With the recent release of Division 3 (out of 7) of Raising the Bar: Redux, I decided to play the two available mods for Half-Life 2 that attempt to recreate the original vision for the game.
I already talked about much I love Half-Life 2 and what makes that game be what it is, and also how the cutting room floor (not the website, but you check it out!) exists for a reason. But for everything that we didn’t get, there’s always wanting to experience it. But wanting is better than having…
Quick recap, Half-Life 2 released in November 2004 is considered one of the best PC games of all time. The game won a plethora of awards and is one of the biggest steps forward in video game history. However it had a troubled development and many ideas that didn’t pass the Cutting Room Floor.
In September 2003, the entire source code of the game was leaked to the Internet. This was the biggest leak at the time, and even to this day. Lotsof things were leaked, including archived content from the development stages of the game, circa 2000.
I’ll add some quotes from the Cutting Room Floor post I made:
There’s a MegaLeak pack that you can download and check it yourself. This pack includes all the dev maps from different era of development of the game, so you can see how development was like. And I played it. Here’s my thoughts on it.
The leaked Half-Life 2 sucks. It doesn’t suck because it’s bad, it sucks because it’s too much all once, firing at every direction. I do admit that some parts of it look cool, like the atmosphere, but walking down through leak-City 17 will make you completely lost without nowhere to go. It’s quite telling when you go to the Consul/Train Station plaza and just feel completely lost. Then we have the Manhack Arcade, which is a nothingburger, because it’s only for show. Kids work on making Cremators just makes me laugh.
Alyx doesn’t meet you on the way to Kleiner’s lab, and apparently he gets injured after the teleport? Then it goes off the rails, with Ravenholm being before Eli’s lab, and then we have to go on a train to get to the Depot/Prison THEN to the Air Exchange, and THEN to the Borealis and later, Kraken Base. It’s just too much.
After that we also had the City Wars levels which were gonna be longer and we also had to fight the Hydra.
This original version was apparently gonna be 4 days long (in story), while the final version is 3. This extra day would mean that we would have a game that would be like the runtime of HL2 + Episode One + half of Episode Two at bare minimum.
Yeah…
BUT! Never doubt the fan community, they’ll get it done, one way or another. Today we’ll talk about 3 mods, and I’ll throw one in as a bonus at the end.
Raising the Bar: Redux
The aptly named Raising the Bar: Redux is perhaps the biggest mod that attempts to recreate one of the versions of the storyline, being something closer to 2002 to 2003’s version of the storylines, and comes with all the bits that matters. Currently, it only got up until the train ride out of the Depot chapter with ‘Division 3’ (out of 7, apparently).
RTB:R goes through the same ideas that Valve wanted to put (and cut off).
Gordon gets reintroduced to the world, showing him what happened while Gordon was sleeping. Then he gets dropped in City 17, goes through the old plaza, gets into a citizen rebellion, saved by Barney and meets Dr. Kleiner (no Alyx here). The teleport fails like the retail game, and Gordon is set loose inside the city. After dealing with a helicopter on foot through the Plaza, he leaves the city via the Canals by airboat.
After getting through the Canals, Gordon finds Eli Maxwell’s den with Alyx Vance in there. She shows the gravity gun, I mean, Physics Manipulator, and Eli gets captured. Then Gordon takes a detour through Ravenholm and the mines (like in the retail game), but here, the mines are much longer.
After leaving the mines, Gordon goes through the wasteland and reaches the Antlion Caves, defeating the Antlion King. He travels with a buggy to reach the Prison/Depot, to rescue Eli, finding Alyx there (like in the retail game), and then they get a train.
I glossed over some bits here and there because they don’t need to be explained. As far as a recreation goes, it is mostly accurate. There’s bits here and there that are from the leak, but several others are straight up from the retail game.
One of them is the fact that Eli Maxwell gets captured and Alyx Vance (remember, they aren’t related in this) asks the player to save him. I’m sorry, what? I only met you both for like 5 minutes, there’s zero connection between me and you two. Why should I care?
This is because the prison/depot was not the climax of the chapter or day, whatever you wanna call it. The actual climax was the Air Exchange, and the prison was only one of the many locations that Gordon went through to find the Air Exchange. But this has been expanded to be a larger chapter with its own climax… And I dislike that, it doesn’t make sense. Someone that has been around me for 2 minutes asked me to go rescue a man that I met for like 5 minutes… Very good.
This is clearly made for fans of Half-Life 2 (like me) who see the emotional connection between Eli and Alyx, but in the original storyline, they are notrelated. Because of that, there’s no reason to think otherwise. We’re saving him because she asked us nicely? Huh?
