Who Cares About Black Mesa?

Who Cares About Black Mesa?

By Olde

January 8, 2018

Author's Note: This is an opinion piece. The opinions reflected herein are exclusively my own.

If you can't handle an opinionated piece of criticism, then this article is not for you and you should quit while you're ahead.

I also differ from standard writing practices in that I do not italicize titles of games. This is because I use titles very frequently,

and since I use italics for special emphasis, it would look very weird with italics everywhere when you know the title refers to the games.

Black Mesa is a re-imagining of the classic first-person shooter Half-Life (1998) by Valve Software, one of the most revolutionary and influential first-person shooters ever made, and it is currently available for purchase through Steam's Early Access program for $19.99 (USD). Black Mesa started out as a mod using Half-Life 2's (2004) Source engine in a highly ambitious attempt to recreate as well as update the original Half-Life through more modern means while retaining the classic game's original tone, atmosphere, environments, and basic gameplay. To accomplish this, it pushes the Source engine to its limits, develops and enhances the original Half-Life maps through a much higher level of detail, and both revises previous areas through abridging or expanding the levels in ways the developers see fit. The project is now infamous in the gaming community for its severely protracted development schedule, the intentionally secretive nature of development, and poor communication to the public. Moreover, I find Black Mesa important and interesting as a cultural and community product for a number of reasons. In addition to it being a recreation of a landmark, watershed game widely recognized one of the most influential shooters of all time, I also find it important because it is a modern example of a game that has been excused time and again for its nearly unrivaled Development Hell (thirteen years of development and counting), only being surpassed in design time by one of the most botched games to ever come out of Development Hell, Duke Nukem Forever (2011). Yet behind its consistent delays and in addition to the extreme waiting to which fans are subjected undercuts a serious question that determines why one is still waiting for this game's release.

Development on the Black Mesa project began in 2005 as two concurrent but unrelated projects to do an appropriate iteration of "Half-Life: Source," which was a bastardized version of Half-Life in that it merely ported the same maps over to the Source engine and ended up being nearly identical to the first except in its myriad of additional bugs. After the two projects joined together, they formed a team called Crowbar Collective and their resulting free mod was released in 2012 on ModDB. After that release, Crowbar Collective received an offer by Valve Development themselves to put the game on Steam's Early Access program, which would give a pricetag to the game, thereby allowing the team to get paid for their work, and would also give them the opportunity to use the latest version of Valve's Source engine. Crowbar Collective seized that opportunity and used the next three years (2012-2015) to port the free mod's levels over to the newest version of the Source engine. In May 2015, Black Mesa saw an official Steam release on Early Access, sporting the same levels in the new engine, as well as a multiplayer deathmatch mode with some multiplayer maps and the promise of the final part of the game coming soon. For those who don't know, the final four (or five, if you consider the two minute long Endgame to be an entire chapter) chapters of Half-Life take place on an alien world called Xen, which depart from the Earth levels in look, gameplay, and focus. These final levels constitute the last major component of the game and, as of this writing, the Xen levels are not included in the Early Access release of Black Mesa. Where that section would normally tie into the next levels, the game essentially ends with the player jumping through the first portal to Xen world, and the credits roll with a promise of the game to be continued. So all is good...right?

I have been following the game since I first discovered the mod in 2014. I have been somewhat active in the Steam discussions forums and have posted a few times on the Black Mesa forums before the team decided to prevent any new people from being able to register. I paid for the Early Access version as soon as I saw it on sale in May 2015. I have played the game from beginning to end twice, once through the free mod version and once through the Early Access version. I have tested its various updates on Steam and have played the team's original abridged versions as well as alternative, extended versions of We've Got Hostiles, On A Rail, and Surface Tension. I have supported the developers' slow, methodical re-imagining of the Xen levels, which were promised to be much more robust, expansive, and fun than were the original levels of Half-Life. I have patiently waited for the release of the Xen levels, delay after delay. After an update this past November said that the "do or die" deadline of December would not see the release, I had reached my breaking point. But it wasn't until a lot more introspective thinking that I actually realized a more pressing issue than the game just being delayed for yet another undisclosed, probably undecided "deadline," aka TBDW (to be decided whenever). I found that the real question that I had was this:

Even if the Xen levels get released, who cares?

I'm not just being flippant here, nor is this a question that can be easily dismissed. This is the fundamental question for any project, if people will care if the game is finished. I am legitimately asking here, who actually cares if Black Mesa is ever finished? And I realized why I came up with this question: because I have stopped caring.

In the two and a half years that Xen has been supposedly worked on, we have received a grand total of four screenshots of Xen (and no videos or .gifs). Four. Screenshots. And while what we have seen isn't necessarily disappointing, it's also not particularly awe-inspiring. One picture is too blurry to really tell what's going on, one looks like a cave, and the other two look like pictures of the Great Barrier Reef. And they certainly don't look like the project has warranted two delays. For those who don't know, here's a brief rundown of the delays. Upon first release on Steam, conjectures on Xen's release date were all over the place. The first solid release date of Xen was announced in October 2016, when the team said they were aiming for an ambiguous Summer 2017 release. In the summer, it was then delayed for a final "do-or-die" December deadline. In late November, they announced that the game would be delayed yet again, this time with no definitive or estimated timeframe provided. Now there are not even vague hints as to when the Xen levels will be completed or released. Will it see a release in 2018? 2019? 2020? Later? Your guess is as good as mine.

Xen is really the only major thing holding up the game's final release. By the developer's own admission, it constitutes about 15% of the game. And if/when it will is deemed finished, it is said to be released in a free update for those who already own the game. But since this is essentially the only thing holding this game's full release back and has been the subject of much anticipation and ire, its importance can't be overstated. So in order to broach the question of who cares about Black Mesa, I need to talk about why I think Xen matters.

Why do the Xen levels matter so much?

Probably the most widely circulated preview picture of Xen,

now synonymous with the words "delay" and "disappointment."

The current build of Black Mesa is currently incomplete and customers have been promised a much more fulfilling and rewarding Xen than the levels from the original Half-Life. We have been told that the original Xen levels were rushed and weren't representative of what players would have gotten had Valve taken more time. Basically, we are promised a much more enriching experience that would correct or fix what is largely seen as a deficiency in an otherwise strike of brilliance, an undoubtedly classic game. But I think another large part of it is that the current Black Mesa experience is unfulfilling. Of course we all would love to play the final version right away, that's not the issue. The issue is that we've played 85% of the finished game (by the developers' own estimation) and we're not satisfied. The current game is good...but not great. So we want more. We're staking all our hope in these last final maps to make it the experience we were promised.

The original Xen part of Half-Life can be beaten by a casual player in about 35 to 45 minutes. It consists of only four chapters and an Endgame (for all intents and purposes, a cutscene). One of the chapters is a short platforming level while two others are short boss fights. The only substantial level is the third, Interloper, and it is about as long as the average Earth level. One of the reasons why some customers are upset is because in the original Half-Life, the entire Xen section is very small compared to the rest of the game. In fact, already by 2017 there was a fully functional version of the Xen levels made compatible with Black Mesa on the game's own Workshop! Meanwhile, other customers are more patient but expecting a lot from a little. This is because they are used to the waiting and feel reassured by the promise of a more fully developed Xen segment. While still only being four chapters, Crowbar Collective claims that the size of each map is vastly increased, the environmental detail greatly enriched, and the gameplay much improved. They have essentially said that their levels will put the original Valve maps to shame.

So back to our original question: who cares if/when Xen is released and Black Mesa is therefore finished? SteamDB charts say that currently there are about 713,500 owners of Black Mesa. This is not an insignificant number. Note too that a noticeable number of people on the Steam forums have said that they will only buy the game once it's finished and removed from Early Access, which Crowbar Collective has repeatedly said they would. So there is still an untapped market for this game, those who won't support the game on Early Access. But by the point that the levels are deemed complete, will it be too late?

