Announcing the winners of our RaiseTheBarVille Half-Life mapping challenge

Here are my more detailed thoughts on these maps:
 
Nova Exchange: I assumed as soon as I saw the name that this might be an attempt to play around with what the Air Exchange chapter could have been, which was cut during Half-Life 2's development and was meant to come straight after Nova Prospekt. In terms of gameplay, it's a lengthy and well-paced level but I found myself feeling like it wasn't guiding me very clearly, and in some cases I got frustrated with fiddly scenery and jump sections. It uses the Nova Prospekt setting effectively, but falls victim to feeling too similar much of the time. I also felt that there was a lack of exciting set-pieces, which combined with high difficulty ultimately made the level feel a bit long and grindy. I think that this would have been an excellent map if its length had been shorter and the extra time used to refine the moment-to-moment play.
 
Delayed: This was a nice revisit of some great parts of Episode Two, and I thought that set-pieces were used very effectively. I do feel that it stalled a little after the exciting introductory sequence, as the giant antlion encounter got a little frustrating in the end and it took me quite a long time to get past it. However, the pace soon picked up again once I eventually figured out how to get through the concrete walls, and the level quickly but excitingly drew to a close with a set-piece and car sequence. I'd say that visually this level was splendid and there was a definite wow factor to seeing the citadel up close, but in terms of gameplay there wasn't anything particularly noteworthy.
 
Blast Pit: Being one of Half-Life's most memorable sequences, I was very keen to see what this level had in store. After a visually impressive arrival at a facility that serves as the map's setting, I soon had a smile on my face when I saw the tentacles reborn as a Strider. The level is essentially about navigating the facility that surrounds the circular room the Strider is trapped in and figuring out how to dispose of it, with its overwhelming firepower just as lethal as those tentacles. Well-designed puzzles that involve locating and activating equipment break up the action, which combined with plenty of nooks to explore and excellent use of scripted enemy encounters makes this level the most enjoyable overall experience. It also excels on the visuals front, with every area exhibiting impressive craftmanship.

Thanks again to those who put stuff together, even if you didn't manage to complete it.

Just watched the video of Blast Pit: very well deserved won! Incredible visual quality for a tight deadline, but most of all a very well thought out layout and puzzle. Also nasty firefights.

Congrats

I played the 3 maps tonight and it was really great, congratulations !

Tons of work has been put here and it's very satisfying to play some half-life 2, even 11 years after its release. And it was big, i mean, you had only 6 weeks (is that right ? maybe even a bit less idk) and it was few hours of gameplay here with only 3 maps (espacially Nova Exhange which was really huuuuuge), so i really appreciate it.

I agree with the results, Blast Pit was really the best map from my opinion, of course it reminds me the gameplay idea from the tentacles boss from HL1 and that's great, it's a clever design idea (you reuse an area multiple times but the player never gets bored). But all 3 maps are epic and memorable.

The only big negative point i have is about gameplay and balance. I think it was by default but i also wanted to play it that way, so the game was on hard difficulty level and it was ... not easy

The big problem i had most of the time is that i didn't get the healthkits when i needed them, the autosaves were not always on the good spots (even once it saved 1 sec before i died so i was forced to load a previous save, otherwise i'd have died without being able to do anything) and the weapons were never the ones i wanted. The big problem with HL2 on hard-difficult level is that each bullet that hits you does at least 10 hp damages, when a bunch of ennemies is shooting you and you don't have powerful weapons but only that ludicrous smg that needs 30 bullets to kill 1 single combine ... you feel powerless

Or when, for example, in Nova Exhange you're asked to run in front of the vehicle with rockets and big machine gun in order to get rockets to kill it but you only have 20 health points ... you can't do anything.

And that's the problem i had many times (more on Nova Exhange and Blast Pit, i don't remember having this kind of problem on Delayed), on Half-Life you just can't be in front of an impossible situation, there is always something. The most basic things are the infinite grenades/rockets crates, but it's also about health.

On Blast Pit, i had a lot of troubles right after killing the strider when just 3 combines and 1 hunter gets in, the AI is just very annoying in this room because you can't really hide somewhere, your weapons are inaccurate and ennemies field of view is crazy (when they climb the stairs they can perfectly see you and gets the advantage from bellow, it's really frustrating) I died at least 10 times here because i was only 24 hp.

But all these things are just details (that may have been fixed but with the amount of time for the contest, that's fully understandable), it was really an excellent work, congratulations to all of you and thank you.