Basic Details
- Title: Timeline 3: Heart Of Darkness
- File Name: hl1-sp-timeline-3.7z
- Original File Name: timeline-3.exe
- Size : 30.4Mb
- Author: Ross Smith
- Date Released: 03 February 2002
- Related: Timeline
- Related: Timeline 2: Iced Earth
PlanetPhillip Download Servers
Walkthrough
A walkthrough for this mod is available. It is in PDF format. You may be able to open this directly in your browser, depending on which one you use and its version or alternatively you can download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader
Reader Recommendations
Total Downloads
Please note: These statistics are valid from December 2010
-
2,670Overall
-
0Today
-
6Last 7 days
-
14Last 30 days
-
173365 days
Meta Review Data
Statistics based on 5 comment(s) with meta review data.
Installed:
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 5 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 4 Hours, 21 Mins
Shortest: 2 Hours by Thechugg
Longest: 8 Hours by Martina
Total Time Played: 21 Hours, 45 Mins
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 5 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 4 Hours, 21 Mins
Shortest: 2 Hours by Thechugg
Longest: 8 Hours by Martina
Total Time Played: 21 Hours, 45 Mins
Tags (?)
Collections (?)
If you believe this release is missing important tags, please suggest them in a comment?
Jump to a review
found it a great map – typical of halflife – but am stuck on the bit where u r in the control room and many soldiers come through a teleport – which u obviously kill – but nothing else happens
Help
WoW!
I played the Timeline II and III levels and I’ve noticced they got better as the game progressed. The locations in Timeline III were probably the best I’ve ever been to in a half life mod.
Without giving away too much there is this one part where you can go to four timelines (really five, but i’ll leave that a surprise). set in a future Lambda complex. Your first choice takes you to HG Wells and the story that the Time Machine has brought to us over the past century. There is one bug here though I encountered where your weapon will have no ammo. Simply quick load the game and that bug should be fixed.
Then there’s the year 2019 which is basically modern and nothing too fancy about it. But the other two locations just capture the mind and your imagination so much it could be a movie or a book. You go to the year 5 billion AD with the sun a super massive red giant and 20 billion years AD. And once you beat all that you’re still only half way through the mod!
The mod’s cut scenes were nicely done but there were a few times that I wish they had had a cut scene or two that it was kind of confusing. Especially with the chose your time zone part. I didn’t know if I had completed that mission or not. Though lava rushing after you is a good hint that that mission is accomplished. 😉
anyone else have a problem with the game crashing on map change from dark11e to f ? thats the spot where after breaking a case open getting the goods and the floor gives away you have to crawl through a pipe.when dropping down the pipe it crashes to desktop.does it in steam also.i tried just manually loading the map but it crashes then too.
I have enjoyed Timeline 1&2 so far with not much problems, only getting stuck on elevators sometimes! but I’m in Timeline 3 part 2: The cry of Mankind and now the comments are in some different language!! Is the rest of the mod like this??? or is there another version in English?? I printed your walkthru, just in case! I don’t like using them, makes it to easy, cause I like to challange my old Grey Gamer Mind!! Since I don’t eat oranges, I use a large wooden mallet on the back of my head when I get stuck!!
no idea what you mean. part 2? darkness is in another language for text.
I went by the listing in the Timeline 3 walkthru it says what I described above, BUT when I looked at my save map list it says darkness, take a look at the walkthru. But my same question, Is the language different in the rest of this mod??? I’ll get thru it but it’s annoying when you can’t understand the message! Hmmmmmm maybe the old dog needs to learn some new tricks??
well I extracted the maps from the pak file and tried to run a viewer on map dark11f but no go.seems to be errors in the .bsp.worked fine on other files.couldnt export to a .map and rebuild because of the errors either.what a pain.
Whoops, just posted on the walkthrough instead of here. Sorry!
I crash in exactly the same place, just as you drop down the tube after the floor has fallen away. I tried skipping onto the next map, but that didn’t really help in any way whatsoever….
Pity, I was really enjoying this one, just as the previous two.
Any suggestions please?
if you find an answer let me know.short of finding someone with an original pak not corrupted I have no idea.
http://editingarchive.com/view.php?ID=393
The download at “the Archive” isn’t corrupted,at least not at the same place that the one I got from here is. The zip has a different name though, as does the folder in it.
