To begin with, I knew for a while that this mod was ore or less hyped, what makes it to look in a bad spotlight so far was that the first pictures of the mod that someone was playing were simply just Engine Errors in the game's attempt to load the maps, so I told myself that "It can't be just that bad" no? So here is where it all begins:
- NOTE THAT YOU CANNOT WRITE A REVIEW FOR THIS MOD, so all the criticism is taken in the comments instead.
Unzipping this, the zip pack itself says it's 11 GB, but the reality is that it's almost 30 GB as a fact (29.4 GB), and with the given available space, I couldn't get it fully unzipped even for the love of God, even by taking it out in parts, the Textures for it alone makes up for the whole size, and I do ask myself if this is just Half-Life 2 Textures combined with the new Textures for this, and i ask myself how many of these textures are even actually used in the maps when the size for the textures alone is 23 GB, and that's a lot for the textures themselves, and I feel like the priorities for what should be packed in the .pak files was misplaced when the textures take 80% of the size.
Unfortunately I didn't get to play the mod at it's full glory because of this unfortunate file size, so the best I could get was to play it with errors and missing textures at this point, but even then I didn't get too far with it because this simply just downgrades the Half-Life 2 experience with 90% of the time crashing, and that's just at the beginning of every map you attempt to play on.
I am also aware what was written in the comment section by now and really displeases me when most of the replies are 'Try to do a mod of this size by yourself', when the truth is that, this is a modpack than a mod, as it uses assets imported or made by other people, the only effort I could see in this is basically just gathering together these assets and getting them work without conflict, modify the maps and recompile them, and call it a day basically.
I also understand that the creator themselves is busy with the studies and all, but that doesn't really makes it as a excuse for rushing the release of this in the current state, which explains for the bucked of criticism on the Mod DB, no one has the right to rush someone to release something as quick as possible, that is also up on the creator themselves to take their time until they consider it's good for the release, the second problem I see is that the mod name itself simply got everyone really hyped for this modpack, and with the rush of the release of this as well, well... You got this storm on Mod DB, more or less.
This has potential, big one if it gets polished, but for as far as I got to learn was that the creator couldn't take the heat that was sent on Mod DB and decided that it is for the best to keep it on GameBanana instead, which I can understand why they feel that way.
I wish the best in the endeavors of this and hopefully to get better over the course of the time.
The_Guardian™
joined
Hello I'm TheGuardianTM. Source Engine and GoldSRC Modder. Sound Engineer, Textures Creator, Editing Models, Voice Actor, Absolute noob in CPP. I have contact details shared below on right if anyone has questions in some regards.