I could go on with this but another large part I dislike is the Antlion Caves they added in Division 3. Not only we go through one but TWO cave sections in RTB:R with the latter being much longer and more annoying than the former. It goes on for too long and the boss fight feels like the final boss of Half-Life: Opposing Force, but without the Randy Pitchford-ness it had, so that makes me less likely to try to kill it. I still don’t know how I killed it, because the game didn’t really explain how should I do it, and also the god damn respawning antlions…
Overall, my opinion of RTB:R is that, although it’s a really well done mod, and a lot of care and effort was put into making it, it’s not a Valve game by a clear shot. Multiple clear shots. Yes, the storyline is based on a Valve game but that several parts were cut for a reason, several things didn’t work and it shows.
Reminder that this is in “Division 3” at the time of writing, and they plan another 4 parts. It took me about 3 real life nights to get through the entire thing, and it’s so long already… Imagine MORE game runtime… Yay…
Overall, if I was gonna give it a rating, it’d be ‘Not a Valve game/10’, simply put. Valve wouldn’t do this in a million years, and the fact they didn’t it when they went back to the Xen Quarantine Zone in Half-Life: Alyx makes it less likely that they would do it in the future. At least you got your beta, huh? Hope you like waiting until 2040 or something for it to be completed.
Dark Interval
The other mod that tries to recreate the original non-cut storyline is Dark Interval. In a really weird way, it is more accurate to the original leaked material from 2003, while trying to remake the storyline circa 2000 to early 2002.
In a dream-like state, Gordon awake inside a ship, heading to City 17. He meets Odell, an engineer that ‘knows the captain’, and after some tutorial-ling, Gordon is out to City 17. Nevermind the fact that the ship kept fazing into the arctic…
Once he steps inside the City 17, Barney recognizes him and tells him to go to Kleiner’s place, in the far side. From here, Gordon goes through the city’s underbelly, construction site, manhack arcade and then finally the industrial sector. Barney meets him at Kleiner’s and the two reminisce a bit before trying to teleport Gordon out. As expected, the teleporter fails and Gordon goes on foot to tackle the Combine forces.
New to Dark Interval is an attempt to humanize the Combine characters so the Overwatch is less of a robotic dispatcher and more like a proper human calling the shots, and also with several people trying to stop him. Unless many versions of the storyline, Gordon acts as a decoy to get Barney and Kleiner out of the city, meeting them before parting ways.
Gordon is told to go to see Eli through the wastes, but needs to leave the city first. This is where Gordon goes through the Canals/Sewers but is chased by an insane Combine commander in a heli (mimicking the heli chase in the retail game). Surprisingly, no airboats are used but instead a Combine APC… Which is weird but okay?
At the wall to the wastes, Gordon faces and kills the heli and its pilot without much issue and then is free to leave. He goes through some caves until stumbling to find Eli. No surname, no titles, just Eli. showing Gordon how the world used to be in a slideshow (!!!) and everything. Then goes off to show the Physics Manipulator and some minor training with it. Then… A portal storms hits and the mod ends…
Yeah, I forgot to mention, Dark Interval is on its ‘Part 2’, out of 5 apparently.
Overall, I personally like that they mimicked the maps from the leak and the aesthetics are also pretty nice. It does look and feel more like the first SIGGRAPH demo that Valve showed, and with some nice detail added.
However the liberties took with the Combine and the chase inside the city are not only bad, they are horrendous. You get a bunch of angry people shouting at their comms that Gordon is a force to be reckoned with. Yeah, well, we’re already know that, we’re playing as him. There’s no need for that.
Other than the strange Russian or maybe European look for Eli, he fits the bill perfectly, doing almost exactly what the original vision for him was. If you take RTB:R’s voice and model and put in Dark Interval, you get the perfect Eli recreation…
Dark Interval is not a perfect recreation, in fact, neither RTB:R or DI are recreations, but more like re-imaginings to what the original vision of the storyline for Half-Life 2 looked like. And I can’t say I dislike it but there’s too many changes that don’t fit. The aesthetics are really good but that’s one of the many upsides compared to the drawbacks it has.
Also sadly, it’s missing a large chunk of the game as well, at the time of writing, it’s only Part 2 (out of 5 apparently), so we’re missing a bunch of stuff. High effort and quality, but deviates too much to be what I’d consider a ‘recreation’. It’s not bad, per say, and it uses somewhat the Valve philosophy but not quite.
Rating? “It’s almost there/10”.
Raising the Bar: Retail
Wait, didn’t I already talk about this? Nope! This is completely different. This is Raising The Bar: Retail, that attempts to mix the aesthetics and themes of RTB:R with the Retail release of Half-Life 2. Despite what you might think, it’s not a remake, but large edits to the retail maps to make them have the RTB:R style.
