I can has conflict of interest? Well, sort of. See, I really want to tell you lovely people how awesome the new demo of Crysis mod OpenOutcast is, but I should probably mention first I’m on their team as a trial member, looking to write dialogue for them. Still, I wouldn’t want to contribute if I didn’t think they were worth it, and it’s not as if they’ll be compensating me. So what’s so great about OpenOutcast?

We’ve featured it on UserCreated before, but this here is a sequel of sorts to Appeal’s beloved third-person action adventure from 1999, with former Navy SEAL Cutter Slade returning to the distant world of Adelpha. The original was a stunner in its day, and the mod is using CryEngine 2, so technically it’s none too shabby.

The demo gives you two areas to explore – a tiny village nestled by an oasis in the desert, and an island in the middle of a secluded lake. It’s a series of fetch quests that need puzzling through, basically, though you’re free to marvel at the scenery as you go.

And it is marvellous stuff. Some of the animation’s occasionally a little stiff and the AI patterns are relatively limited, but the textures and modelling are fantastic. Overall the visuals are absolutely top tier – a brilliantly polished update of the original’s Gallic comic-book aesthetic.

Music and FX are solid; the score doesn’t particularly reflect what’s going on, and there’s nothing really out of the ordinary in the demo areas. More notable is the amount and quality of voice work. There’s some weird phrasing and enunciation here and there, and the NPCs arguably sound a little too similar, but by and large it’s very professional stuff that’s far above most fan dubs or amateur performances.

Though there’s not exactly much of a challenge here, it still plays well enough – controls work fine with the third person view, and the camera copes more than adequately with open or enclosed spaces.

It is just a tech demo, admittedly. Again, there’s not a huge amount of things to do at this stage, and the team have been unable to iron out every minor bug or quirk in the engine. You can see the joins, so to speak, if you run around poking at them.

But screw however it makes me look. Damn it all, OpenOutcast is a phenomenal effort so far. You don’t have to spend a thing to play it, other than whatever you pay for bandwidth – Crysis Wars can be had for free. If your PC’s up to it, give it a shot and see what a dedicated team of modders can really do when they put their minds to it. And cross your fingers this makes it out – if I get to have a say in it, I’ll be trying my hardest to make sure it does.

You can find the ModDB page for OpenOutcast (where you can download the demo) here, or their official website here.

A nice big feature for you! It’s been a while since we heard anything from modders Cracked Glass and their Source project Tension. Set in a sci-fi dystopia in a future of global warming and cities half underwater, the standout gameplay mechanic is the way players can fling themselves from building to building with a versatile grappling hook.

The early footage promised the Bionic Commando remake done right, and when we pointed out to Cracked Glass we were very excited about what they were doing, they offered to do an interview with us if we wanted. It’s taken a little longer than everyone expected – the team having hit a bit of a rough spot – but from the sounds of this they’re ready to forge ahead once again. Fingers crossed.

UserCreated: Could you tell us exactly who your team members are?

Alex Soustek, Cracked Glass: Well the team just recently went through a little re-structuring. All the same we have myself, the coder and project lead; then we have a close friend of mine Spencer who is doing the music for the game as well as story composition, and for the longest time Cooper had the entire burden of graphics on his shoulders, but since he recently went away to school he’ll be contributing significantly less. Of course our latest team member Mikkel helps with that by taking the reins of the graphics of our world.

I work primarily on gameplay mechanics and backbone functionality of the game. Spencer works primarily with his MIDI and sits there perfecting an ambience that fits the theme. Cooper now does minor modeling work, but is is responsible for every graphic you see in the early footage. Mikkel goes pretty much insane with models – literally, the rate and quality this guy puts out work is nuts. He has been working for a few weeks now and has about 6 different models prepared with a ton of different skins.

UC: Have Cracked Glass worked on any other significant modding projects before, either individually or as part of a team?

AS: Haha, Cooper and I attempted a modding project like this a few years before and quite simply crashed and burned. Far too ambitious for a first project, and we simply were not up to it yet. Spencer has never worked on a mod before although Mikkel has been known to be pretty active in the modding community lending a hand to quite a few mods/games. So I guess that makes him the most experienced with modding.

UC: Your ModDB page makes it seem as if Tension’s narrative is significant to you, but how significant? Did the mod start as a story idea or a gameplay idea? Did you change the story at any point because of the gameplay, or vice versa?

AS: It actually started eerily close to ‘You know what would be cool? Grappling hooks’. I’m pretty sure the exact sentence was “Dude, how badass would it be if you could swing around a city on grappling hooks?”. So I would definitely have to say the game spawned from a gameplay mechanic – and there have definitely been changes to the story based on gameplay. For instance, water kills you – okay, how do we work that into a story so it’s believable, and other things like that. But as far as gameplay changing for story I’m pretty sure the answer would have to be not yet.