People are anticipating Xen for a lot of different reasons. Mostly, I think the majority of us who have been patient simply want the waiting to end, want to be able to play the finished product, and want to see the way Crowbar Collective re-imagines the iconic endgame segment. I think that most people are excited to see what Xen looks and plays like, and simply don't mind the waiting. After all, there are thousands of games out there, so surely there are others to hold our attention while we're waiting for Xen. But I also think that to some degree, a lot of customers have been fed some grossly over-optimistic rhetoric from the developers without any evidence. What's worse is that when really critically examining the product that Crowbar Collective has put out, as well as what they've concerned themselves with in 2017 alone, one's expectation can only be mediocre at best. The result of believing unsubstantiated and ultimately unrealistic rhetoric is that most fans who are still taking Crowbar Collective's side are staking all their hope in Xen. One cannot deny that with the excited developer talk spouted out about Xen, the final part of the game is stronger as a concept than as a reality. This is because as a potentiality, it is nothing but greatness. We can believe in its exceptional quality because we have no proof to the contrary. It can be anything we can imagine it to be and it gives us hope for the future. The reality is much more distressing. Can you imagine being disappointed by the actual release of Xen? Disgusted by it? Are we going to just lap up whatever we get, reject any criticism, and simply repeat to ourselves that Xen is unequivocally and indisputably fantastic because that's what we've been told to believe?

Many people believe Black Mesa to be a masterpiece or that Xen will help to solidify it as a masterpiece. Aside from those tired or fed up with waiting for Xen, the game's positive reception based on the merits of its present full release can hardly be overstated. It currently holds a Very Positive rating on Steam, with 93% of the 9410 reviews being positive. Interestingly, this is actually down from the "Overwhelmingly Positive" status it held just a few days prior to the present writing. I feel, however, that this game has many, many flaws, and no matter how amazing Xen is, it cannot fix what I see as problems intrinsic to the game, nor can it rebuild my trust in the developer, on this or any future project.

My thesis is this: many fans are expecting great things from Black Mesa, Xen, and Crowbar Collective unquestioningly and without any justified reasoning, are continuing to believe everything Crowbar Collective says, are waiting patiently and silently for those Xen levels for as long as it takes, and are ultimately the ones who care about Black Mesa because the game looks pretty in places, has lots of polish, and has witnessed a high amount of unsubstantiated positive rhetoric and self-praise from the developers about the game's unreleased segment. Right now, Xen is amorphous. Xen is ambiguous. Because of this, Crowbar Collective can engage in cheap talk in an attempt to convince customers into believing that their Xen will redeem Half-Life's original Xen or cause us to overlook any problems with the rest of Black Mesa. Without its release, who's to say it can't? It can even, in our minds, fix many of the mistakes and realize much of the missed potential in the Earth levels. By that logic, why should Xen ever be released? It's a nice fantasy, but deep down, we know it won't. I know that some people are satisfied enough with the current build of Black Mesa, and to those people, the rest of this article may read like curmudgeonly cynicism or nitpicking from a bad player or a fan who feels burned. You're entitled to think that. But I want to convey that I believe that much of the anticipation of Xen comes from the idea that the last 15% of the game will exceed and redeem a lot of the issues that we may have with the current iteration of the game. So I want to take some time to examine the parts of Black Mesa that we are able to play in order to suss out some reasons why I believe the people who are waiting for Xen are doing so. In the next sections of this article until my concluding thoughts, I'll try to address these issues, and hopefully, even if you don't agree with me, we'll be able to gain some insight into who might care about the final release of the Xen levels and the completion of Black Mesa, and maybe it will cause you to see things differently.

Visuals

Blurry visuals may have been added to make the game look more cool...

It's not. It's just blurry.

Let me talk briefly about the visuals of Xen first before I begin on the game as a whole. We of course only have a few images to go on, but from the images we have of Xen, it looks good. It looks good. Not great. Not excellent. Simply good. Having played new games in the Unreal 4 and Unity engines, I can tell you that there's nothing in the entirety of Black Mesa or anything from the Xen images that looks like it couldn't be matched or exceeded in either engine. I'm not saying that Black Mesa should be on the Unreal 4 or Unity engines; I'm not knowledgeable or proficient enough about those engines to know whether that would be practical or beneficial (plus the time it would take to port the game over to those engines would at this point nullify everything, though more on that later). What I am saying, however, is that Black Mesa's visuals don't exceed that of games that take much less time to develop considering the advancements in modern game engines. Black Mesa also currently doesn't exceed the wow factor in triple-A games, such as Battlefield One or Assassin's Creed: Origins. Having played the new Battlefield games, I can tell you that I was much more impressed with those games visually than with anything in Black Mesa. Black Mesa is only remarkable in its update and adaptation to Half-Life. As a standalone, it can't compete visually with modern triple-A games.

Black Mesa looks great for a game running on the Source engine. Take that away from it and one becomes painfully aware that Black Mesa's time to visually impress is long gone. Aside from CSM (cascade shadow mapping, a system in which shadows move alongside light sources and objects), god-rays (rays of light visibly passing around objects when the light source isn't visible), and a couple of other minor visual effects, such as depth of field and color correction, the game looks almost no different in its latest public beta branch than it did in the free mod release of 2012. That is, the game looks pretty much the same as it did five years ago. If the game had been released in a finished state even in 2015, it might have been a big deal. And even the new additional visual effects (particularly CSM and god-rays alone) have caused some people to recently pay attention to the game for its visual style alone. But let's be realistic here: the game looks good for a Source mod but as a standalone game in the general market, it can't even hope to compete visually with modern triple-A titles. Black Mesa isn't even considered a fully released game yet, and it maintains the same visual framework designed in 2005. By the time that it is considered finished, which is looking to be 2019 or 2020, even Xen may look average or even slightly below average. Without a doubt, the visuals look good compared to the original Half-Life levels. But in a world of Far Cry 5, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Battlefield One, Resident Evil 7, Escape from Tarkov, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the visual efforts of Crowbar Collective are merely par for the course. This isn't to say that the game looks particularly bad; in fact, as far as I can tell, its overwhelming visual style has been the biggest draw to the game. But it's still a Source game and it's limited by the capacity of its engine.

But even regarded on a strictly visual level, the game still has problems. I can casually run through pretty much any area and show flaws or things that keep it from looking perfect, realistic, or above average in today's gaming world. Take the two above screenshots, only mere meters away from each other in-game, and the locations of which I didn't even have to try to find. The excuse of Crowbar Collective being a small team doesn't make a difference to me, since I'm judging the final product (plus everything should have been combed over in the port between engines). I don't want to be that guy to be overly picky about seemingly needless stuff, because usually I don't care for these kinds of graphical oversights. What I do want to do is to show that even by the merits by which everyone seems to judge this game, it still has obvious problems. I mean, if Crowbar Collective is going for realism here, should I point out that bullet shells still make the same metallic "clink" sound when ejected onto sand as they do when ejected onto metal floors? Should I point out that the tops of tanks still fly unrealistically a dozen feet into the air when hit with a few rockets? I even noticed the below low-res textures immediately upon restarting a new game in September 2015 (long before I had the idea to write this article) and running it on the highest detail setting:

I had realized there were problems with some of the textures back in September 2015.

Let me abate the impending vitriol by reiterating that I don't point these out to be merely a griper or faultfinder, or that I'm someone who "just doesn't get it" (a criticism that I've heard so many times to discount an argument that I could write a whole article on that). I don't actively look for things that I can nitpick so one day I can write an opinion piece that no one will read in a failed attempt to irrationally smear a successful business and development team that's been working on a project for over thirteen years while I easily throw criticism without lifting a finger from my desk chair. I'm not an armchair modder and I can't create what Crowbar Collective has done. That goes without saying. But you also don't need to know how to build a printer to know a shitty printer when you see one. And you don't need to be a chef to realize when you've got food poisoning. So if you at least agree with that, then at least concede this point to me: if you're asking me to judge the game on visual merits alone, when you get right down to it, the game just doesn't warrant all the praise it gets. That's really all my point is. It doesn't look spectacular, it clearly still has problems and looks, well, average compared to our contemporary alternatives.