But on the plus side the text referred to above is in English!
I’m 99% certain that I also have that file:
http://www.filecloud.com/files/file.php?user_file_id=145975
It’s the same name and size. I’ve added it to the main post.
The original download was 38Mb and the one you’ve just linked to is 40.6Mb…I wonder if there was something missing?
At least its working now!
And once again, thank you for an excellent site!
cool stuff.thanx
I must say I dont think I could of finished this mod without the walkthrough.I really enjoyed it and the length of it was great.Almost like a whole new game.
Having the same crash when the floor drops out going inside the pipe to the drop off and game quits
do the same thing you did with the one you have installed now.just over write the files with the new ones.
Thanks again!!
hey i’ve downloaded the 3 timeline episodes yesterday, and i’ve won 1 & 2 I found the improvements in each episode very nice you learn as you go on into making this I like the detail level for some things and others..
im playing timeline 3 im at the begining of the second episode, and I wanted to share the fact that I have actually (this is for the ppl who played this) I still have barney with me, (yes the one from the begining) it’s a loler and well I wanted to say thanks to this page that has prove to be valuavle one more time to make me enjoy some good games, with all that sayd I think this is a mod that no hl-gamer should miss.
sorry fot the double post.
you need to get a keycard from the room were there are two elevators, the panels on the walls are actually doors check the guide it has pictures, with that keycard you activate the satelite or something and then you can press the buttons in the control room.
Finally finished all tree Timeline mods and all of them are great in places hard but playable.
Great gameplay and story I can only say
quality mop/design great/good balance/hard jumps/lots of going tracking/confusing at times.
From the design side this is properly the best of the 3 in the series, however, I find it contained too much back tracking making the mod very confusing at time, such that I did not enjoy 3 as much as 1 & 2. But it’s still a quality mod with design great, good balance gameplay if on the hard side with some very difficult jumps.
Overall the Timeline trilogy ranks among the best all time HL1 custom games and if you have not played them you are missing out. I am ranking the whole series here.
SDRAWKCAB:
wow siht dom si rebu emosewa ):
ENGLISH: Wow this mod is awesome 🙂
It’s astonishing that the Timeline series isn’t better known – I have played over 100 HL1 mods and this one has only just hit my radar! It is a towering achievement – one of the very best mods around. It is well worth playing Timelines 1, 2 and 3 in sequence as the very ingenious story unfolds throughout all three. The gameplay is really tough in places, both in terms of firefights and puzzles. I usually play on “Hard” but did the three Timelines on “Easy” – it’s that tricky – and had frequent recourse to the excellent walkthroughs. This mod is engrossing, enjoyable, clever and has plenty of humour. 5/5 from me.
i have a bug, when I get to the map dark13c and I press quick save (F6) the game crashes. also when want to come back to the loading zone, it crashes too.
can someone tell me how to fix this?
Wow boy it’s been a long since I completed the “timeline” series, and I must tell you the concept of this mod is great, but I feel like the developer didn’t make his best, with the concept, ok I know!, you probably think: and where the bloody are you to say so???
Ok i’m saying that because even tough the concept is great the classy HL1 npc’s models just dont fit into it!, I mean the natzi soildiers were just US marines with swasticas in their arms!!!, come on!!, it’s been like 2 years since I played this mod and I still remember that, sorry mr developer i’m not trying to be rude but that’s a lack of quality related to the detail…
I mean if the GATE1 reached it’s classic state in HL1 mods it’s because that mod created an unique atmosphere, I mean you see real natzi soildiers on it and also their propper WEAPONS, here on TIMELINE you feel like a Black-Natzi-Mesa atmosphere and the soildier enemys just crap the play-action momentum with those ultra modern MP5 guns shooting at me, I mean i’d love to saw on that mod real models of natzi soildiers and models of their propper historic period weapons. I mean, I maybe sound like a yelling mother, but I think this mod could be a classic, if those details are corrected in a propper way, I mean put some reallistic models that create a propper atmosphere that make us belive we are in a timeline adventure!!
I don’t know what is doing the author of this series, but he surelly has the “historic” opportunity to make this mod right and convert it into a classic and a must play into the HL1 world, i’d love to see this mod also into an integrated Whole mod, I mean with parts 1,2&3 integrated into a big one and with the propper steam fix, and you bet with no doubts, i’ll sure I download it and play it with excitment and joy again that’s for sure, even though I think that’s unlikely going to happen, but anyway, i’d love to see this mod with those minimum but very important changes, and we most likely would have a master piece in the HL1 mod universe.
