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Black Mesa now out in Early Access. $20.

A

ashecitism

Member
Note: Have been updating the OP frequently. Please read it, and you might find answers to your questions.

latest update: Crossfire

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http://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/

launch trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVYJ9o6Bddo

announcements page on steam for any current and future announcements: http://steamcommunity.com/games/362890/announcements/
news and dev updates section on the BM forums: http://forums.blackmesasource.com/index.php/Board/4-News-Developer-Updates/

Why Early Access?
“Making a game with the scope and scale of Black Mesa is a massive undertaking. Back in 2012 we made the decision to release what we had completed up to that point, and were blown away by the community’s response, feedback and improvements to our work. We want to keep that relationship alive and well by using Early Access as a tool for allowing our community to participate in the final phase of Black Mesa’s development.

In addition, we simply didn't have the resources to create Xen as we would like it. Our ambitions go beyond the original Xen section found in Half-Life. We have a standard of quality that we have to achieve. By using Early Access, we are allowed the resources to bring you the remaining chapters with the quality that you expect.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
“We currently have the first ~85% of our single player campaign completed. For the last 15% we want to not only recreate it, but improve upon it to make it an enjoyable and memorable experience. We feel it will take us considerable time to get the last 15% up to our standards, and putting a time estimate on it would be a total guess.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“The conclusion of the single player campaign, with the addition of the Xen chapters
Final polish on the Earth-based chapters of the single player campaign
More multiplayer maps
More multiplayer gameplay modes”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“Over 10 hours of single player campaign. Multiplayer deathmatch and team deathmatch with 6 completely re-imagined Half-Life 1 maps on the Source Engine.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
“Black Mesa will be $19.99 USD during the Early Access phase. The game may go slightly higher once out of Early Access (or we may keep it at $19.99).”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
“We intend to work closely with our community as we complete the final portions of Black Mesa. We started out as a modding team aiming to do true justice to a Half-Life: Source port, and we won’t forget our roots.

The Black Mesa game hub and forums will be the primary points of interaction with our users. Many team members regularly browse these areas to discuss ideas with the community, and to show progress on game development. Community feedback will be sorted into groups and taken into account as we develop.

We also support Steam Workshop, and will be watching and encouraging developments there.”
Click to expand...

about the game said:
Heavily updated single player experience – The Black Mesa single player experience has greatly improved from the mod release; new visuals, new voice over, updated gameplay encounters, stability changes and more. Xen is not part of the Steam release of Black Mesa, but will included as a free update when it is ready.

Black Mesa Multiplayer – Fight with or against your friends, in two game modes across six iconic maps from the Half-Life Deathmatch universe: Bounce, Gasworks, Lambdabunker, Stalkyard, Subtransit and Undertow.

Custom Modding Tools – Use the same tools the developers used to create your own mods, modes and maps for Black Mesa and Black Mesa Multiplayer …
Fully integrated Workshop – … and then share your work on the fully integrated workshop!

Complete Steam Integration – Collect trading cards, backgrounds, emoticons, achievements, and everything else you would expect out of a Steam integrated game.
Click to expand...

edit: Regarding the free version, what you get in this paid version and Xen:

The free version is basically the mod release, ported to a new engine, with some bug fixes. That's mostly it.

The paid version, obviously, gets everything we're doing. That includes MP, constant updates, improved graphics (not just world props; we've got a few new weapon models, animations, particle fx, sounds, to name but a few), new features, active development, workshop, among many other things.
Click to expand...

http://forums.blackmesasource.com/i...ee-vs-Steam-version/?postID=591325#post591325

So to be clear:
1) The existing free mod release is as it stands. While we all know plans can change, we are pretty confident in saying that at this time there are no plans to upgrade or add to the "mod" release.

2) The "retail" release or Steam version (yes, you will finally get to throw us some change) is is going to have upgrades, bug fixes, a multiplayer addon, and a port to a new engine. That said, because it is a steam version, this also means that any additional fixes or add ons after the initial launch can be done on the fly. No more sending you off to other websites to download patches or upgrade to newer versions. That is the beauty of Steam that we all appreciate.

3) Now regarding the 4 Xen chapters; They are not currently slotted to be included in the mod release or the steam release. You see, it isn't that we are done with it and are just holding onto it for some special occasion or to tease our beloved fans mercilessly. Far from it. It means it is simply not done, and we are unwilling to slate it for any of our release projects at this time.
Click to expand...

http://forums.blackmesasource.com/i...ee-vs-Steam-version/?postID=591591#post591591

Again, everyone who says this vastly underestimates how much work Xen is. Xen would still be extremely huge amounts of work, even if we were aiming for just a straight 1:1 remake. You still wouldn't have it today, even if we'd gone that route and put everything into it.