Does Black Mesa look better than anything that Valve Development has made in the Half-Life universe? Well, they haven't ventured into Half-Life territory for over ten years, so obviously, yes. Is it better looking than Portal 2 (2011)? No, not really. Is it good for a small, freelance mod development team working out of their basements? Sure, but that's not their status anymore, and besides, I'm looking at the finished product. Is it the the best-looking mod that uses the Source 1 engine? Possibly, but it depends on how you look at it. Personally, I find screenshots of the Chernobyl project, an unreleased Left 4 Dead 2 mod, to look as good if not better than Black Mesa, and that was also done by a small team, but that's just my perspective. Black Mesa's levels are the best-looking Half-Life recreations in Source, sure, but they're nowhere near as good something Valve could do themselves if they were to actually try.

So I can only roll my eyes when I read the same, identical praise that Black Mesa looks spectacular. It's good for a Source mod, but again, since Crowbar Collective are trying to shed their skin of calling Black Mesa a mod, I'm comparing it to other games, and the suggestion that its detail is nearly unparalleled is simply not true. Furthermore, when I hear people praising the visual style, what I figure they must be saying is that the low-res textures in the train that the player starts in look good. They're saying that textures that don't align look good. They're saying that the same character models that have hardly seen any updates since 2007, aside from slightly darker hair, look good. These things make the game look bad, period. If it were still 2007, I'd be saying things differently because the standards would be different. And no, I'm not comparing this to Half-Life because let's face it: any piece of shovelware can look better than Half-Life at this point, and you'd have to actively try to make a Source mod of Half-Life look worse than Half-Life: Source. Half-Life: Source was a demonstration, it wasn't intended to be a standalone game. So instead, I'm comparing Black Mesa to other options that we can currently play, and I don't see anything wrong with that. If it looks simply average if not worse than the best options we have today, then why do we praise this game for its graphics and yet just accept amazing graphics as a given and not a selling point when looking at other games?

Speaking of which, I wanted to take a moment to address the newest update to the game, a public beta branch released on December 23 and Crowbar Collective's only substantial update of 2017. This update is a great example of the developer putting too much effort into trying to save the game from looking old when it's already too late. They have already said that the new engine update (dubbed "Xen-gine"), which includes a lot of these overwhelming visual effects, is necessary for Xen. I can sympathize with a developer for having a specific artistic vision and needing to break certain boundaries when they're absolutely necessary. Nothing in Black Mesa seems to justify this and I cannot help the feeling a multitude of emotions: it honestly feels like the team is either acting like children who just discovered a new toybox of glitzy, shiny toys that they want to play with at the expense of others, is extraordinarily lazy and doesn't take their jobs seriously, or honestly is just contemptuous of the community. Perhaps all three. None of what I have seen in the newest update has indicated to me a more realistic or necessary art style; in fact, if anything, it goes completely overboard in the wrong direction. The visual effects overwhelm the scenes that they're supposed to enhance, they wash out things that you should be able to clearly see, and they make the scenes now look much less realistic. Personally, I don't think it speaks well to a game where a design of overwhelming blur, movement shadowing, and unrealistic depictions of light for cinematic effect supersede good gameplay to mask a frankly average-looking design, considering the year that we're in and other games that have come out.

This may spark controversy, but I'm going to say what I think we all know but are too afraid to admit: Crowbar Collective has been adding the new visual effects of CSM, god-rays, new light sourcing, lens flares, and four-way texture blending because they realize that without these flashy, distracting effects, the simple fact is that Black Mesa looks dated. None of these effects were necessary in Half-Life because it wasn't built on a then-obsolete engine. On the contrary, Half-Life was groundbreaking for its time in large part due to its visuals in spite of lacking all the sparkly effects. It wouldn't surprise me if Crowbar Collective would try to do the same with their mod. But time is not on their side. Since they've spent so much time working on unnecessary Xen visual effects and retroactively applying them to the base game, the Earth levels look worse now than they ever did. Nevertheless, because of the pace of graphical progress in the game development world, Black Mesa can't help but look like a last-gen game. The modeling of Drs. Eli Vance and Isaac Kleiner look nearly identical to their models from Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (2007), dating to ten years ago. Even looking like the best a Source mod ever has and ever will, it simply cannot compete visually with modern games. No matter what the "Xen-gine" contributes to Xen, no matter how sparkly, shiny, shadowy, shimmery, or intricately detailed the alien world appears, the Earth levels will still look average at best when the full game releases because those levels were completed six years ago. It would be the equivalent of dusting up Half-Life (1998) levels with some masking visual effects to include in Half-Life 2 (2004) without any of the redevelopment necessary to make the former levels work in the latter. It just wouldn't work. If Black Mesa needs a bunch of shiny effects in order to mask its age, it simply can't stand visually on its own, end of story.

I will admit that, sure, many people are impressed. But what I believe they're actually impressed by are the ways in which the original Half-Life levels look in this revised state, they're impressed by how far the old Source engine has been taken, and they're impressed with fancy new cinematic effects. That's it. Those may be convincing in the short run but one can quickly see through them because they constitute a shiny veneer that covers up a rather average, even sub-par game underneath.

Engine

Errors in loading textures in the Source engine.

Black Mesa uses the Source engine, which is the engine of Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and other now-aging games. Admittedly, Black Mesa is an impressive feat in regard to the game engine. Not only does it use the newest version of the Source 1 engine (an engine that has been retired by Valve itself), but it has pushed the engine to its absolute limits and, as I understand it, even has its coding licensed to Crowbar Collective so they can modify it as they see fit to more fully accomplish their goals. But while the game is impressive in regard to how it pushes the engine that was used for Half-Life 2 (2004), I highly doubt that one would be nearly as impressed if one didn't know the game's engine history or origins. The Source engine was retired even for Dota 2 (2014) and is sorely out of date by this point. Aside from hypothetical modders coming at Crowbar Collective with torches and pitchforks, calling it sacrilegious to have Black Mesa on an engine that isn't Source, here's a little secret that the Source modding community doesn't want you to know: there's no real, legitimate reason to have this game on Source over any other, modern engine. Sure, in 2005 or 2006, Source might have been the best engine available for modders, but we live in a time when much more accessible, capable, and user-friendly modding options exist. Source wasn't created with the intention of creating something to the extent of Crowbar Collective's vision, and they, and we the consumers, pay dearly for this poor decision, since the engine's clunkiness and limitations are undoubtedly some of the most significant sources (pun intended) of many of Black Mesa's setbacks.

It's well-known in the modding community that while Source allows for certain levels of realism, it also comes with a plethora of problems and limitations, as one might expect from an engine based off the Goldsource engine, which itself was based on the engine used for Quake 2, which came out in 1997. The Hammer editor, used to create maps, is based largely on WorldCraft, the level editor for Quake 1 (1996). That's right, the game that the current level editor was created for is over two decades old. Such limitations weren't as important for Half-Life 2, since the Source engine was closer in time to Quake 1 and 2 than Black Mesa is to Half-Life 2. So in my modest and ignorant layman opinion, it only seems logical that developing Black Mesa on a modern engine would not only have been much more liberating artistically, but it would also be much more conducive to progress.

