this threads pretty bad so I'm gonna take one for the team and go full hog on explaining this shitshow becuse its become one of the most entertaining gaming fiascos in a very long time. Say what you will about battlefront 2 but at least that game wasn't missing 20gb of textures for everyone.
Hunt Down The Freeman is a fan-game set in the half life universe, starting from the Black mesa incident and 7 hour war and concluding during the events of half life 2. It follows Sgt. Mitchell, a donut-steel member of the HECU vowing revenge on gordon freeman for leaving him for dead at Black Mesa.
Sounds like a par for the course HL2 mod, right? They're generally decent! A lot of gems all for the price of nothing! (Underhell, free Black Mesa, Goldeneye: Source and Fistful of frags all come to mind) At first glance, this is actually where HDTF's problems begin, because while there are a load of fantastic source mods for free, HDTF is a commercial game. You're paying nearly $30 for it (but at least there's a launch discount to make up for the 4 delays this game had!)
In reality though, this is the least of the games problems. Wake up, sit back, and smell the ashes.
History:
If you decided to look up the game on youtube before launch, you may have seen this video of the games 2016 concept demo, rife with unoriginal levels, inexplicable bugs and pitiful voice acting and narrative full of small fuckups with the half-life lore. ("east black mesa"?)
There's yet another twist though, as prior to the demo HDTF originally had an indiegogo campaign to raise $100k, 1/4th of which would be dedicated to engine licensing and the other to god knows what. In total it made... a lot less than that. One of the developers went anonymous and claimed that the lead creator got investor money, including 50k from a man named "Bolloxd" (who I should mention is the only person to have had gameplay footage of this game before launch and allegedly broke down after seeing a stream and realising what he just funded), to buy bots and bring the game higher up on steam greenlight, as well as to inflate hype for the game on its own group. You can view some of the evidence in this video here, from 1:14 to about 2:23
So the game made it through steam greenlight and now has a story page by the end of 2017. Hype was building up especially with people still being really :autism: and struggling to cope with what happened with epistle three, but things were about to take a turn for the worse.
On the 14th Janurary, HL fansite Lambda Generation announced they pulled down all their prior coverage of the game after discovering that stolen assets, especially those featured in Black Mesa, were still present in promotional material for the final game. This was then followed up with further damning claims from other ex-developers that the lead is insanely deluded and thinks the game has a chance to get on consoles too.
So thus far this game has been accused of stealing assets from a lot of big time source engine games. The devs remained silent, not even releasing any new footage of the game outside of their main source of income until they announced that they got an all-clear from the firearms: source team.
"But what about the others?", you might ask. Well, If you want to know how true those claims are, stick around. I think the answer is going to be a bigger shock than you could ever imagine.
At this point, HDTF then starts getting delays. A lot of delays. The game was originally meant to come out at the end of January, then its pushed to early Feb. Then to mid Feb. Then to the 22nd. Then to the 23rd. And then it missed its launch window by over 9 hours.
But alas, the game is finally out. It probably shouldn't have come out.
HUNT DOWN THE TRAINWRECK:
This game was already becoming infamous prior to launch, with a lot of mockery in the source engine community (especially facepunch) for its use of youtube celebrities in its voice cast (including Keemstar and IHateEverything), its terrible 2016 demo, the asset theft allegations, the use of mixamos "fuse" program for its lead characters causing a clash in art style, the entirety of this trailer, the lack of any actual gameplay footage besides Bolloxed's teaser and the concept demo, and the aggressiveness of its developer team towards any criticism.
When it finally hit the marketplace, nobody could be prepared for how FUBAR this game actually was. For starters, the game shipped missing a lot of assets- its main selling point of "high quality" cinematics was nowhere to be seen because they forgot to include the .bik files needed to actually play them. There's also a lot of missing textures, and a keyboard seen early on with sources iconic pink checkerboard became a bad omen of the quality to come.
Oh, and heres those big youtuber cameos the devs were gushing themselves about:
The experience was promptly livestreamed, mainly by macd11 and Valvenewsnetwork, the latter of which went on a downward spiral of pure insanity trying to beat the game. His stream is the most in-depth look at the game and if you have 5 hours to spare its worth the ride.
So what about the stolen assets? Well, brace yourself, because among the already existing claims theres some pretty hefty allegations that there has actually been MORE content stolen since January and now:
"Blatantly stolen Zombie Panic : Source map (ZP:S dev confirmed)
COUNTLESS Gmod addons stolen
-One of their main selling points, parkour, is a stolen addon from Gmod's Workshop
Literal complete ripoffs of HL2 maps
-Ravenholm graveyard
-City 17 train station and a lot of city sections.