UC: Do you think of Tension as more of a fun experiment or are you trying to do something better than the competition?

AS: The answer would have to be both. It definitely started as an experiment and is still a lot of fun (trust me, development would not continue if it wasn’t) but we found out that we hold ourselves to a very high quality standard and plan to keep that up. Just because we aren’t part of a large company (or paid for that matter) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work hard. Bionic Commando was almost a nail in our coffin – when we heard about it our hearts dropped. We were like “Oh well, it’s been done. Back to the drawing board”. But upon researching it we realized it was too scripted and not focused on grappling nearly enough, and basically came to the conclusion we could do it better – and if it ended up we couldn’t, where was the harm in trying?

UC: Do you see Tension as more of an open-world game, a linear, scripted adventure, or a mix of both?

AS: Definitely a mix of both, because if it was just a free roam world we’d lose the opportunity to put a lot of design and unique locations in – because quite frankly why would we put that sort of design effort into a part of a level where there’s a chance that the player won’t even experience it? I would say the levels will be sort of an “hourglass” design. Starting free roaming, find your own path and eventually slimming down to a single path which houses a cool combo or puzzle and then widens back out again.

UC: Both open-world and linear games have their pitfalls. Have you thought about how to avoid these problems at all?

AS: The plan is to have a linear story path (e.g. not multiple missions to choose from at once) but different ways to complete each mission. Hope that makes sense. Haha, as far as Bionic Commando goes we can’t really have a boundless world – although by just extending level boundaries I think a new level of roaming will be found by the player.

UC: The Source engine is still a popular choice for modders. Were there any particular reasons you picked it? Have its technical limitations affected anything you wanted to do?

AS: The main reason we picked it had to be because of how well we knew it, on top of its flexibility. It was great for rapid prototyping of gameplay due to the large amount of example code provided. Now the levels – if you were to ask me if they were limited, my answer would have to be a capslocked and resounding OH MY WORD YES! I have never experienced as many issues with level creation as I have seen in Hammer; we have had more bizarre errors and crashes of vrad.exe than I can even count. But we just keep on working at it, although how professional games are developed with this is beyond me.

UC: Can you say anything about the look you’re working on for the game?

AS: Well, the hard part about doing this is not emulating Mirror’s Edge, as it really did have an eye-popping scheme that would be immediately recognizable. Although I think as far as our scheme goes it will use a lot of contrast – not between bland and vibrant, but more like run down/high tech, sort of juxtaposing the grimy with the polished.

UC: What are your plans for long-term replay value?

AS: Originally we talked about both separate courses (released as some sort of DLC as and when we finish them) and the single play maps re-packaged. The single player mode may have a post-level screen scoring you on completeness, and we also plan on implementing collectibles (which are still changing too much to release any details) and hopefully some nice achievements (fastest fall, longest swing, etc.).

UC: An awful lot of promising mods never get off the ground, let alone reach any kind of finished state. You don’t have a release date on ModDB. How do you think the work is going? Do you just believe ‘It’s done when it’s done’, or do you have internal targets you’re trying to meet?

AS: Occasionally we set internal deadlines, and I expect to be doing that a lot more now my workload has gone down so much. But as a whole progress usually comes in bursts, and because of this we are definitely operating under “It’s done when it’s done”. To be quite honest, now it’s on to the graphics and design of the world, because the gameplay is very solid and refined. With the tweaks we get from our beta feedback the gameplay may be close to requiring use of the F-Word (“Final” that is, although it is “f$%#ing awesome” as well).

UC: Thanks for your time, and best of luck with getting Tension finished.

AS: Thank you so much for the support!

You can find the ModDB page for Tension here.

Ah, the humble forest. All you need to do is turn the lights down, sprinkle a few props around – a splash of blood across the path, an empty hut in a clearing glimpsed in the distance – and pretty soon you’ll have most players tearing their hair out and firing wildly into the trees at the slightest noise.

Seriously, though, it still takes some effort to make a setting work for you, which is one reason Left 4 Dead campaign Back To School would seem to be worth looking out for.

Modders 100_o/o_f@ke and romasm are clearly being careful not to fall back on tree-lined corridors, or just dotting an empty plain with foliage. There’s some striking level design going on here, keeping the naturalistic feel of Valve’s original game, with enough obvious care in the set dressing that it suggests they’ve got a good idea how to pace this stuff, too.