What I'm talking about isn't heretical, even in the Half-Life community. A recent mod that began development in 2017, Project Borealis, aims to finish the Half-Life 2 story delivered by Marc Laidlaw in a blog post entitled Epistle 3. The engine that the mod team has decided to work with is Unreal 4. In their own words:

"To keep up with modern technology and to make a more efficient pipeline for development, we have opted to use Unreal Engine 4. We understand this may be an issue to some, however, given the age of Source, and its clunkiness, we believe we can make a better game using UE4." (Source)

I want to stress that I'm not saying Black Mesa should be on Unity or Unreal 4 per se, but there are other options than just Source at this point.The Source engine is a huge pain to work with and is full of issues that don't make sense as things that developers should be dealing with nowadays. Just to use one example, Earthfall, which uses the Unreal 4 engine, actually looks just as good if not better in places than Black Mesa, and I'm sure the development didn't take nearly as long as Black Mesa. The fact of the matter is that the Source engine is ancient by industry standards. Several knowledgeable sources who have spoken to me about the engine told me that many aspects of it are relics of Quake 1 and 2 and make no sense in today's industry setting. Releasing the final version of the game in 2018 (which it won't) would be the equivalent of releasing a new game on the original DOOM engine in 2006. By that time, the then-stunning (and still good-looking, with the right mods applied) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had come out and the highly praised, realistic-looking Half-Life 2 had already been out for two years.

I understand that certain factors caused the mod's development to take many years, and I'm sure that porting over to another engine would have essentially meant that much of their work had to be rewritten or scrapped. Additionally, Crowbar Collective now has access to the engine's source code, which means if they have proficient enough coders, they can directly address issues with the game's coding to fix certain problems. This doesn't fix everything, of course, and their reliance on the Source engine means they're still greatly limited. Obviously at this point, they can't port the game over to a new engine. However, I have never able to understand the mentality of an approach where the developers just couldn't imagine doing this game in a different engine because Source is a beautiful mess. Source is inherently flawed and its quirks and uniqueness comes from its bugginess. It doesn't do anything better than any modern engines, and in fact I would argue that the fact that it crashes constantly makes it simply worse from an objective standpoint. The engine is inarguably much more limited than Unreal or Unity. This wouldn't have been a problem if they could finish the Xen levels in time, but time is not on their side. Thirteen years in technology is enough time to make an engine such as Source not only antiquated, but obsolete. Even the newest version of Source doesn't resolve any of the engine's fundamental problems. Staying with Source for no reason other than that it's a Valve product or because Black Mesa needs to be on a Valve engine has proven detrimental to the game's progress because it is so obscenely limited and crash-prone. The engine is so old that it needs substantial rewrites to its code to realize the developer's artistic visions. If you're going to take so long that you need to rewrite parts of the engine's code in order to execute something that you can do in any other modern engine, what should that tell you about the project?

Gameplay

The Gonarch, whose arena and modeling look great but will probably lead to sub-par gameplay.

So what about the gameplay? Well, we don't have anything to go on in terms of Xen, but we do have the Earth levels of Black Mesa released, so we can start there. I am planning on writing a much more thorough article on why Black Mesa's gameplay just isn't fun, so this will be a concise version. If you're more curious about specific details, I recommend checking out GGGManlives's video on Black Mesa here.

Let's start with the movement controls. Black Mesa plays like an impotent, poor rendition of Half-Life that has unnecessary holdovers from Half-Life 2, a game conceived entirely differently from the original. By default, Black Mesa's movement employs the now-standard "hold shift to temporarily sprint" mechanic, which was introduced in Half-Life 2 and is completely out of place in Half-Life's design. This can be disabled in the settings in favor of the always-sprint movement mode, but even so, strafing is still limited to the walking speed, meaning that the movement system is somewhat altered. As such, movement feels a bit more stiff than in Half-Life. But to be fair, combat in Half-Life was kind of always bad. It usually relied on shooting bullet-spongy enemies until they dropped dead or hiding behind a corner and waiting for a brain-dead enemy to walk around the corner, only to be met by a double-barrel shotgun to the face. In Black Mesa, enemies are still bullet-spongy, perhaps even to a greater degree than in the original Half-Life, but even worse than that, the A.I. is significantly worse than in Half-Life. In the original game, soldiers and alien slaves would retreat when injured or try to hide behind cover. In Black Mesa, soldiers use the Combine's AI from Half-Life 2, which was notably inferior to that of the soldiers from Half-Life. So in Black Mesa, the soldiers hardly react at all with any need for self-preservation and make zero reaction in regard to pain. They also seem to react more quickly to shooting you, just taking up position wherever they're currently standing, versus how they acted in Half-Life, where they would usually run to find a different position the instant they spot you. This made for more fair gunplay in Half-Life while it conversely makes combat feel annoying and cheap in Black Mesa. To compound the issue, vortigaunts and houndeyes are given significant attack speed boosts, and several sections with multiple houndeyes, whose attacks now mess up your aim, make for extremely annoying sections for no real reason.

To additionally "update" or "modernize" combat unnecessarily, the classic weapons have also received quite a nerf. One of the most reliable guns of Half-Life, the MP5, received the biggest nerf of all, and it completely shifts the balance of gameplay. Instead of 50 bullets in a magazine, the MP5 now holds 30. Instead of extremely slight recoil, the gun now kicks upward like a mule. Instead of holding 10 grenades, it now only holds 3. And finally, reserve ammo has been reduced from 250 to 150. These changes may not sound like a big deal when written out, but the extent to which it changes combat is huge. Basically, instead of being able to reliably kill three or four soldiers before needing to reload, you'll be lucky if you can kill two. Other weapons received similar but not quite as extensive nerfs (for instance, the shotgun can only hold half its old value, the magnum only a third, and the crossbow only a fifth!). Weapon firing has been altered in ways, the most noticeable of which may be the crossbow, though I feel the magnum and double-barrel shot of the shotgun feel slower, and I've read several complaints about the glock being unable to rapid fire as quickly as the player could click the mouse. The crowbar feels like its range gets adjusted with every update and it doesn't seem like Crowbar Collective, in spite of their name, know what they want to do with the weapon at all.

Leading a security guard to take out the soldiers for me.

Bear in mind that while most of the guns have received nerfs, the enemy spawns are either unaltered or increased. This means that each skirmish will require at least several weapon changes, since reloading during a firefight is suicide. The soldiers, the most common strongest enemy, are essentially hitscan (meaning their attacks instantly hit you, versus projectile-based attacks) because you can't move fast enough to dodge bullets or strafe into cover. Half-Life had only a couple of reliable weapons to counter enemies that can hitscan you with multiple shots that mess with your aim from 40-50 meters away: the crossbow and magnum. Both have significantly less ammo than in Half-Life, while the crossbow, bewilderingly, has its semi-rapid fire mode changed to a single-shot weapon. This kind of situation only rarely happens in Half-Life, but because Black Mesa's soldier A.I. is based on auto-aiming hitscan from any distance, this situation is much more common in Black Mesa. The crossbow's fire rate lowers it from an effective counter to a mediocre one. The magnum or, I suppose, the MP5 grenade, is really the only solid choice for dealing with such long-distance hitscanners. However, they're clearly not as good as they could be, since the magnum's aim-down-sights, the only gun in the game with one, is fairly poor, and the MP5's grenades are so limited and hard to aim. Since the tau cannon needs precise aim and the rocket launcher is best saved for vehicles or tough enemies, I'm not going to consider them as really viable options. In any case, nproblems such as these really become apparent when Black Mesa throws in fights such as these with three or more such enemies at a time.

These alterations to the combat dynamic ironically don't cause the player to use any of the skills prevalent in 90's era arena shooters, such as skill-based dodging, weapon-prioritizing, and twitch-reaction accuracy. Rather, these alterations cause the player to take each skirmish very slowly by using walls as cover, peeking out from behind cover for quick shots, and quick-saving and quick-loading galore. While I enjoy a challenge, it's very clear that the A.I. doesn't gel well with good combat. It doesn't test a player's shooting and maneuvering ability, but rather relies on exploiting cheap facets of the game. It really feels like the combat wasn't playtested at all and was changed from Half-Life for no reason. You can't simply make arbitrary weapon and AI changes and keep the same maps and expect everything to work identically if not better. It took me nearly three years to realize these difference and how instrumental they are to changing the feel of combat.