Finished replaying this tonight. The mapping, textures and style of Timeline 3 are the best in the series and always makes me sad that Ross Smith doesn’t seem to have done any projects after it.
Timeline 3 takes you on an incredible adventure through time that you’ll likely not forget. This mod is almost 10 years old now and I still enjoy and remember it. Highly recommended.
And here we are with a complete trilogy of time-traveling that includes the original Timeline, Timeline II: Iced Earth, and now Timeline III: Heart of Darkness. Although it’s not necessary to have played the two precursors, it certainly helps when following the story.
The overall story of the entire Timeline saga has something do with Nazis exploiting time travel to take over the world. You play as Gordon Freeman to (naturally) subvert their evil plans for untimely domination. Well, at least you did in Timeline and Timeline II. Timeline III takes a different direction away from the Nazi stuff that instead circles around the G-Man in a rather confusing turn. The reason for this isn’t told clearly, but it makes for an interesting twist in story as you’ll see in the last chapter.
Unlike its direct prequel Iced Earth, Heart of Darkness tends to skimp on involving gameplay and leans more towards exploration and actual time traveling – there aren’t nearly as many puzzles & localized set-pieces. It instead plays like an overblown continuous adventure, especially with the keycard- and door-hunting involving some lengthy backtracking. In a way this is a step backwards from Iced Earth because gameplay has less immediate direction and thus can be more confusing, but in the end it seems to work well with the epic visual scale. Iced Earth could have used some of this gameplay style.
Amazing set design and solidly-built architecture are carried over from Iced Earth, and thankfully, CD music is now part of the experience as well. The combat tends to be laid back but is more than enough challenging, but sometimes it gets downright aggravating due to the sheer number of enemy generators that endlessly spew out aliens, Nazi soldiers, or Nazi assassins. The rest of level design is very good though, with good balance between attention to detail and r_speeds, intelligent routing, (limited) nonlinearity, and the occasional puzzle. The objectives are nicely varied as well but are sometimes unclear and/or stretched across too many maps, dragging gameplay.
Clearly different from its two prequels in terms of gameplay and story, but Heart of Darkness has the same “cool” factor, fun, and intriguing time travel (especially in Black Mesa!). A worthy ending to the Timeline legacy and very nice indeed; not to be missed.
Special Note: Timeline III features a certain scenario from a World Trade Center office on September 11, 2001, that many players will find distasteful. This reviewer certainly did, but to hold it against Ross Smith and the merit of this HLSP release would not be rational.
Notes
This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Monday, 11th March, 2002 by Calyst.
This review was originally posted on the Ten Four Website, which is now offline. Permission has been granted to republish the full review and more details can be found on the About page.
Loved this series; very good conclusion. Loved the concept & is a AWESOME mod. This not being a retail game & with maybe limited time, money, experience or just not a priority– there details that could be updated to increase the atmosphere of the game more, but it also can be attributed to the broken time lines. Either way this is still worth the download & time to play & ENJOY it!
Manually
Easy
3 Hours, 30 Minutes
I really liked it, a lot like halflife original, with lots of roaming through the black mesa complex.
Manually
Hard
8 Hours
What the heck are you supposed to do if you get to the nazi air robot thing and have no rockets or tau cannon ammo? Like seriously dude? You dont think maybe you should put a couple of rockets or something before a major fight that requires them? I had to use them earlier during a part where I was on 5 health and I need to blow up the crystal without entering the room and now I cant even finish the game even though Im so close because you give the player barely any ammo or health before a major fight!
It’s a shame I don’t seem to “get” the Timeline mods, since it seems like everyone else loves them. As I’ve progressed through the series, I’ve enjoyed them less and less, which is a shame, because I had a lot of hope for them. Unfortunately, like many older mods, the Timeline series has not aged well.
Although you might get the impression from the rest of this review that I completely hate this mod, there are a few things I like. The combat is fun and challenging, as it doesn’t pretend to be difficult by spamming or infinitely spawning enemies (except for some parts). Also, the instant-death explosions that were so prevalent in Timeline II are gone.
The environments also look very nice and are fairly unique; my particular favorites are the Nazi world and the very far future map with the pyramid.
