Revisiting Mission Improbable

As I’ve worked to get myself out of my modding slump, I’ve revisited Half-Life 2 mods which had a big impact on me when I was first starting out with Inhuman. Half-Life 2 in my eyes is a game that’s greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve never loved the feel of the guns or how most combat encounters play out, yet there’s something undeniably great in how the game delivers its world. 

Half-Life 2 is at its best when it focuses on a moody atmosphere and unique experiences over extended combat sequences, so it follows that my favorite Half-Life 2 mods tend to do the same. High on that list is Mission Improbable, a fan-made Half-Life 2 campaign from 2012 made by Magnar Jenssen and Rick Underhill. Over the course of 3 chapters the mod basically retreads over Half-Life 2’s best moments while adding its own unique sensibilities to make things feel fresh. 

The locations featured in the campaign will be familiar to anyone who has played Half-Life 2 before, but for what Mission Improbable lacks in originality it makes up for in quality. Nearly anywhere you look is jam packed with new assets and textures, which helps the levels stand out from their original inspirations. 

This Combine base at the end in particular really grabbed me. Half-Life 2’s Citadel was a bit on the overly abstract side for me, but these lovingly detailed rooms really strike the right balance of functional purpose mixed with over the top scale. 

The attention to visual detail plays into the level design. Bits like this water falling down into the basement, which presents a hazard as it’s getting electrified by a nearby generator. Little details like this really help these locations feel like lived in spaces.

The mod’s also constantly throwing something new at you without falling into full on gimmick territory. Every couple of minutes something happens. For instance, take this opening segment from the game’s second chapter.

First you drive into some basic soldier combat. It’s nothing special, but you can opt to just run them over which is always some good fun. Then we step inside and flip on the gas which then enables us to…

Blow up the gas station! This flows into a bit more combat, and then the best set piece of any mod: Launching yourself in a headcrab shell. We transition from this to having to avoid more shells ourselves as we move on to a new part of the level. 

Check out a video of this whole segment here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQVbVsT_g_I

This is an aspect of the mod I think I’m the most captured by, and really plays to Half-Life 2’s strengths, focusing on memorable moments in between solid gameplay beats. Honestly this is something I’ve fallen out of with Inhuman, as we’ve focused so much on improving the combat and weapon balance, but it’s still something I’d like to inject where it makes sense. These little moments do a lot to make you feel like you’re doing more than pressing the w key and clicking on bad guys. 

These days, I find Half-Life 2 a little boring to revisit in full. The opening act doesn’t grab me anymore, especially with how much I’m forced to wait for scripted moments to finish, and the game leans more on its combat the further in you get. Luckily for me, the moments I love the most I think are captured really well in this mod. For anyone with an itch to revisit the series, I highly recommend giving Mission Improbable a playthrough. 

This latest playthrough definitely gave me some perspective on how much Inhuman has diverged from Half-Life 2. We put a lot more focus on moment to moment combat and exploration, and it has paid off, but as we grind towards a release I think finding ways to inject some of these memorable moments would help make level design fun for me again. Having something that really speaks to what happens in a location beyond “player encounters bad guys and shoots them” can really elevate the whole experience.

So I’m finally making good on doing these quicker off the cuff pieces that don’t directly link to my mod work. I’m going to be making this a public post, and I plan on doing more of these at least twice a month. I’m still grinding away at some more in depth nerdy articles, these will probably be paywalled at first, then cleaned up and made public eventually. I’m really trying to get my thoughts together so that my content can be genuinely useful for aspiring game developers, so any feedback on this will be super helpful.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to check out Mission Improbable here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/mission-improbable