One thing I loved about Goldsrc was the death animations, and recently I've decided to take a look at The Specialists again. Now, while this is a very tiny feature and is merely cosmetic, the animations made me feel so much more immersed into the idea that I was in an action movie.
Now before I begin, I am well aware this isn't supposed to be a direct remake of The Specialists nor is it the newly born brother of (insert any divey, shooty vidya game here) but I think it's well-worth comparing the games since they are quite similar.
Now what I mean by the animations being more movie-like is that they have a lot of detail in the movement, very much like how movies focused on scenes so much that the deaths seem too perfect; action movies don't try to simulate the reaction of a gun shot, they want to make it look as cool and effective as possible.
Now, I have been debating whether or not to post this since this is Source, but then I remembered a previous mod called Action Half Life 2, and decided to take another look at that. I'm going to mention one specific thing they did because it stood out so well and when I first saw it, I was awestruck. I was spraying a machine gun at a guy and he didn't fall down after he died, he continued to react to my bullets. He didn't fall to the ground until I stopped firing my gun and that alone was such a satisfying feeling! Little things like this make such a difference and this was a huge example of that for me. Sadly, I don't have any footage of it but if you want to check it out for ideas or reference, this is their Moddb page: http://www.moddb.com/mods/action-halflife-2
So, how could Double Action include these dope-ass death animations? I have no idea. I'm not going to pretend like I understand how source works because my only knowledge is the standard file layout, what files do what (for the most part), working with textures and a bit of mapping. However, this week I checked out a mod called Counter-Life 2, which at first I thought was just a SMod-esque mod, but it turned out it had some really interesting features, one of which was different death animations based on where you shoot them. You can watch them fall over as you shoot them in the leg, see them fall backwards when taking some lead to the face or watch them quiver and fall when shot in the chest; it was so satisfying!
This was just a quick mind-dump; if anyone else is interested in expanding the discussion go ahead, I just thought it was worth sharing.