As further proof of this, Black Mesa has rolled out yet another questionable modification in their "Xen-gine" update, which changes a staple feature in Half-Life. This time, they have adjusted certain factors with the long-jump module. I don't have a problem with them making it a double jump, so long as they provide the player with the option to use the standard crouch-jump as well. The double-jump is now widely recognized as a standard feature of contemporary video game mechanics that surpasses crouch-jumping in that it's much easier to consistently repeat, even if it has a slightly slower start. However, now they've added a recharge meter to the long-jump module, forcing the player to now wait for it to recharge. Right now, it appears that the player can jump about five or six times before needing to wait for the meter to replenish in order to jump again. Considering how integral long-jump movement is on Xen, how prevalent speedrunning is, and how bad combat could be in certain places, this just screams to me that they didn't think through this change and only decided to arbitrarily and artificially limit movement because...that's what games do? They don't want it to be too easy? They want to limit the way players can move to prevent people from finding exploits in their maps? Since the Xen levels aren't released, I have little basis on which to judge these changes, but I can't comprehend why making player movement more limiting should be considered an improvement. Especially if the factory is going to be featured in the Xen levels—which it better—I don't see this boding well for the Xen section. Yet again, Crowbar Collective has shown that they don't know what they're doing or why the gameplay of the original Half-Life worked.

Black Mesa has been rightly criticized for its significant and unwarranted departures from Half-Life, to no justified response from the developers. It is painfully clear that Crowbar Collective has no real grasp of how Valve intended the combat of Half-Life to be played out, or what makes combat in Half-Life's maps so good, or why certain skirmishes in Black Mesa are terrible. I do not wish to speculate on Xen's gameplay, but the gameplay that we have so far has been noted not just by myself, but by other, more proficient players than myself, as not only being inferior to that of Half-Life, but merely average if not slightly below average. The gameplay is simply not that much fun.

Physics

Balancing chairs and wastebaskets on people's heads not only is more interesting than anything else,

but also helps to show how broken Source's physics engine is.

One of the major contributions that the Source engine brought the gaming world was a robust physics engine used in a first-person shooter. I will have much more to say about this in another article about whether or not FPS's need physics engines, but again I will try to be concise here. The physics engine needs to be addressed because it's usually heralded as one of the most important aspects of Black Mesa that separates it and, to some, makes it superior to the original Half-Life. The original game didn't have a real physics engine, and therefore wasn't built around many sections that required manipulation of physics objects. There were some sequences where you could pull or push boxes along, for all intents and purposes, a track, or where you broke open some boxes of barrels to jump across water, but nothing that entailed the free, unrestrained movement, placement, and throwing of objects. Half-Life 2 made a big deal about being able to pick up nearly anything in the game and it won many accolades for this feature. Yet other games with no physics aspects at all have endured for decades, such as Quakes 1-3, the Unreal Tournament series, and DOOM. Still, many people say that the physics engine is a boon to Black Mesa and enhances the experience. My big question is: what does the physics engine add to the gameplay?

Let's take a look at how Black Mesa uses the physics engine. From my two playthroughs, I can tell you the places how the game uses physics to complement the gameplay in a way that differentiates it from Half-Life. 1) Flares can be picked up and thrown to ignite enemies. 2) The physics engine allows the player to trick barnacles into eating things, such as headcrabs, zombies, barrels, or debris. 3) Picking up sentry turrets will turn them to "your" side and let you move them to kill enemies. 4) I guess you can move medkits, armor pickups, and weapons/ammo if you want to move them to a different area. That's it. There are sections where you need to carry a broken valve or lever and put it in its right spot, but that's hardly using the physics engine (it might as well be a keycard). There is at least one section where you need to pick up a wire and plug it in like the beginning of Half-Life 2, but again that's hardly a justifiable use of the physics engine. You can throw random objects around for no effectiveness against enemies and pretty much no reason, but that doesn't really add anything to the gameplay. So let's examine the four real uses mentioned above of the physics engine.

Leading a zombie into a barnacle's tongue is one of the only legitimate times you'll use the physics engine

to your advantage, even though both enemies are slow and avoidable anyway.

First off, the flares. At first I didn't even know what their use was, because why would I just assume that a lit flare would cause combustion? When I learned that they were used to ignite enemies (unrealistically, I might add), it became obvious that they were added in specifically to justify the physics engine. Not only did they not exist in Half-Life, and not only do they look out of place in the Black Mesa Research Facility, but you only really find them in three short sections of the game. In all cases, they're present when your weaponry is limited. More importantly, their presence allows Crowbar Collective to push back the crowbar's original location in order to make the player fight enemies without a standard weapon. Whether this change is for better or worse will come down to personal preference but it's undeniable that it is solely pushed back to justify the physics engine. Secondly, the barnacles. Really the only strategic use for the physics engine that I found in Black Mesa, which is in distracting barnacles or getting them to eat other enemies, only really is effective in one place in the entire game (the brief sewer segment in Unforeseen Circumstances). But again this point is pretty much moot, since barnacles are stationary enemies and you can pretty much always avoid them or shoot them to death considering you'll always have enough ammo to kill them. Thirdly, the turrets that are normally enemies can be picked, moved around, and placed to assist the player. However, this functions not so much as a physics aspect but more as a contextual ability similar to the way the player could pick up sentry turrets in Alien: Colonial Marines. In that game, you simply press 'use' on a turret to pick it up and then you're carrying it until you press 'use' again to set it down. In Black Mesa, it's essentially identical. You could theoretically do this in any game without a physics engine, such as DOOM or Team Fortress. The only minor difference here is you can throw the turret instead of simply placing it down. The last conceivable use I thought of was that the player can move medkits, armor, weapons, and ammo, presumably to move to a different spot before a skirmish. This assumes you won't just get the health as soon as you pick up the medkit in the first place, or the similar effect from the other objects. I can only think of two parts in the entire game where this kind of strategy might be useful, and even so, this isn't necessary, since I never did this when actually playing the game. For those curious, the two parts I thought of are in Surface Tension before the fight with half a dozen soldiers before the dam and at the end of Lambda Core, moving gluon gun ammo and medkits to a small corner before the fight with the alien controllers. That's literally all I can think of.

This criticism is aimed more at Black Mesa than it is at the physics engine of Source because to be fair, some Source games have creatively used physics to their advantage, such as Portal, Portal 2, and even to some extent Half-Life 2 and its episodes in the form of the gravity gun. I'm personally not a fan of the gravity gun, but even I will admit that at least HL2 and its episodes added a damage value to shooting objects of various sizes at enemies. In Black Mesa, the only things you can do with the physics I've listed in the above paragraph already. But in order to not keep this as just a section of bashing, I will try to be constructive, since I was able to come up with some ideas as to what could be added. First, the game could have a sort of noise-distraction system as in Alien: Isolation, which would allow you to lure or distract enemies by the sounds made by an object when thrown against a wall. This could be used to get a soldier to leave his particular patrol or post, which would be very effective if it were against a soldier manning a turret, for instance. There is already this kind of aspect with the giant tentacles in Blast Pit where you need to distract the beast by the sounds of grenades. Additionally, throwing dead headcrabs or other carrion could be used to lure or distract bullsquids, ichthyosaurs, or other enemies to leave you alone, or could be used as bait for a kind of makeshift trap. In the original Half-Life, bullsquids are attracted to the scent of carrion and will consume it if left alone, so adding in a kind of system for distracting both human and non-human enemies could be interesting if you choose to go a more stealthy or non-lethal route. Having a way to lure snarks could be useful for both fighting them and getting them to fight enemies for you, because currently there really isn't a reliable way to kill snarks except for the crowbar. These two suggested uses for throwing objects aren't merely one-time-use only, and while they might be primitive in their physics employment (only entailing throwing), it would at least give some additional viability to the engine. If I had to add another use for physics, it might be using reflective glass or mirrors to scatter light particles or lasers to either break open a path, light the player's way, or activate some kind of device. Here I'm thinking of something akin to the glass cubes used in Portal and Portal 2 to direct beams of light into certain holes. If any place would have a reasonable use for the presence of lasers, it would be the Black Mesa Research Facility.