The campaign is being worked on in Left 4 Dead first, then being converted to the sequel at some later date. While they’re only a two-man team, they’ve been posting some detailed, professional-looking updates showing off their level construction and tweaks to the Source engine’s different systems, and all the media in these updates looks polished enough Back to School could well be worth the wait.

You can find the ModDB page for Back to School here.

Okay, yes, this is old, but as far as I can tell it’s not graced UserCreated before, so in case someone hasn’t seen it who’d like to…

I’m always wary of games the hardcore hold up as the second coming, because the hardcore have a tendency to blindly evangelise anything remotely iconic that only gets worse the older the game is. Doubly so for games written by Hideo Kojima, because he’s a bloody awful writer, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, out of all the fan remakes I’ve seen doing the rounds over the past few months, this has to be one of the ones I’d most like to see finished. Snatcher in the Crysis engine, anyone? Yes? Thought so.

Now the bad news, of sorts – it’s another mod (like Butterfly) where the creator’s put it on the backburner while he waits for CryEngine 3 to turn up. Understandable, but still, sniff. On the other hand, modder Ash712 is still working on those things not intimately tied into the engine’s nuts and bolts, such as modelling and animation. So there’s been the odd snippet of progress released all the same. Feast your eyes on these screenshots and video – I’ve never even touched the original game but this is the kind of fantastically distinctive worldbuilding I want to explore anyway.

You can find the ModDB page for Snatcher here.

Somehow, this came and went without a post on it, but I believe being three days late on a release is early enough. Maybe the Internet won’t hate me for being late on this. Anyway, DrGonzo said that this looks like an interesting “zombie mod”. Hmm. Personally, I think that anything with zombies in it could be classified as survival horror, which is apparently what this mod is going for.

It seems like most of these so-called “survival horror” games happen to involve zombies in it at some point or another. But from the screenshots, Nightmare House 2 seems to be delightfully monster-less. This means that I can hope that it’s merely a survival horror game that happens to involve zombies in it at some point or another.

Anyway, Nightmare House 2 seems to be a continuation of the Nightmare House story, except this time you wake up in a hospital with a vague memory of the girl from FEAR from the first game. She’ll probably show up later in the game.

Initial impressions seem to be overall positive, so it should be worth a download. I’m downloading it right now, but I probably won’t play it a whole lot. Let’s just say that horror games aren’t exactly my forté, and because of that I’ve only gotten through the first chapter of Dead Space.

If you have a more manly disposition than I do, you can download the mod at its ModDB page.

Okay, I guess it had to happen; Team Fortress 2 fans may have thought they were having a bit of a laugh creating these pictures of the (non-existent) ‘Team Fortcraft’, but someone else saw them and thought ‘I could make that into a mod’. Modders JetDragonsLeague seem quite happy to invite mockery from every Tuftoo fan on the face of the internet, but at the same time it does look as if they’re taking Fortress Craft perfectly seriously.

The project’s not really any more than concept renders and developer notes at the moment, so who knows if it’ll get anywhere, but the StarCraft 2 editor seems more than up to the challenge and their modelling skills are certainly a cut above a great deal of ModDB.

Hey, sometimes even an idea’s worth making a little fuss about. Fingers crossed. I don’t know if I’d buy TF2: the RTS exactly, but I’d definitely give the mod a shot.

You can find the ModDB page for Fortress Craft here.

Everyone still wants to do the parkour, apparently. Or some kind of stylised, colourful urban obstacle course. We’ve had grappling hook racer Tension – no news from them in a while, I must try and follow that up – and now City Freerun, from modder Dosycool. Yes, it’s Mirror’s Edge in Source, there’s no getting away from that, but it looks like it could be a good attempt, and it’s coming along slowly but steadily so far.

The mod is set inside a simulator, apparently, with the surroundings becoming steadily more fully realised as the levels progress, something which does get it a bit closer to having its own identity. Knockoff or not, though, Dosycool has the aesthetic down pretty well. The visuals are hardly as crisp as DICE’s game, but they gain something from being simpler, looking weirdly like a Lego playset or the city as blank canvas in DeBlob.

To be honest, I almost like this more – I always felt Mirror’s Edge’s look was somewhat over-rated, with a lot of it seemingly just random splashes of primary colour all over the place. City Freerun – it’s a working title, don’t worry – is pretty rough around the edges in places but actually more polished in others.

It’s hard to get a handle on how this might play, given the video so far is mostly just running around, but consider me very interested.

You can find the ModDB page for City Freerun here.

I haven’t even started Men of War yet – I’m sorry! Please don’t hurt me! – but this still got my attention. While the next official instalment takes DigitalMindSoft’s cult favourite RTS off to the jungles of Vietnam, modder volchonok is hard at work dragging the original game back to the Great War.