Our version of Xen is not extremely ambitious because we're making it super long. We're making it longer, yes, but it certainly won't be a third of the game as someone said. It's super ambitious because the detail and design are meticulous and extremely difficult to pull off in the Source engine. Trust me, we tried looking at how 1:1 would look/play. Many times. It sucked. We wanted to do better than that. We can do a lot better than that. Game design is hard. Designing an organic and beautiful alien border world on the ageing Source engine? Creating a believable and fully functional ecosystem which has detailed science behind everything? Creating some of the most ambitious and beautiful landscapes and skyboxes the Source engine has ever seen? It. Takes. Time. Xen's landscape design, to make it right, requires a lot more attention and refinement than anything earthbound by orders of magnitude, and requires a very different design pipeline to the rest of the game. Much more time consuming and hard to get right.

Honestly, whenever anyone makes posts about how we should have prioritised Xen and how it's "bizzare" and "selfish," that we're doing stuff on MP or whatever, it really does come across to me as "I want Xen why aren't they giving me Xen?" There are a lot of circumstances which have led our team to be in the position we are in. They are complex. Nobody on the team wanted to just work silently on Xen until it came out. Lots of us, without the prospect of the MP release on the horizon, would have dropped out. The project may have died. It's as simple as that. We're bloody human, we have fleeting motivation, we face challenges. And it's not like MP is the only thing we've been working on, either.

We have had huge numbers of people complaining to us that we should have just bunged the BMS mod on Steam so they could get the Steam version, as soon as we were Greenlit. The legal requirement for us to switch engines prevented that from being possible. The engine port fiasco set us back hugely. It stalled development for a very long time and crushed a lot of our motivations. But, when it was said and done, we didn't want to do just a straight port of the mod release, but we knew we did want to get BMS on Steam before Xen was done, so we could keep deploying updates for people and build up a community, while we finished Xen. We wanted to take the "mod port" to the next level. So we've done what we think is the best compromise for everyone. There's a fun and cool MP. The existing SP parts have been touched up hugely based on feedback from before. At the end of the day, it's a compromise. You can't satisfy everyone. We've poured huge amounts of love and hard work into all of this and we're extremely proud of it. I know I am. It's always a bit disheartening to see posts like yours, for that reason.

Everyone seems to be forgetting that MP was an original part of Half-Life too, we haven't just run off and started doing whatever we feel like while we completely ignore Xen. You will get Xen. It will be amazing. We need time.
Click to expand...

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1266077&p=47448830&viewfull=1#post47448830

Regarding the Source 2 rumor:

This is correct (the first part). It's not Source 2. We call it the "new engine" because our engine is a custom hybrid of several Source branches and features. It's really a custom Source engine version, in a sense. You could even call it the "Black Mesa" branch, if you wanted. No Source 2 whatsoever, though. Can't be much more specific than that, I'm afraid.

As for flexibility, our SDK allows people to do as much as you can do with any Source branch, so the flexibility is there. We're providing the standard Source mod tools which work with our engine, with workshop implementation and we'll be providing full support to modders. We can't however open the engine code up because we're not legally allowed to. Neither can anyone else who uses the Source engine. We're intending to open up our own code (I believe, not completely sure) much further on down the line, for the community to play with, but we can't open up the engine code as that's Valve's property.
Click to expand...

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1266077&p=47385784&viewfull=1#post47385784

edit2:

Dev said regarding the price

Incorrect information in that post on the Steam page. We have removed it. Apologies for the confusion.
Click to expand...

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1266077&p=47663952&viewfull=1#post47663952

so, it should stay $20

and regarding OaR and ST uncut:

Within a week or two. There are some issues with the workshop backend that have been giving me troubles with uploading it; it's one of the the first things on our list to resolve next, to improve the workshop.
Click to expand...

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1266077&p=47663981&viewfull=1#post47663981

edit3: regarding the removed link

devs on the removed link for the free version (edit5: they put it back, for 3rd party sites)

We're not personally hosting it on our site anymore, but we are not going to do anything else with regards to the free version that's already available
Click to expand...

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1266077&p=47664222&viewfull=1#post47664222

edit4:

Here's an older post where one of them expands on "why do MP in the first place?"

We get that not everyone cares about multiplayer, we do. There'll be things for you guys, too. Plenty, don't you worry.

We think MP is great. HLDM was actually a fantastic game but it really got glossed over - very underrated. There isn't much like it around nowadays. We won't change the world, but I think we've made a really cool, neat MP title which fans will enjoy. Plus, it was part of the original Half-Life, too.

