This review basically sums up my opinions of this map. Very good but kind've a 1-2 session map. Just after one night I quit and the next I had to think for a second to get my bearings. I don't blame the original map dev for not modelling the original zombie skins as that would've been allot of effort but I completely agree with there being WAY too much ammo for all the guns. I think a simple fix would be to limit how much ammo you can carry and cut the ammo drops in half.
Even if there is no counter on how many Items and ribbons you collected I will say I found the Ink ribbon system to be very cool. Overall a very cool map considering its a HL2 mod. Would be cool if there was a side B map.

Hey guys! I'm not the person who made this mod - all I did was port it over to Workshop and make sure nothing was broken along the way - but I appreciate the feedback nonetheless, and felt you might find some of my thoughts interesting, since I'm a bit of a Hammer hobbyist and know a little about how things work.

I'm not intending this to be a "defense of the map" or a debate, it's just my thoughts in regards to what points you brought up.

And there no bugs about purple textures, sounds working right, entities are not messed up. Just run&play. There are no need to troubleshoot anything that actually surprised me, because in many MANY cases you have to tinker something to make this work. But there - everything just works.

I really appreciate that, because that was my primary goal when uploading this to the workshop. I wasn't expecting HL2 to get a workshop, so when I saw it, I dropped what I was doing and set out to see if I could make it work, because I wanted it to be something you could just click a button on and play with barely any effort required. And while it took some finagling with the workshop system to get there - they didn't provide much documentation - I'm very happy I was able to get everything to "just work" right out of the box like that.

Granted, there were some hiccups, like a few issues people had with reflections not working so they'd have to turn their settings down to compensate. But nothing too major.

I just subscribed to all content needed to make this mod work. But i'm guessing that you have to unsubscribe from it to prevent conflicts between mods. Or you will have a situation like where your armory in HL2 is resident evil swep. Or you can just disable them from Extras in menu, that can be handy in lots of ways.

As it turns out, Half Life 2 does something neat with Workshop content. If you bundle custom assets together with maps and upload it as a "Campaign", then you don't have to worry about it overwriting other maps! For example, this mod has the pistol ammo reskinned to look like ammo boxes from Resident Evil. If you have the mod in your list but load another map or go into the regular Half Life 2 maps, you won't see those. That's because the custom content doesn't load unless you're playing one of the campaign maps that they shipped with. This is super handy because it means mappers can be free to modify whatever textures/models/sounds they want, and keep it to only modify their maps and not other people's!

Of course, you can instead choose "Content" instead of "Campaign" which goes on its own separate ordered list, and those DO modify any and all maps you run.

If you were looking at my RE2S collection of items, I tried my best to make it plain - if your only goal is to play the RE2 maps, the first main item is the only thing you need, full stop, nothing else. The other items - the weapons and zombie - are not meant for the RE2 maps, they're uploaded as "Content" so you can use them in other maps if you want to. I was mainly encouraged by a couple comments early on of people asking if I could make one of the weapons available to play in other maps, so I made the pack for that purpose. But with just the main package, you get the custom guns when playing RE2 but not on any other map.

It's also worth noting that "Content" overwrites "Campaign" assets, so it's possible to overwrite one of the RE2 guns with a custom one from the Workshop if you want to.

There are too many ammo, i know that is taken from original positions. But finding 20 bullets in one spot for shotgun is overkill. Like if you will shot right, you can kill 20 zombies with it, and i will guess that changing difficulty to Hard "in half-life 2 settings" will not change the result. Like okay, you spawn with almost 0 ammo in mod. And you feel that "survival-horror" element. But after few minutes. You feeling comfortable, just because you now have normal amount of pistol ammo, and sooner you get shotgun. That feeling like a failsafe if you really bad in shooters.

I certainly feel you on this one. The skill setting file lets you change what damage the various ammo types do, and how much of it you can carry, so there's some control there. But strangely, the amount of ammo you get per item pickup is more determined by the difficulty you have on than a config file. For example, you mentioned how 20 shells in a box is overkill. According to the Valve developer wiki, this value does actually change with the difficulty - if you were playing on Hard, you'd only get 12. So the difficulty does change some things, though I can't find any actual comprehensive information on everything it alters, so... it's a bit weird!

It does explain why shotgun ammo goes so hard, because the only real way he could have reduced it further (apart from max carry amount) is place less of them. And that ties into item placement in drawers and hidden spots, because you have to assume that the average player isn't going to find every single box of ammo there is on the map. A meticulous player will find nearly all of it, but others won't. And it's not a great feeling if you get to the minibosses or the last boss right after you save the game and find out you're not carrying enough ammo to take them out. It's a delicate balance. If it came down to placing too much ammo down VS not enough ammo, I think the former is more preferable. But I understand how it can feel strange to have so much ammo in a Resident Evil map, when those games are known for their strategic ammo and resource management.

Don't forget the final boss, either. It's not a complicated fight since it reuses the Antlion Guard, which is a simple "shoot him and don't let him get close enough to claw you". So if you enter that fight with not enough ammo, you're pretty much screwed because killing him with the knife is pure frustration. You could feasibly do it by getting him to charge, then running in and getting a few swings when he's stunned from hitting the wall. But that would take a long, long time, and wouldn't be very fun. So making sure the player can find enough ammo to defeat it without having to scour the entire map for every pickup is important.

All puzzles is "press E to continue". Like i get it, developer just did not wanted to code every puzzle, so he will focus on finishing mod and visual. But its feeling a bit off, because the main point of the resident evil, is to actually read puzzle's and solve them. I didn't even notices that i solved puzzle in library, untill i found chess piece. I'm pretty sure that coding any puzzle in Source will be a massive headache, because game was not built in with this in mind.