I’m aware there’s a whole separate modding scene for Men of War and no, I’ve not been following it that closely, but a few projects have turned up on ModDB, none of which really struck me as particularly interesting. Men of War: World War I seems different, and while volchonok’s arguably stretching himself a bit thin – four whole campaigns, plus bonus mini-campaigns? Single- and multi-player? – he’s still producing some relatively meaty updates, all of which look pretty special.

Snappy modelling, historical detail, bold mission design – it’s all here, and he’s got plenty of video and still screens to show you how it’s coming along. This wouldn’t be the first time a mod’s sold me on a game. Though in this case I’ve bought the game already. Still! Random internet people keep wishing for a World War I FPS – this could be the closest (particularly with Men of War’s direct control mechanic) anyone’s yet come to that.

The ModDB page for Men of War: WWI Mod can be found here.

Finally! Okay, let’s try this ‘posting about mods’ lark again – how about starting off small? Say with a nice little bit of mapping? Sometimes it can feel a bit self-serving writing something up that merely says ‘Hey, look at this guy! He can… build things! In Hammer! That look great!’ but hey, there’s enough rubbish around that good level design still stands out a mile. Take Biohazard. No, go on, take it. You’ll thank me.

Nothing to do with Resident Evil – this is an action-oriented map pack, it seems, sounding a little like Slums 2 with its terse description, [sic]: ‘You won’t find here much logic puzzles or a good story. My main goal’s to make movie-like battle scenes on pretty nice maps with a slightly stylized colors and awsum HDR’.

Not really anything wrong with someone saying that if he can deliver, and from the look of these early screens, it seems modder Dabu[PL] might just be able to.

Like Slums, it’s still very much a Half-Life 2 mod in that all manner of recognisable assets are immediately present and correct – but where Slums had a dark, grimy, Silent Hill aesthetic going on, Dabu seems to be going for cold and clean with ever so slightly blown-out lighting, a sort of vaguely sixties futurist look (check those two big white buildings, for example). Very impressive stuff, and this is definitely going in my bookmarks. (There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?)

The ModDB page for Biohazard can be found here.

Confession time! Well, it’s not like I’m ashamed of it or anything, but I find the Elder Scrolls lore really, really boring. I’ve never been won over by any of its backstory – God knows I likes me some po-faced high fantasy, but Bethesda’s take on the genre has simply never done it for me. So the idea of a total conversion for Oblivion gets my attention, given that by definition it’s throwing out everything I didn’t like about the game.

Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge is a sweeping re-write of The Elder Scrolls IV, ditching Bethesda’s world entirely and throwing in a fantasy world of the modders’ own creation. It’s a German team doing the work, and now the mod’s been completely finished in their native tongue they’re translating it to English. It’s currently going through a brief spot of beta testing, then they hope to have it out around the end of August.

You can watch the final trailer for the German release below. I find it interesting they’re apparently planning to keep the German speech and merely subtitle everything – I’d prefer more teams do it that way.

The trailer seems fairly, uh, po-faced – lots of little dialogue snippets delivered in a tone of voice that implies Serious Business – and bonus unintentional comedy points for brazenly lifting that tune from Mass Effect 2. Still, it’s big, expansive-looking, polished, and it’s not bloody Tamriel. Maybe I’ll actually score myself a copy of TES IV and give this one a shot.

The ModDB page for Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge is here. If you speak German, or you’re feeling adventurous, you can get it already!

Ooo. Ooooo. It’s only a quickie, but… I couldn’t pass this one up. I mean, it’s artistic and stuff. Tail has just popped up on ModDB, advertised as ‘a short, surreal adventure game’ focusing on moral choices and curious events, and looking like something Tale of Tales (note to self: stop saying tail/tale so much) might dream up over an evening’s drunken brainstorming.

There’s nothing there apart from the idea and a couple of early screens, so no telling whether this will get off the ground, but it’s the kind of thing I’d dearly love to see more of. Nice, strong art design and colour palette, and a genuinely otherworldly tone games simply don’t employ often enough. Hopefully short isn’t that short, but then again, the less modder kfhammond has to do, the better the chances are this gets finished. I am cautiously optimistic.

The ModDB page for Tail is here.

Facepalm! I should really start checking more places than just ModDB and a couple of forums. I mean, I do, but… seems one of the projects I had my eye on has all manner of updates on its own website, and I missed them, because I am a lazy, lazy man. That stops now! Ivan’s Secrets is a singleplayer Source engine mod which I think we can file under ‘I do hope this gets finished’, given I’ve just seen a lot more evidence that would mean fun times.

