it takes extra time to polish the content that is being made.

On the upside – whilst it is unlikely that we will make it on time to deliver the big update before the end of 2020, we did still make a fair bit of progress on the main campaign of the game. There are quite a few new features which are going to help to further distinguish Resurgence as its own product separate from the basic Half-Life 2 modifications.

We have also made one big change to the way the game will be distributed. As you remember, a few years ago we’ve made a difficult decision to switch from releasing a full campaign at launch to 5-part episodic format. This year, we’ve made a decision to turn the 5 episode structure into 3 episodes. This way, the story will seem less convoluted and it will be easier to follow as each episode will have its own one-off protagonist. We’re not really shortening the game, merely merging a couple of chapters into one episode – originally we have planned to have 5 episodes with two to three chapters each, now we’re going to have 3 episodes with four to five chapters each so nothing is being cut really – just simplifying the structure.

To leave you off with something other than a wall of text – a couple of years back we did look at the history of the (undeniably rocky) development of this project. One location that has survived through all incarnations of Resurgence is a place called Clymenus Compound (ohhh, mystery!) Above you can see how it changed its appearance throughout the years, and how we have incorporated your feedback in the most recent version (mixing industrial design with a bit of nature from early versions).

Thank you for taking your time to read and for your patience, we will return with next blog post either closer to the end of this year or very early next year – and this time with more positive news (fingers crossed!).

Take care and stay safe!