-Highway section stolen
-Rebels are just retextured combines"
The developers have responded by having their bot remove all discord messages calling the game an asset flip.
Despite how thorough I've tried to be with describing this mess, I'm probably only just scratching the surface, especially since we have no clue how the devs are going to handle the situation they've got on their hands.
After taking command of not-mother-base and having a speech that nobody cheers for you go to city 17, from there Adam (IHE) betrays you and kills the daughter of the cremator factories owner, framing you and undoing all of your efforts to get the combine on your side. GMan then tells you that gordon Freeman did nothing wrong and its actually Adam who left you for dead, (even though theres presumably only 3 HEV suits in black mesa at the time of the incident, 2 of which were taken by Gina and Colette of Half life: Decay, with the remaining one taken by Gordon.) GMan also leaves you for dead now that the combine think you killed the Daughter -which is actually a ruse to divert combine forces and let Gordon "succeed" in getting himself killed at the top of the citadel- and it turns out that Adrian Shepard is your brother who you haven't seen since your mother died as children. Yes. Seriously.
You then return back to your vessel and kill Adam in a cutscene. Then you announce to the crew you're going to the borealis, a ship that only the resistance really knew about and even then not until episode 2, which is still days away from happening in the canon
And unlike HDTF, Postal 3 had an actual development team and Running With Scissors was working with Akella on the game until problems arose. This on the other hand had a lot more terrible shit with all the stolen assets and the like.
about that thing on this game getting on xbox one and ps4, i'm not so sure it's impossible. Does anyone remember life of black tiger, firefighters the simulation, horse riding simulator, and all that other shit? all of those games got onto the PS4 just fine and some of them were even actively promoted on the official playstation youtube channel! For all we know, it could get onto PS4 without a hitch and knowing sony's bullshit, they'd probably put this shit on screen to millions of people during E3.
about that thing on this game getting on xbox one and ps4, i'm not so sure it's impossible. Does anyone remember life of black tiger, firefighters the simulation, horse riding simulator, and all that other shit? all of those games got onto the PS4 just fine and some of them were even actively promoted on the official playstation youtube channel! For all we know, it could get onto PS4 without a hitch and knowing sony's bullshit, they'd probably put this shit on screen to millions of people during E3.
I think they were talking more on the technical side of things. There's no source engine game on 8th gen since they've never really built anything to support it.
And no, Titanfall doesn't really count- it runs on source the same way the new call of duties (or even source itself!) run on the quake engine. Its maps are bigger than anything source can handle and the file formats are way different, what little of it does exist was probably used to help facilitate the xbox 360 port of the first game (which is obviously no longer the case for the 8th gen exclusive Titanfall 2)
I saw Bolloxed's live stream, and you can just see the buyer's remorse on most of the comments, "HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS BADASS!" "A HIDEO KOJIMA GAME!" and on the HDTF youtube channel I like how the developer loved every comment praising the game all the while ignoring people mocking the cringe ass voice acting and the very barebone gameplay and level design.
I think they were talking more on the technical side of things. There's no source engine game on 8th gen since they've never really built anything to support it.
And no, Titanfall doesn't really count- it runs on source the same way the new call of duties (or even source itself!) run on the quake engine. Its maps are bigger than anything source can handle and the file formats are way different, what little of it does exist was probably used to help facilitate the xbox 360 port of the first game (which is obviously no longer the case for the 8th gen exclusive Titanfall 2)
At launch, sections of the game (especially the larger maps that were 100% made for the game) ran at 30-70fps for most people. This is on hardware that would've otherwise completely crushed the source engine on any other game- you don't need a very expensive card to hit sources default 300 FPS limit and yet here it's barely hitting 10% of that.
Again, this is on recent cards. We're talking Vega or 900/1000 series GTX's here. With such a blatant disregard for optimisation that could've easily been fixed by watching a video from 2009 and also not making 4K keypad textures I don't really think we can trust these guys with making a playable console port, let alone a port to begin with.
At launch, sections of the game (especially the larger maps that were 100% made for the game) ran at 30-70fps for most people. This is on hardware that would've otherwise completely crushed the source engine on any other game- you don't need a very expensive card to hit sources default 300 FPS limit and yet here it's barely hitting 10% of that. I imagine this is shit that could've easily been fixed
Again, this is on recent cards. We're talking Vega or 900/1000 series GTX's here. With such a blatant disregard for optimisation that could've easily been fixed by watching a video from 2009 and also not making 4K keypad textures I don't really think we can trust these guys with making a playable console port, let alone a port to begin with.
Thanks. Again HDTF is a glorious shitshow prior to and after launch and it'd be a shame to let a bad first impression make people ignore it
