The beginning of WAR: TSO's development - 13.06.2024
I have been modding Half-Life for at least 10 years now. Granted, I was a dumb little kid for most of that time - but it's at least some kind of experience nonetheless.
I've tried making many mods, and most of them never really made it anywhere. Ambitious ideas that I didn't have the time nor experience to actually execute.
WAR: The Savior's Order being a very notable example of that. An overambitious mod with a huge scope and basically no manpower to actually create it.
If you don't know what the hell WAR is, it's basically an old mod I was making before TimeWarp, it was largely inspired by the old Call of Duty games.
After some 5 years of that mod's development I cancelled it because i lost all motivation to work on it and got really tired of it.
Check out WAR's ModDB pageSo let's go back to 2018. Specifically, somewhere in March 2018. I remember this very vividly.
I was about 12 years old, messing around with the JACK editor when I came across the WC Mappack again.
I was exploring those maps when I suddenly had an idea. What if I made a new, unique campaign based on these maps? Give them another life sorta.
I was always at least a little obsessed with the Half-Life 2 beta. Especially when I was younger. I still think some concepts like the Air Exchange and the wasteland are pretty cool.
So I had an idea to incorporate these ideas into my own story, I'd just take the WC maps, reskin them with HL1 textures, plop down NPCs and other crap, and boom - here's a map.
That's how WAR started. The story (from what i can still remember of it) was that you were a scientist working for an underground resistance force,
rising up against the very cleverly titled "Special Anti-People Combat Unit", or SAPCU for short.
You were coming to your old friend Walter, in order to help him out with something, however the SAPCU invade the place and you gotta get outta there.
That's basically it, there was nothing else and after like two maps i got bored and quit working on it.
There wasn't really much of the mod done. The first map was a very poorly reskinned version of an Eli's Den map from the WC Mappack.
The NPCs like Barney's and scientists would speak in terrible lines recorded by 12 year old me. You'd eventually meet Walter,
he'd say some shit and give you the "People Combat Vest", really daring here with these names.
You'd then return to the start of the map to see a door open, leading to the second map which was actually not taken from the WC maps - and it really shows.
Blocky geometry, and areas that make literally zero sense, you'll see that kinda stuff later on too.
This second map is unfortunately really short and unfinished, it just ends abruptly as we were moving out
to a different house at that time and I completely forgot about this mod for a while.
Pictured: the first map.
...and here's the second map.
Don't ask me why there's construction.mdl just placed there randomly.
The infamous WAR blue crowbar's origin. Real OG's of my Discord server will know this one.
And the not-so-infamous MP5 with a camo poorly pasted onto it. Also the SAPCU grunt straight from gamebanana.
Beyond these maps, there's also a few other ones that are pretty unfinished.
First one of these is a "helicopter" map, after escaping from Definitely Not Eli's Den you'd get on some helicopter and fly God knows where.
The second is quite literally just one of the Air Exchange maps poorly reskinned and with no lighting. Nothing particularly interesting there.
And finally, a "scripted sequence test" map which was me trying to recreate the Manwich scene from the HL2 beta without actually having seen it.
Complete with the lines being completely in the wrong order and all.
This marks the end of the first era for WAR's development. It was short lived and not very eventful. It would be much later where this mod would really get a start.
But you'll have to wait until later for that. Thanks for reading and I'll see ya in the next one. Bye ;D