are the total-conversion coming back?

I was thinking about making a total conversion sometimes. But I'm working on getting my own games developed so I can't work a lot on anything modding related.

I'd love to see such a resurgence one day. Though, there are already quite a few promising projects in the works, I think.

I still have total conversion ideas on my mind.

But I just need some time to work on the projects. The developments are in spare time to me.

Paranoia was a pretty good, recent-ish (for half life...) total conversion

I saw a truckload of Doom total conversions, some Duke Nukem ones too. Guess sooner or later a HL one will be seen too.
Problem with HL is that Valve still wont release the source code after all these years , way to hold everyone back valvE(A).

It's 2022, the community simply isn't as big as it used to be. Half-Life was the dominant modding platform among FPS games in the early 2000s, while today its mapping community is (as far as I can tell) smaller than, say, Doom's or even Quake's. Besides, I think it's also important to remember that TCs used to be way more common because, at the time, there weren't any general-use, cheap or even free game engines such as Unity 3D or UE today, so it was often the case that people who wanted to create their own games would resort to modding instead. You'd even get people who created TCs not so much because they were, say, Half-Life fans, but rather because Half-Life was such a flexible (for the time) modding platform with a large playerbase.

All of this has no longer been the case for more than a decade - there just isn't as much a compelling reason as twenty years ago to make a TC anymore. Why would anyone create something such as Counter-Strike or Natural Selection as a HL1 mod, rather than as an actual game on a modern 3D engine? People who still mod Half-Life to this day tend to do this precisely because they like Half-Life, which means that the majority of the community's output is going to be BM-styled singleplayer mappacks (which is fine!), perhaps with a lot of custom assets and coding, but still Half-Life campaigns at heart. This doesn't mean that TCs aren't (and won't be) made anymore, it's just that it's perfectly understandable that they're nowhere as common as they used to be in the game's heyday.

^ Absolutely this. A TC renaissance most likely isn't coming, I'm afraid. The only way something like that could ever happen is if the engine were finally open sourced, but I have doubts that Valve will ever do such a thing. As much as I'd love to see TCs on Half-Life again, it's just not happening. But hey, at least we have TCs still being made with the id Tech engines!