The plot revolves around the player travelling to a remote location on the trail of a MacGuffin, and discovering general spooky goings-on, but this is far more S.T.A.L.K.E.R. than lazy Aliens knockoff. It’s largely set in a real place, a tiny island in the Aral Sea called Kantubek which was apparently somewhere the former USSR used to test chemical weapons (anthrax, mostly). Long since abandoned, as if that wasn’t eerie enough, in Ivan’s Secrets the Aral Sea has dried up so the ghost town sits in the middle of an empty desert.

The team appear to be ambling along on a fairly casual basis, which to be blunt is yet another reason to worry this will never see the light of day. But they’ve certainly turned out a lot of work, and those screens! They’re a little rough around the edges, but it’s still hugely atmospheric stuff GSC or 4A Games could be proud to have been responsible for. The comparison shots between in-game and real life locations are also very impressive.

Definitely keeping an eye on this one. Note to the ModDB kiddies plotting endless variations on psychotic assassins set loose in a world gone mad; this is how you do creepy, not buckets of gore everywhere without context or emotional weight. Fingers crossed, as I seem to say so often.

You can find the ModDB page for Ivan’s Secrets here.

Or you can visit their website – with a few more screens and more recent progress updates – here.

Well, not me. Modder keved’s the one behind it. I am merely politely informing you that his mini-campaign One 4 Nine is practically complete. Done. Wrapped up. When so many Left 4 Dead mods are just a few steps above ‘I maed a gaem with zombies in it!!11!1!1′, it’s nice to have a clear, concise announcement that yes, this one’s finished, rigorously tested for bugs and all but ready to go.

It’s a short run through four linked maps, themed around an abandoned military base in Nevada, built on top of some kind of alien last resting place the US Army discovered in the desert. The army crack the tomb open, the outbreak happens, the four survivors turn up looking for a safe zone in the base (but have no idea there’s aliens in the basement)… hilarity ensues! No, wait. I meant screaming. And gunfire.

Can’t tell how it plays, obviously, but it still seems like fairly promising stuff, polished enough keved’s promises of a big finale unlike anything you’ve ever seen might be more than just hyperbole. Plus he’s converting it to Left 4 Dead 2 once this version’s out and working, apparently. So if you prefer the sequel, you can still join in the fun!

You can find the ModDB page for One 4 Nine here.

While their ambitious Crysis total conversion Butterfly might be on hold for now, modders Merhunes and Lenox47 would like to offer you a little something to make up for it. Isn’t that nice? While this is nothing like as grand in scope as their main project, it’s still a fully-developed release they’ve had in mind all along; they just want to make sure it gets released now they’ve decided Butterfly won’t be finished just yet. It’s called Killer’s Skill, and it’s due mid-August.

Horde mode in Crysis on a very pretty map (or maps), it seems like. Lenox47′s English is a little rusty (better than my French, etc., etc.) so I can’t be entirely sure, but they mention ‘waves of enemies’, and use the word survival prominently.

They really do seem to be determined to make sure this gets out; a couple of days’ private beta testing, then we can start counting the days. The ModDB page has some very nice-looking shots of the level design, and a summary. Fingers crossed, eh?

You can find the ModDB page for Killer’s Skill here.

God. There is nothing going on. Well, no Source engine single-player mods I’m interested in seem to have done any significant updating lately, there aren’t any multiplayer mods that look new and different enough I want to talk about them, and I haven’t found the time for any giant Mount & Blade total conversions. Bah!

So what to discuss? How about… Arx: End of Sun? I was reluctant to talk about it because, well, I can’t quite tell if it’s dead or not. If you haven’t found out for yourself while I was twiddling my thumbs, it’s an ambitious attempt to create a prequel (using the Doom III engine) for Arx Fatalis, Arkane Studios’ beloved attempt at making what was essentially Ultima Underworld 3 in all but name.

Mod team neurolab have contributed some very impressive work in progress updates to ModDB and their own blog, showing their mapping along with their successes in recreating Arx Fatalis’ inventory and gesture-based spell casting system. It’s slick and professional stuff – easy to wheel that phrase out yet again, I know, but take a look for yourself. iD’s Tech 4 seems an apt choice of engine for subterranean corridors, and neurolab seem to have done a fine job of beating it into the shape of a first-person RPG.

So, yes. Any news? neurolab have supposedly been posting on Arkane’s forums, but I can’t for the life of me get in there. Hotmail account, GMail, nothing. And I’d really like to know. This is streets ahead of most of what’s cluttering up ModDB right now, and it’d be a shame if it went missing.

You can find the page for Arx: End of Sun on ModDB here.

Or you can visit neurolab’s blog here.