The story is very well done, as well. It’s interesting enough as a premise, and the actual writing is very good. The introduction of the Monitors was a nice surprise; I thought my game was broken! I absolutely loved the historical deaths section! (reminds me of Golden Wind, lol)
I also found the ending to be pretty satisfying. Gordon gets promoted, Anomalous Materials is discontinued, Barney doesn’t get locked out, and G-Man gets yeeted from existence. I love a good happy ending from time to time, especially in Half-Life’s world of unhappy cliffhangers.
Unfortunately, that’s where my positives end. I found the rest of the mod to be an annoying, time-wasting mess.
Doors that require keycards are marked with a green light. I enjoy this mechanic, but I hate the way it is introduced. The first time a keycard door is encountered, there’s nothing really to indicate this door requires a keycard. There’s no scanner or text that says “Looks like you’ll need a keycard to open this door.”
In addition to issues with keycards, it’s often just not exactly clear where I’m supposed to go. Quite a few times, I wandered around an area for a couple minutes, only to realize I was supposed to go down a ladder that was barely lit and the same color as the wall it rests upon. This isn’t a problem with just Timeline III but with the series as a whole. I found myself consulting the walkthrough many times just to get a sense of where I was supposed to go.
Another major gripe I have with this mod is the sections with respawning enemies. I found the most annoying instance of this was in the final battle, where fem black ops infinitely spawn! I will forever hate respawning enemies, I have yet to see it done right, if it’s even possible.
Maybe this was only something on my end, but there were quite a few occasions where, upon reloading a save, I was unable to fire, reload, or switch my weapons, with the ammo counter being stuck at 0. This added another layer of frustration onto an already infuriating experience.
There were some spots where I got stuck, forcing me to reload. An example of this is in the Thames River Valley, where if you go off the right edge of a stone temple, you get stuck on a grass slope and are unable to move.
It doesn’t really seem like I’m fighting Nazis, just HECU in Nazi cosplays. Besides slapping an arm band on the soldiers, there’s not really much effort to change them. The modder could’ve at least grabbed some voicelines from Wolfenstein or something.
My greatest issue with Timeline III, along with the Timeline series in general, is that the backtracking is HELL. Almost every keycard you get leads to a door at least 2 maps back from where you came from. This, in conjunction with inconsistencies with what types of doors you can and can’t open, makes navigating levels a nightmare. One section I remember involves opening a “Vent Access Door,” which, up until now, was a type of door that was always locked. I had never been able to open these types of doors up until this point in the mod, and as a result it took me a good 5 to 10 minutes before I found out I could open these 2 specific doors.
The most egregious instance of Timeline III’s problem with backtracking is near the beginning of the mod. There’s a locked fire/blast door that requires a keycard. But guess what? You find the keycard a whole 4 MAPS LATER. By the time I had gotten the keycard, I had completely forgotten about that locked door! What was the point of having these 4 maps that did absolutely nothing except give me a piece of plastic? Why did I have to do all that just to get one object?
Judging by how RTSL lists the average playtime as 5 hours, but Bolloxed’s walkthrough is only 1 hour 20 minutes, it’s safe to say all this backtracking only serves as padding time. There’s rarely any new enemy encounters during this backtracking, which makes it even more confusing. If I’m not seeing any new enemies, I’m generally wondering if I’m supposed to even be going this way. It’s sort of like Hunt Down The Freeman, in that the time it takes to play through the game would be about 50% shorter if you actually knew where you were supposed to go.
I’d really only recommend playing this if you’ve played every other Half-Life 1 mod and you’re desperately hungry for more HL. Otherwise, I’d recommend giving this series a pass.
Manually
Medium
3 Hours, 15 Minutes
As the last game of the trilogy it feels a lot more polished in presentation and gameplay, there are some weird moments of backtracking through levels though, the story is a lot more focused and the ending is rather satisfying.
Manually
Easy
2 Hours
The best Timeline of the trilogy. Unfortunately, you still repeated the annoying parts of the game which is primarily spamming enemies and fetch quest (finding keycards). Talk about level design, I wasn’t aware that the entire game is full of backtracking. I love how this game features different time periods, just like the first one. Speaking of story, I am glad it has a very satisfying ending as if Timeline deserves a closure. Come to think of it, Timeline has “3” in it but not Half-Life itself.