This week’s poll question (a few days late – sorry) was inspired by Carolyn (a RTSL reader) talking about mods being hard.

One of the possibilities for mods is to ramp up the difficulty giving it a smaller “market” but I respect mods that aim for a particular type of player or focus their work in some way.

In general, I don’t think mods are harder than the respective games, although, and more experienced readers feel free to correct me, some early HL1 mods were pretty hardcore.

I’m working on a MapTap idea to allow users to have more control over the difficulty of mods, but I am torn between wanting to give players the choice and respecting what the modders have created.

If a mod is too hard early on, then it’s just too easy for players to cheat, don’t you think? Whereas, if a player has gone through most of the mod without cheating they are more likely to try to finish that way.

Anyway, back to the actual poll question.

All I am looking for in mods is new and interesting situations, not tougher fights.

What about you?

---

Sorry for another HL3 question so soon after the last one (more to come though, I’m afraid) but I saw something on the Steam Greenlight page that starting me thinking about this.

Fans of other franchises, although I don’t know of any gaming ones, have continued the stories when the originators didn’t seem to be interested. Star Wars and Star Trek are the ones that come to mind, but there might be others.

It’s probably happened with fiction too and I don’t just mean fan-written stuff, I mean actual ends to series that were never finished or poorly finished.

---

A few days ago on the HalfLife SubReddit quimralho asked Why is the game called Half-Life? What is the relation of the title and the game?

It’s a question that is often asked, by new and seasoned players alike. Most often people talk about the decay of radioactivity etc but it doesn’t really address the question.

However, this time scriminamp got right to the heart of the issue with a very funny, and quite sad really, answer.

The game is called half-life because it takes half your f*%king life for a squeal to come out.

It was then suggested by Don that this would make a good poll question, so here it is.

---

Sorry, I’m a few days late with this week’s poll question and lucky too because I didn’t really have one until I read Reddit today and saw the above.

I’ve talked about outsourcing Half-Life 3 before, specifically with regard to Gearbox, but I wonder if Valve would ever sell the whole Half-Life licence. If they actually plan to never make another HL game again (and I don’t believe that for a second), it could make financial sense.

The question is if whoever they sold it too make a crappy game that would also tarnish Valve reputation. In many ways it’s a lose-lose situation for then.

But maybe it comes down to would you rather take the chance of playing a crappy HL game than never knowing if Valve were to make one?

---

It’s been a while since I have played Half-Life 2 and we all remember how annoying the Squad system was but what about the rebels in general?

At no point during the game did I actively protect them, especially if they had a weapon.

I’m sure some players remember better than I but did any rebels without weapons help you? I don’t think so.

---