Black Mesa as a whole doesn't have any creative or intricate uses of physics. While it may be true that the physics engine is needed for scripted sequences, such as the elevator drop in Unforeseen Consequences, a particular cave-in or wall collapse, or an exploding computer or device that makes it look realistic, there's not really any manipulation of physics objects here, and they could just as well be on tracks. Recall that the original Half-Life, which had no physics engine, had numerous complex door mechanics and explosions without the need of physics at all. In Black Mesa, I can guarantee you beyond a shadow of a doubt that you, the player, will spend more time using the physics engine to put wastebaskets and chairs on security officers' and scientists' heads than doing anything else with physics objects in the entire game. This really isn't good justification for why this game needs a physics engine at all. I don't feel like the physics engine is really used for anything substantial or creative in the game that warrants its existence other than it's just a thing because every game has to have physics now. Ironically, the main feature of the antiquated Source engine's claim to fame comes across as wholly unnecessary because, as it is largely a recreation of a game that didn't have a physics engine to begin with, and as such the original maps and puzzles didn't need a physics engine to be effective.

Time

The announcement that the do-or-die deadline of December 2017 for Xen would be missed.

Black Mesa has been in development for a long time. A long time. The project initially started in 2005 and is still incomplete now that we're in 2018. That's 13 years. While I don't know how many assets are maintained from the project's work from 2005, I think it's pretty safe to say that a lot of things have changed since then. Recall that back then, the leading consoles were the PlayStation 2, the original X-Box, and the GameCube. Here's a quick recap of some of the games that came out in 2005: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Doom 3, Resident Evil 4, F.E.A.R., Shadow of the Colossus, Star Fox Assault, Fahrenheit, Serious Sam II, Quake 4, Perfect Dark Zero, Gran Turismo 4, Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death, The Sims 2, and Call of Duty 2. That's right, Black Mesa began the year Call of Duty 2 was released. While I'm not saying that nothing has changed since the project began—certainly aspects have gone through many, many iterations and variations—the basic conceptual start of the mod was in 2005.

Video game standards and general expectations have come a long way since then. More importantly, games that emerge from development Hell often just aren't that good because things have been retread and reworked over and over again until not only do they not reflect anything that they've started with, but they betray the original vision. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a consistent artistic vision over a period of a decade and a half. Things get reworked, usually for the better, until they're unrecognizable from their beginnings. Due to the very nature of modding, this is simply an accepted inevitability, since mods are usually done by freelances in their spare time without pay. This has definitely been the case with Black Mesa, where the developers have worked for the majority of their development time without pay. On the one hand, their work and dedication is to be commended. On the other hand, now that they're getting paid, one can only wonder why the pace of development is still the same and why they still can't meet their own self-imposed deadlines.

It should surprise no one that Black Mesa feels incredibly dated by this point. The intolerably long loading times, the still-buggy physics engine, T-posing enemies, unbalanced AI, and other facets of the game hearken back to an age when the industry was starting to experiment with the implementation of shadows and physics creatively, often at the expense of adding in a lot of bugs. Black Mesa has high-resolution models and snazzy animations that look cool, but they can't conceal the fact that Black Mesa falls into a lot of the same traps that plagued Half-Life 2 and F.E.A.R. Remember dying over and over again to the same ridiculously bullet-spongy enemies with impossibly good accuracy? That's still here. Remember attempts to wow and amaze players through overly dark or unrealistic shadows and shading? That's still here. An over-reliance on setting up a dark, atmospheric tone via industrial settings with way too many pipes and wooden crates (thanks, F.E.A.R.)? Yup, that's still here. Time is an inevitable factor in developing a game. Products change as they go through development, in part because ideas, personnel, and trends change. I get that. But the fact of the matter is that when your game is based on ideals that pervaded over a decade and a half ago, especially during an experimental era when developers really didn't know what direction they wanted to take their games, it feels like a holdover of the past, dated in its employment of tropes that have been since abandoned because of overuse or because we've just gotten past it. Whether there will be a market for a game that feels like the mid-2000's video game adolescence of shooters, when developers were struggling to find their unique path (unlike now where everything feels identical, formulaic, and churned out as if from a soulless machine), is anyone's guess. But in my opinion, that era was when quality shooters were on the decline and had to resort to lame gimmicks to get people's attention.

Old vs. New

The Crossfire deathmatch map in Half-Life. The blocky nature, smooth,

clear, consistent lighting, and simple detail facilitate better gameplay.

Black Mesa feeling like a relic of the past isn't necessarily a bad thing. I love a lot of retro games, and actually I think that the best time for a resurgence of retro shooting sensibilities is soon to come. My issue is that Black Mesa's attempt to reconcile an older style doesn't work in the context of modern sensibilities and modern graphics.

Have you ever wondered why the original DOOM, Wolf 3D, and Quake games never received high-res updates? It's because those games were made when gaming sensibilities were different. Mouse look wasn't even a thing until Quake 1. What does this mean for modern updates? Simple: the idea of those games was to shoot everything as fast as possible while absorbing the general mood or aesthetic of the game without needing to pay attention to every last bit of detail. Games like Wolfenstein 3D, id Software's DOOM, Quake 1 and 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Descent 1 and 2, Heretic, Hexen 1 and 2, Shadow Warrior (1997), Rise of the Triad (1994), and Strife (1996) are just as timeless today as they were in yesteryears because the games were constructed and based around the limitations of their engines and hardware. When you see a game like Descent: Underground (unreleased), Unreal Tournament 3 (2010), or Bethesda's DOOM (2016), you quickly realize that they just don't work with that level of detail everywhere. This is also why games like DUSK (2017 - ongoing), Amid Evil (unreleased), Immortal Redneck (2016), and Brutal Doom (ongoing) clearly do work (and while STRAFE isn't a good game, it's failures are not because of aesthetic reasons). You can't concentrate on killing enemies when there's nothing but flashing, neon, oversaturated lights and unnecessarily cluttered detail everywhere. It's unfortunate because the most promising games to rekindle the old-school shooter sentiment, DOOM (2016), Quake Champions (2017), and TOXIKK (2016), are what I call "eye-bleeding" because of the ludicrously high level that occur while playing at breakneck speeds, but even DOOM (2016)'s single-player is lackluster compared to older games. For those who disagree, play the DOOM 2 .WAD called No Rest For The Living on the Brutal Doom v20b mod; it puts DOOM 2016 to shame.

Now let's finally talk about multiplayer, because I really, really want to. The multiplayer part of this game is simply ridiculous and hardly justifiable even for the developers themselves. When Black Mesa was put on Early Access in May 2015, one of its selling points was its deathmatch multiplayer system. No bots, no cooperative mode, just straight deathmatch (and teams, I suppose). We did get some map recreations, but even this didn't populate the deathmatch servers with any decent number of players. When the servers are habitually empty or only one server maximum can be filled in a game that's still in Early Access, it tells you something isn't right. I tried multiplayer mode out a few times and when I did, I got the feeling of running around a maze that doesn't make any sense, being way oversupplied in ammo but not having a lot of weapons, then getting spammed with the best weapons, dying, and having to recollect your weapons over again. Yet I had a lot of fun in TOXIKK's multiplayer, which is more or less the same thing. So what makes BM's multiplayer different? For one thing, the maps are a lot better in TOXIKK; they're not as cube-shaped, don't feature as many unnecessary rooms, are more streamlined and conducive for forward momentum, and have better, more consistent lighting. In short, the maps feel like they were made for the game, rather than inappropriately applied from a different game to this engine. As I said before, the movement of BM is still off and makes it feel more stiff than an arena shooter should be.

