In an act of incredibly targeted pettiness, the developers behind a Half-Life 2 mod that's been available since 2022 have managed to ban a select group of YouTubers from playing the latest version of their work. The mod in question, Half-Life 2: Overcharged, is an "overhaul modification" that adds new enemies and weapons as well as restoring some cut content, promising new ways to play and so on (thanks, RPS).
Except it wasn't all that great. Looking over the user reviews, people generally seem to have had some fun with Overcharged but reckon it could've used a bit more work, and doesn't live up to some of the more grandiose claims. So far, so normal: There are a thousand mods that fit such a description.
Certain YouTubers who specialise in playing and talking about Half-Life 2 mods made videos about Overcharged in the time since its release, and they weren't very kind to it. Again, pretty normal. But last month the Overcharged developers released a 2.0 update for the mod, promising fixes for many of the issues raised by players, and when certain YouTubers went to try this out, they got a nasty surprise.
For them, loading up the mod sees the game crash, and subsequently display an error message that says "STOP talking SH1T about us!"
YouTuber NoClick is one of those affected, and initially assumed this was just a problem with his installs or the mod… before realising that the error message is perhaps a little too pointed. Checking in with some other Half-Life 2 fanciers, he realised that fellow YouTuber Radiation Hazard also had this issue, and in fact four YouTubers in total were targeted in this way.
How? "There is proof the Half-Life 2: Overcharged developers used my SteamID, Scolcer's SteamID, Keron's SteamDB and Radiation Hazard's SteamID to ban us from playing the mod," says NoClick, linking to the mod's code which shows it running checks for all of the above Steam IDs, and referring to them as "anticitizens."
"You fixed absolutely nothing," says NoClick in his video about Overcharged's 2.0 release. "I gave you valid criticism and you only took it as an insult." Rather brilliantly, NoClick then devotes the next ten minutes or so of the video to highlighting various bugs and glitches in Overcharged 2.0, which does rather prove his point.
The most obvious thing to say about this is that it's so absolutely, utterly petty that it almost raises a smile. But targeting your critics is never a good idea, and using YouTuber's Steam IDs to ban them from playing your mod is just asking for trouble.
Sure enough, anyone with an interest in Half-Life 2 modding is now very mad with the team behind Overcharged. The ModDB page is now overflowing with negative reviews of the mod, many containing the line "the sun is leaking" in reference to one of Overcharged's more notably lighting glitches, while others are more concerned about whether this falls under Steam's definition of malware.
I couldn't put it better than redditor Upreality: "Script kiddies vibes from this lmao, did they think nobody would just apply basic reverse engineer[ing] and load the binary in IDA to check from where the string comes from?"
This temporarily made Overcharged 2.0 quite popular on ModDB, but only because people wanted to roast it. "Right now it is the number 2 most popular mod on the entire site, and it's literally all just people shit talking them," notes KoopaCL on the Half-Life subreddit. "Most comments seem to be 'the sun is leaking' and all tags to find it are stuff like 'virus', 'manchildren', 'malware' etc."
Let us end with some of those user tags mentioned by KoopaCL: These are community-sourced labels that help users understand the content of a given mod on ModDB. For Half-Life 2: Overcharged, we now have the following tags:
Being the second most popular mod on ModDB might usually be considered a good thing, but in this case it seems more like a way to get Valve's undivided attention on your HL2 modding career—and not in a good way.