We're not aiming to compete with Dota, CS:GO, etc, of course not. We're an indie game, we can't. But what we can do is build a fun multiplayer shooter which people will occasionally hop into, and have a blast with their friends. A welcome dose of Half-Life. Where, while waiting for Xen, people can build all sorts of awesome and cool stuff in our game, put it on the workshop, and form a community around. Prototype great new ideas with our flexible SDK. Create amazing stuff in community contests. Tell us new stuff you want, stuff you want changed/fixed, while we discuss with you and listen.

It just generally allows us to interact with you guys, form channels for dialogue. Build and engage a community while we quietly chip away at the vast Xen workload. Seemed a superior option all around to us just silently working on Xen for years. Both for you guys, and for us.

It's also part of our "new direction". Myself in particular, as well as a lot of the new guys, don't think the team's go-to method of "radio silence" is the way to work. So we're changing that, and MP is the biggest way in which we can.
Click to expand...

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1266077&p=47435519&viewfull=1#post47435519

regarding the uncut chapter

The team isn't willing to do that, and I'm personally not willing to do that either - as the creator! The version of On a Rail which was released in the mod fits the vision of what the team wanted for that chapter. The decision to cut it down was a conscious one, not an issue of time/resource constraints, like Surface Tension's cuts were. It's not how I would have done it personally, but it's not my decision. How my mod turned out is also not how I would do it, not anymore, which is a big part of the reason why I'm not happy to have it in either.

I also completely disagree that you don't get a sense of how expansive the BMRF is without them. The maps cut from the original OaR looped in a spiral, upwards, around the rocket. You hardly traveled any lateral distance whatsoever when you looked at it on an overview map. Their omission just makes OaR's journey in particular feel a lot smaller, but I think extending that logic to the entire facility is a bit of a stretch. The vast majority of the other maps in BMS are sized up from their originals, both in distance and just general size. 2 of the maps cut from OaR were literally loops. We had huge discussions about all of this in the OaRU thread on the BMS forums, back when I started on it.

You have to understand the huge workload we already have on our plate. People keep saying about stuff like OaRU, STU, Hazard Course, etc, etc - oh, just take them, redesign them to make them better, and put them in officially. It's absolutely not that simple. It's months of work, from every department. We're already overloaded without this stuff as is. We do want to actually release the game at some point, constantly adding to our workloads is a surefire way to block ourselves from that goal.

It will be there in mod form if you want to play it, and will be as simple as clicking the "subscribe" button. If my work doesn't satisfy people, well, a talented modder can always do better than I did, fire up the SDK and make a better vision themselves! That's exactly what I tried to do back when I started. I will probably revisit Surface Tension Uncut from scratch someday, especially knowing I'm a massively better mapper now than I was 3 years ago. OaRU? Less likely, but it's on the cards too...in the distant future.
Click to expand...

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1266077&p=47391418&viewfull=1#post47391418

edit6: http://forums.blackmesasource.com/i...-early-access-title/?postID=607071#post607071

edit7:

Here is our workshop guide. I am working on making a version which will go on the workshop and on the Steam Guides section too, but for now, this one will do.

Note: The 100mb vpk limit is on our radar and is the very first thing in the workshop we plan to fix. It is why I am unable to upload the Uncut stuff there properly, and I'd rather not split it into 10 parts.
Click to expand...

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1266077&p=47672224&viewfull=1#post47672224

edit8:

Introducing The Test Chamber, The Black Mesa Livestream Show
 
L

LightningXCE

Member
Was this not previously available for free?

Not that I mind supporting these amazing devs, however.

E: Nevermind.
"Back in 2012 we made the decision to release what we had completed up to that point"
 
P

PillarEN

Member
So to be clear I should not be expecting the original version released from a year or two ago to ever be finished right?
 
S

shadowhunter89

Banned
So right now you get multiplayer if you buy this? or did they do some tweaks to the singleplayer since it was free? I hope they added those mods to it that expanded certain areas of the campaign.
 
Stahsky

Stahsky

A passionate embrace, a beautiful memory lingers.
HL1 Remake sold on Steam by another group with Valve approving it.

Shit is weird, but I like weird shit. Bought.
 
Trojita

Trojita

Rapid Response Threadmaker
For the last 15% we want to not only recreate it, but improve upon it to make it an enjoyable and memorable experience. We feel it will take us considerable time to get the last 15% up to our standards, and putting a time estimate on it would be a total guess.”
Click to expand...

You are going to have to change a lot to make Xen enjoyable, to the point it wouldn't even look like the original game.
 
A

ashecitism

Member
I updated the OP with dev quotes about the free and paid versions, Xen and Source 2.

The End said:
So was there any truth to the rumor that they were working with Valve on porting BM to Source 2?
Click to expand...

Arkhanor said:
I hope this has some kind of "test bed" for source 2.
Click to expand...

There was never a rumor about that, just speculations, since the devs said "new engine". However later they clarified by new engine they mean a custom branch of Source.
 