The Crossfire map in Black Mesa. The increased level of detail pulls your

eyes in different directions and overall makes it more difficult to focus.

I think the bigger point is that the look of the maps isn't conducive for playing. Again, Crowbar Collective can prove that they can make a pretty picture, but they show that they can't make a map conducive for play. One does not necessarily entail the other. A developer should want the game to be about skill, not about straining your eyes to see your enemy or trying to block out feedback that your eyes are providing you from random gizmos or rocks that you're running past. This is the same basic problem that I have with Unreal Tournament 3, which is that there's too much detail everywhere to concentrate on playing, and which is why I much rather prefer the original Unreal Tournament to it. TOXIKK is also designed in the Unreal 3 engine and I've run into that problem a fair bit in that game, but I think the levels are a bit better designed for that game. In Black Mesa, it's very clear that lighting was not a concern for playability. Compare the above screenshots of the original Crossfire map from Half-Life with its recreation in Black Mesa. As you can see, although the original game's map is much more bare-bones, it's also consistently well-lit and works very well for multiplayer because of its basic simplicity. The map as shown in Black Mesa has shadows, holes in walls, and unnecessary structures that I don't even know what function they would serve, all that distract the player by cluttering up the screen and provide too much contrast, drawing the eye around to static and ultimately useless objects.

One of the many problems with Crowbar Collective's re-imagining of Half-Life is the inability to reconcile an older playstyle with a newer visual style. I would argue that it's very difficult to strike a balance between the two, and this game definitely shows the mismatch. You may not think you feel it, but you do. Crowbar Collective is not a brilliant game developer that can appropriately understand the two and weave them seamlessly together. As a result, Black Mesa cannot recapture the feeling of Half-Life while also making the game look contemporary. The two factors exist in dialectic opposition to one another and may ultimately be, on some level, incompatible.

Lore

New section ostensibly added to Xen to show more human-Xenian travel than in the original.

Crowbar Collective has added in a few of their own elements of lore into the game. It mostly retains the elements of Half-Life where every security officer is different (or the same), and every scientist is nondescript. Yet you meet Drs. Eli Vance and Isaac Kleiner in Anomalous Materials and again in Unforeseen Circumstances, and it ties in a bit with Half-Life 2 (a bit of retroactive work is done in places that won't make much sense if you play Black Mesa before Half-Life 2). Barney as an actual character is referred to in the beginning of Anomalous Materials, even though Barney was the generic term for the security guard in Half-Life, and his "bar tab" seems to be a reference to the original line in Half-Life where a security officer can say the line "Catch me later, I'll buy you a beer!" and also referred to in Half-Life 2 where the now-unique Barney says, "Now about that beer I owed you!"

A whole hell of a lot of people are excited to see what new direction Crowbar Collective will take Xen, since they have promised a complete re-envisioning of the alien world. A few pieces of concept art have been released, which look more alien and organic than did the Xen levels from Half-Life, but we don't know to what extent these images will accurately represent the actual levels that will be released. Regardless, whatever Crowbar Collective makes, it will not be official Valve lore. Black Mesa is sanctioned by Valve on the same level as Half-Life: CAGED, Half-Life: Downfall, Half-Life: Before, or Entropy: Zero. Black Mesa's Xen won't be Valve's true vision of Xen; that was released in 1998. Black Mesa's Xen won't be canonic and it won't be official. Whatever lore they add to Xen won't have any more meaning to the franchise than a Half-Life visual novel set in the Old West.

But people think it will. And that's the problem. Crowbar Collective doesn't have the final word on any of the environments in Half-Life, or any of the enemy placement, weapon ammo or damage values, or lore. Maybe Kleiner will be on Xen, or maybe Gordon will team up with some rebel vortigaunts to take down the Nihilanth. People have paid and will pay to see how the story ends in the eyes of Crowbar Collective, even though they not only have no real input or value in the Half-Life story. The reason for this is simple. Black Mesa has one huge thing that other Source mods largely do not: polish.

Polish

Bright, blurry, neon lights oversaturate the game and make it

feel like it's trying to be a cinematic experience.

Black Mesa is one of the most highly polished mods ever put out by an unofficial team and it is the worst thing about the game. The fact that it looks official gives Crowbar Collective credence from the masses to take the story in whatever direction they want and has even earned them the use of official voice actors, such as for Eli Vance, Isaac Kleiner, and the security guards. This, in my opinion, elevates it to a level far beyond any other mods. Indeed, I have no more official input into the story than they do, and admittedly Crowbar Collective doesn't claim to be the official word on anything. They even say that if you want the official story, play the official game (Half-Life). But the fact of the matter is that while this game has polish, it frankly doesn't play well enough to warrant its elevated status.

Once you get past the shiny, polished coat of wallpaper on everything, once you take off the rose-colored glasses, once you forget comparing it to the original Half-Life, and once you sincerely take a good, hard look at the game and its environments, it honestly isn't anything special. It's a shiny, sparkly veneer that regresses in terms of gameplay, doesn't take the game in any new or frankly interesting directions, and doesn't add or contain anything that we haven't seen before or that hasn't been done better before. The Black Mesa Research Facility looks grittier, sleeker, and shinier than ever before, and the original cavernous areas may be slightly more cavernous, or pools of water with electrical sparks may have slightly more sparks...but at the end of the day it doesn't feel like Half-Life, it doesn't develop anything, and it doesn't do anything than add special effects and try to retroactively fit cobble fragments of a narrative from a later game into it. Black Mesa is the Star Wars: Special Edition of Half-Life.

I cannot deny that Black Mesa has polish. But you cannot deny that without that polish, Black Mesa is nothing special. And that's why anyone would care to see the end of the game, to see what Crowbar Collective, a team that has no more claim to developing the Half-Life story than you or me, can come up with. Crowbar Collective's take on Xen may indeed fix a lot of problems that were apparent in Half-Life. A perfect Xen still won't elevate Black Mesa to anything above being merely average. The game will never surpass its progenitor, though I don't think the team ever actually expected it to, which takes me back to my initial question, albeit with some additional caveats: if it's inferior to its source material, average-looking at best, built on an outdated and seriously limited engine, has sub-par gameplay, has an extraneous and unnecessary physics engine, and won't contribute any official lore, who cares about Black Mesa?

Crowbar Collective & Communication

Even if all of the above were not true, I would still have a difficult time supporting Black Mesa, since as a rule, I don't support those who have lost my trust, can't get their act together, don't care about or listen to feedback, or who think they can't be held accountable for their actions. This is far more than just feeling burned by Crowbar Collective's failure to meet their deadlines. Crowbar Collective simply does not show their customers and fanbase the respect they deserve for sticking with the team for so long and through so many blunders.