Fairly accurate, yes. Source doesn't do much for "puzzles", at least in terms of interactive elements. Most interactions in the game that aren't shooting things are either pressing E (Use) on them or walking into them to push it. Otherwise it's mainly physics and platforming, neither of which was a thing you could do in RE2. So a lot of those puzzles did have to be simplified as a result. It's certainly possible to do cool puzzles, the mod "Research and Development" is an excellent example. But again, it's often physics puzzles using the Source engine's primary strength, and RE2 just didn't feature anything like that at the time, as it was before physics in games really became a feature.

No inventory info, i know this is from nitpicking section. But to be fair, you will not remember how many ink ribbons you collected. Or what puzzle elements you collected, and didn't used it. You will not have questions about it, if you playing this mod in one breath. But after returning to next session, you will play in "spam E in everything".

Definitely an unfortunate limitation of the Source engine. It's possible to code in inventory panels, other sourcemods have done it, but it wouldn't be compatible with the workshop if he had done that anyway. The other possibility would be to make each of these items a physics object you can move around with, but that wouldn't be very feasible here because you're often walking with multiple keys and items, while you can only carry one physics object at a time. Juggling several would be a pain. I honestly don't know what would be the best way to improve this.

And maybe i'm blind, or i didn't see on the doors card icons? Like you literally thrown with text dialogue, and you have to remember where this door have that icon. Like in remake, as i remember, those icons was painted on doors.

A fair point. It would be possible to have the door have several "alternate skins" and choose the one that matches which key it needs. Or use separate models if the markings are meant to be more "3D". I think that's how the RE2 RPD map in "No More Room In Hell" did it. I do think the text helps though, as checking which key the door needs is a simple press of one keybind. Being able to tell at a glance would be nice, though, that's true.

NPC's don't have models from OG game. Like playing with default enemies from HL2 just doesn't feel right. Zombies with headcrabs, dogs is fast zombies, bosses is zombies too, and final boss is a antlion king.

Like the guns, custom enemy models are a complicated thing. It's not enough to just replace the model - you have to make sure the new model has proper animations for everything like moving around, attacking, getting stunned, et cetera. It's not easy, and I haven't learned how to do it myself. Also, even if you give them a custom look, they're still going to behave like the original Half Life 2 enemy - even if they were modded to act differently, that wouldn't work here in the workshop as such changes aren't supported.

He did quite well with what he had to work with. Could more have been done? Sure, I'd imagine so. At the same time, I don't blame him for keeping it simple and staying with the Half Life 2 aesthetics. I certainly wouldn't have been able to do any better either, lol.

If you played in OG Resident Evil, you will pass it in like 6-8 hours of play. With HL2 movement, you complete it in 2 sessions, like 2-3 hours max.

The gameplay flow definitely impacts playtime by a large margin. In the original game your movement was much more careful and measured, while in first person you can be much more nimble. Rooms that normally would take 15 to 20 seconds to navigate can now be sprinted through in about 2 or 3 seconds. This extends to enemies too, as you can get very good at parkouring around zombies and avoiding combat with some to save ammo.

Though to be fair, the OG RE2 is not a long game when you get familiar with it. You can easily beat that game in a couple hours. There's even a randomizer mod for it called BioRand where you have the items shuffled around, and you can still beat the entire game in one sitting without much trouble. So this mod being in First Person just makes it even faster. Not much can be done there. Even if you did try to, for example, slow down the player's movement or make their jumps shorter, that's going to annoy a lot of people who like Half Life 2's controls and don't want to be crippled.

One thing I'm considering trying to do is making my own personal "Arrange Mode". I'd like to use the VMFs (map files for Hammer editor) Blood_Wraith provided on ModDB to make my own version of the maps that aims to make it somewhat harder, with alternate item placements, lower ammo pickups, and trickier enemy placement. No idea if I'll actually get around to finishing such a venture but I've already made copies and poked around them in Hammer, considering ideas. The goal would be to make it harder, but not absurdly hard, so maybe that would be something to interest you guys when I get around to it.

Anyway, I probably went way overboard with this reply and bored 99% of the people trying to read it, so I'm done. I hope I could at least give a little insight into why certain parts of the map were designed the way they were - not that I'm speaking for Blood-Wraith or his decisions on making the map, more just observations on what you can or can't easily do with the Half-Life 2 engine and Hammer mapmaker.

Cheers.

I always liked randomized ideas, what could actually make gameplay somehow unique in many ways. Especially Survival Horror, and i was pretty dissapointed when remakes just did New Game+ with slightly swapped placements. And like Leon or Clare scenarios have different placements for weaponry and puzzle elements too.

Would be cool to see random healing items, inc ribbons, ammo, enemies, and maybe expanded weaponry? Even if its will be same gun, but with different model. It will be cool anyways.

As i know, different paths wasn't developed in HL2 until Left 4 Dead 2 released. So i'm guess that making different paths for game sessions will be limited for availability of puzzle elements on different points of map.

Some randomness can be achieved with logic_case entities, at least. For example, I can create spawners for five different copies of the same key item, and use a logic_case to decide which of the five to spawn, having it select randomly each time. It mainly comes down to how you lay out the entities and what the probabilities are. It's something I'll try to experiment with.

Imba

I made a new discussion thread about useful console commands, one of which I recently discovered and lets you limit how much ammo you get per ammo pickup on a percentage scale. A very useful command if you're wanting to challenge yourself to win this campaign with reduced ammo.