Half-Life Enriched is an upcoming mod for the original Half-Life that aims to update the look and feel of the game with reworked art, maps, and more.
The upcoming overhaul for Valve’s hit title fully overhauls Half-Life’s single-player campaign with bigger detailed maps, greatly upscaled textures, over 250 new texture variants, updated, models, completely retextured maps with better lighting effects, and fewer loading points due to merged maps.
“Half-Life: Enriched aims to rework all of the original Half-Life maps in the singleplayer campaign”, modder ‘Hezus’ writes. “This means you'll see larger, better looking maps, with more details. It will look and feel like the original Half-Life but better looking and with various gameplay changes.”
As some of you will remember, Half-Life was one of the first games with continuous gameplay with loading points between maps. This conversion mod greatly cuts down on loading points by merging maps together, opening new gameplay possibilities as well.
Half-Life: Enriched - Black Mesa Inbound - Mod DB
We’ve included a summary of some of the other features down below:
Half-Life Enriched Features
- Completely retextured with over 250 new texture variants
Due to the texture upscaling, all maps had to be completely retextured. By doing so, many errors and inconsistensies have been fixed. Next to that, many new variants to older textures have been created to improve the visuals of the maps.
- Completely reworked lighting effects
The upscaled textures create a much sharper lightmap which gives shadows and light more pronounces effects than in the original Half-Life. Nearly all lights now rely on much more realistic texture lighting and have soft glow effects.
- Detail overlays for every texture
Half-Life: Enriched will have full support for detail textures. These overlays will greatly increase the sharpness of the textures and can be toggled on or off according to taste.
- Updated weapon, NPC and monster models
All original models will recieve and update to their texture resolution and poly count, while retaining their original 1998 style.
- Full support for all Half-Life versions
Half-Life: Enriched will support all Half-Life versions, including the old retail release (also known as WON Half-Life). You'll be able to play this on legacy hardware going all the way back to Windows 95.
No release date for Half-Life Enriched has been revealed just yet, but the modder aims to release new builds every few weeks. We’ll update you as soon as more information about this promising new mod comes in.