And it doesn’t really work as of now.
The first release is ‘Division 1’ (what’s with this word?), that only includes the first three chapters of the retail game, edited and expanded in some areas to make it more like RTB:R.
If you don’t know what happens in those, I’ll sum up with this:
Gordon gets reintroduced to the world by the G-Man, then he gets dropped in City 17. He’s saved by Barney, who tells him to go meet Kleiner. He gets to be into an apartment raid, then is saved Alyx, eventually meeting Dr. Kleiner, who is gonna teleport him away. The teleport fails when it’s his turn, forcing him to leave the city on foot. Barney tells him to go to Eli’s Place (Black Mesa East) via the ‘old canals’. After going through a maze of canals, he leaves the city and reaches the airboat, heading out deeper into the Wasteland.
The ‘demo’ ends there, when ‘Water Hazard’ starts, or should have. Overall, this really strange mod is quite amusing. It’s a remix of the original levels with some aesthetics of RTB:R, but it also includes some of its worse parts: Unnecessary detail for the sake of making something ‘look detailed’. It’s not really good, and people should stop. Clutter doesn’t mean detail, folks.
There’s not much to say other than ‘I dunno who this is for’. If you wanted to play Half-Life 2, you’re already doing it. If you wanted to play RTB:R, you can just grab that. RTB: Retail is an awkward middle hybrid of the two that isn’t finished yet to be considered anything other than a remix.
Reminder that the original Half-Life 2 storyline was set in New York City, and the retail game does use a few bits from it, like the final map where you go through the Citadel, while the retail uses Eastern European (mostly Sofia, Bulgaria) architecture, meaning you have RTB:R assets from NYC clashing with retail assets. You can see how much (a lack of) effort they went when they didn’t remake the maps from retail fully, to give some bits more depth, as I think it is needed.
Overall, I really like the idea but not the execution. Yes, it’s still early to tell, but let’s see if they do something new with the next part. Oh and it’ll be like 5 parts too.
Rating as of January 2026 is ‘I dunno who this is for/10’.
Thrill
The bonus mod I’m looking at is a big deal… It was deleted from ModDB. I have no idea why and I haven’t pursued enough to figure it out.
Thrill is a recreation of Half-Life 1 Alpha to make more sense and connect all the parts that are available into playable experience. As a piece of history, it’s incredibly interesting, how the folks managed to create something playable out of a few demo levels Valve presented back in 1997.
As a game, it’s a lot less fun than you can imagine.
Thrill is annoying and often frustrating because of the many changes made, including to enemy behavior. You’ll die a lot to the enemy placement, map wonkiness and other weird behaviors. Sure, as a piece of media that was lost media for ages, it is incredible seeing it for real, but as a game… I can see why Valve decided to redo the entire game, because if this was the final release, it wouldn’t make the splash that it did.
Several bits of the mod are also rearranged parts of the retail game, including the ‘On the Rail’, ‘Apprehension’ and ‘Residue Processing’ chapters, just made to look more like an alpha release. This is because Valve didn’t make any connection between the maps they presented, probably because the game wasn’t done. The biggest change were the X-LAB maps that turned into the ‘Questionable Ethics’ chapter, which is almost night and day in look, layout, feel, so on.
Also can’t forget to mention the abrupt ending it has. Say what you want about Xen, at least it had a boss fight and all. You go to the last chapter, open a door and then it fades to black, saying ‘No one knew what awaited Gordon on the other side of the door’. Really? You folks couldn’t make anything up? At least make it stop inside before getting into Xen or something…
Overall, I don’t dislike Thrill for being a bad mod, I dislike Thrill for being a perfect recreation of the Alpha maps into a cohesive experience, for better or worse… There’s a reason it was changed into what we know today, people. It’s because it didn’t work!
Rating: ‘No tram ride/10’.
Closing Words
I hate to be a downer but can we please stop trying to get back things that clearly didn’t work? Even if you remake it 1:1 like what Thrill, it can still get you an experience is that is more annoying than actually fun.
I’m fine with mods re-visioning and re-imagining things but RTB:R and DI went into really weird directions that I’m also kinda iffy about. Neither can claim that they recreate the ‘original’ storyline because both put Ravenholm/Trap Town after Eli’s Den, which is how it worked on the retail release.
I love Half-Life 2 as a game and experience and I was quite excited to see that modding teams were working to make the original storyline work because it clearly didn’t but after playing them, I feel that Valve was right to do some cuts. Not everything, but clearly a bunch of them.
Who knows, maybe by 2040 when they are all done and I can play them when I’m over 50 I can look fondly back at what used to be not really good turned into really good.