A full analysis of their poor community-developer relationship deserves an entire article unto itself, so let me limit the scope here by focusing on Crowbar Collective's lack of communication. If developers want to keep themselves in good standing with their fanbase, as well as keep their fans and potentially new buyers interested in their work, it's obviously essential to have strong communication skills. This entails frequent communication with the fanbase through updates that show progress, admit failures and talk about what they're doing to fix them, talk about what went right and what's still taking a long time and why, and provide a rough time schedule as to when things will get accomplished, as well as generally create a positive, flourishing atmosphere in which questions are always answered clearly, effectively, and professionally. While I don't think that Crowbar Collective intentionally tries to be poorly communicative, they are, and they definitely hide information and keep the majority of their work secretive for no reason other than they don't want to "spoil the experience." This is no exaggeration. I remind you that it took them a year and a half before they published one screenshot of Xen in late 2016, and it took them another half-year to release two more screenshots and another half-year for one more. That's four screenshots in two and a half years. All this comes at the expense of fans having barely any clue as to the state of progress, understanding why it's taking took so long, and how long it will continue to take. When I was actually looking forward to this game, I actively sought out that information and I was still left clueless. Basically all knowledge of progress on Xen prior to December 2017 was essentially nonexistent, and even the December 2017 news doesn't tell anyone much. Even though it claims to give people an idea as to the progress on parts of Xen, such as at the Art stage or Gameplay stage or Polish stage, it provides zero context as to what any of that means, how much was done beforehand, how long it's taken, how much more estimated time is left, or honestly what any of that actually means to someone interested in the finished product. It boggles my mind how a group that aims to have good communication can be so bad at it. In most cases, when information sought after is intentionally withheld, it is generally a bad sign.

Additionally, nobody on the team seems to be competent enough to take on the task of having an open developer-community line of communication, and they simply don't try to accomplish their task of having the development of Black Mesa shaped by player feedback. Crowbar Collective says that one of their goals has been increased communication and they have also stated that being on Steam's Early Access program has allowed for improved developer-fan transference of ideas. Yet this is impossible with their present work model. Their full-time community manager leaves the Steam forum for weeks or months at a time, letting it rest in the hands of one or two sycophants to answer questions, a fact that has been pointed out numerous times by random onlookers. I understand that the community manager may be busy designing levels (as far as I understand it, he was responsible for expanding some of the game's cut content), but in that case they should hire an actual full-time community manager. The same goes for any role on their entire team. Any professional business would do this. What's more, their official website's forum has blocked public registration since early October 2017. Even though I had managed to register before this block, it turned out that it didn't end up mattering. I had collected and posted a thorough bug list and series of suggestions after my first playthrough of the game, which wasn't so much as acknowledged by the developer team. I don't feel personally insulted by this, but I learned that this was typical of them, as other threads created on the forum pointing out certain bugs or asking Crowbar Collective to address questions or concerns were ignored. Even when people were occasionally posting on their forum, it was hardly excusable to ignore the very rare, occasional new thread. After all, Crowbar Collective has twenty or so senior developers and even more regular developers. Moreover, the developers have no public Discord server for the game, which in the context of them saying they want to be openly communicative seems extremely perplexing. My presumption is that this is so they don't have more to monitor.

It would be dishonest of me to say that they don't read or respond to any feedback at all, because sometimes they do. And I understand that it may be hard to keep up with every post from every thread, especially when there's so much work on Xen to do. But by and large, feedback from updates aren't taken into consideration unless they're specifically about bug reports on the most recent update. I get that they want to bug-test their newest build, and it's obviously important for them to do so before continuing if the build is in some way broken. What I'm talking about is when something like feedback about the new recharge system for the long-jump module or the new crossbow zoom-in effect aren't even so much as acknowledged when there's clearly much to be discussed about them. My honest impression from glancing through unacknowledged threads that discuss these and other gameplay changes is that Crowbar Collective really doesn't care what you or I think. Rather, they're making this game their way and there isn't anything that you can say or critique that will cause them to rethink any of it. I don't think that artists should necessarily always bend to the will of popular demand, but if changes from a classic are clearly unnecessary or for the worse, there's no reason that the artist shouldn't have to at least justify his or her reasoning for making those changes.

If you want an example of good developer-community rapport, then look no further than New Blood Interactive, the developers of DUSK. Their updates, such as this one, are honest, frequent, and detail their roadmap for the future. They're not immune from making wrong decisions, but when they do, they take ownership and responsibility. They outline what went wrong, why, and what they're doing to fix it. They are prompt, professional, and communicative, and they have established a devoted community on their Discord server, which sees a lot of positive discussion and community-building. They update their game and are actively putting the pedal to the metal to try to push out their game as quickly as possible because they've come to the correct conclusion that the deadline of SOON™ just doesn't cut it. As they have rightly said:

"Plus admittedly – we really liked the idea of the game being done 'When It's Done' - but we've learned that's really just not how things work these days. Not if you want to continually grow your player base and build trust with them (hi guys)." (Source)

Not to be a shill for DUSK or its developers, but what New Blood said above is obvious nowadays and it's why the model for Crowbar Collective just doesn't work. None of these things are apparent in the way that Crowbar Collective handles its relationship with its customers and fanbase.

Concluding Thoughts

God-rays look pretty. Too bad the gameplay is bad, since this

precedes a particularly unbalanced and un-fun area.

Black Mesa, to me, is nothing more than a curious, unofficial "what if?" created by people who probably do in fact have a love for the source material, but ultimately have little understanding of how a game actually works. Their changes to aesthetic details and gameplay were made without understanding their ramifications, to the detriment of the game as a whole. The game's visuals are pretty in places, though experiencing it after having thoroughly investing oneself in Half-Life leaves one with the impression that Crowbar Collective doesn't have the faintest clue as to what made Half-Life great. What they do understand is how to build locations and how to make recreations glow with appealing eye-candy. That's it. This is what we call all style and no substance. They have so far succeeded in convincing people to stay tuned to see what they have in mind for Xen, but the slowly degrading rating on Steam gives me hope that people are rightfully beginning to push back.

Half-Life is more than just its locations. Half-Life is more than just a linear organization of setpieces. Half-Life is more than a bunch of industrial maps with stacked crates and explosive barrels everywhere. At its best moments, Half-Life was an exhilarating balance of combat-driven sections, primitive but serviceable platforming, creative and foreign yet enticing environments, and sections that required strategizing against a diverse yet fair cast of enemies while providing the player with many weapon options to terminate with extreme prejudice. Notice that nowhere in that sentence did I say anything about four-way texture blending, dynamic shadows, lens flares, or god-rays, all of which Crowbar Collective has proudly claimed to be integral if not necessary for their re-envisioning of the classic game. You remember that game, right? The one that only needed a crowbar, some industrial-looking areas, some crates, and some aliens? When playing Black Mesa, one gets the feeling that it was made by mappers who wanted to be architects and have never actually played a shooter in their lives. Black Mesa is an impotent attempt to recapture the feeling of playing Half-Life, and though I don't wish to speculate, I have no reason to believe that Xen will not be impotent as well.

If and when Xen ever gets released, whatever else it is, you can be assured that it will be polished and it will be shiny. You can be assured that it will glow unrealistically due to an overabundance of post-processing effects. You can be assured that it will have extensive god-rays, lens flares, and cascade shadow mapping. And you can also be assured that more attention will have been paid to self-shadowing hanging foliage and maximizing framerate due to ludicrously detailed clumps of alien space-rocks that you'll never notice than to enemy spawns, weapon placements, and the type of maneuvering required of the player to make certain sections fun. And you can be assured that the layout, design, and gameplay of those maps will have next to no influence from player feedback because they just don't care.

Those who want 4K "flashy stuff," they care about Black Mesa. Those who want to see all the detail that can be crammed into one spot before 13-year-old Source or Hammer crashes, they care about Black Mesa. Those who have played the original Half-Life and want to relive that experience in a shinier but ultimately shoddier and less fulfilling recreation of places that they recognize, they care about Black Mesa. And those who would entrust a team that has repeatedly gone back on its word, doesn't listen to what you have to say, can't be held accountable to their actions, and flat-out doesn't care about their customers, in order to repurpose a story that they have no right to use to make their own, those people care about Black Mesa.

The level of detail Crowbar Collective is going for

with the foliage of Xen...but at what expense?

That is why I have stopped caring about Black Mesa.

A screenshot of a developer's response in regard to one player's

concern about an over-emphasis of visual effects.

Olde

January 8, 2018