A

Arkhanor

Member
ashecitism said:
I updated the OP with dev quotes about the free and paid versions, Xen and Source 2.





There was never a rumor about that, just speculations, since the devs said "new engine". However later they clarified by new engine they mean a custom branch of Source.
Click to expand...

Well, I can only dream.
 
N

NIN90

Member
Trojita said:
You are going to have to change a lot to make Xen enjoyable, to the point it wouldn't even look like the original game.
Click to expand...

They took a lot of... liberties with the Black Mesa levels so that doesn't actually sound too far off.
 
T

TheExodu5

Banned
Kind of worthless to put much effort in multiplayer when it will likely have a dead community, more so now that it's a paid mod.
 
A

ashecitism

Member
Dev said regarding the price

Incorrect information in that post on the Steam page. We have removed it. Apologies for the confusion.
Click to expand...

so, it should stay $20, however it's still on the store page

and regarding OaR and ST uncut:

Within a week or two. There are some issues with the workshop backend that have been giving me troubles with uploading it; it's one of the the first things on our list to resolve next, to improve the workshop.
Click to expand...
 
S

Sal Ami

Banned
Some levels of this mod were good. Some were bad. Some were missing. I am curious to hear if they fixed the bad and missing parts of this mod (ignoring the fact that Xen still isnt done).
 
GavinUK86

GavinUK86

Member
don't really see the point in buying this now, not until they release xen. maybe because they're now charging people for it they can focus on getting it done.

edit: that is a really cool launch trailer though.
 
N

Not Spaceghost

Spaceghost
So wait did valve hire them or was a contract worked out where they are able to profit off half life? How else are they allowed to make money off Half life?

The mod was spectacular though, but man it really just isn't worth 20 bucks...especially not for early access.
 
B

balladofwindfishes

Member
So since this has Valve's blessing now, is it canon?

So wait did valve hire them or was a contract worked out where they are able to profit off half life? How else are they allowed to make money off Half life?

The mod was spectacular though, but man it really just isn't worth 20 bucks...especially not for early access.
Click to expand...
I guess it's kind of contract work? This is a weird situation to me, it's not like when Valve has picked up other mods, as Valve hasn't really done anything for the development of this game.
 
C

CryptiK

Member
Need some graphical comparisons between free and paid.
balladofwindfishes said:
So since this has Valve's blessing now, is it canon?


I guess it's kind of contract work? This is a weird situation to me, it's not like when Valve has picked up other mods, as Valve hasn't really done anything for the development of this game.
Click to expand...

They are under contract with Valve. As for it being Canon its is basically HL1 so it probably is.
 
B

balladofwindfishes

Member
abracadaver said:
Sucks that 2 chapters are missing.

Is there a reason for that?
Click to expand...

The Xen maps are massive and have complicated physics and puzzles that are probably trickier to do with Source than it was with GoldSrc, since they could fake a lot of stuff in the latter since graphics and physics were simpler.
 
M

Mogwai

Member
abracadaver said:
Sucks that 2 chapters are missing.

Is there a reason for that?
Click to expand...

This, I guess.
“We currently have the first ~85% of our single player campaign completed. For the last 15% we want to not only recreate it, but improve upon it to make it an enjoyable and memorable experience. We feel it will take us considerable time to get the last 15% up to our standards, and putting a time estimate on it would be a total guess.”
Click to expand...
 
GavinUK86

GavinUK86

Member
they should've stuck it on early access years ago and it might've been a complete package by now.

it's weird how it's taken so long.
 
B

balladofwindfishes

Member
GavinUK86 said:
they should've stuck it on early access years ago and it might've been a complete package by now.

it's weird how it's taken so long.
Click to expand...

Valve threw a wrench in their plans by only supporting the mod if they ported it to the latest branch of Source. I imagine the last year and a half was nothing more than porting it and polishing multiplayer.
 
C

CryptiK

Member
JudgmentJay said:
Why are people thinking there's a difference in graphics between the free mod and paid? Is that mentioned somewhere that I'm not seeing? If not, I don't see why it would be any different.
Click to expand...

Its right there in the OP 2nd quote.

The free version is basically the mod release, ported to a new engine, with some bug fixes. That's mostly it.

The paid version, obviously, gets everything we're doing. That includes MP, constant updates, improved graphics (not just world props; we've got a few new weapon models, animations, particle fx, sounds, to name but a few), new features, active development, workshop, among many other things.
Click to expand...
 
T

TyrantII

Member
I very much enjoyed the freeware version. Def will be throwing them a bone for finishing it.

Any word if they're expanding some of the larger levels they cut in the black mesa part? Think it was we've got hostiles that saw a significant reduction in the name of time and resources.
 
abracadaver

abracadaver

Member
balladofwindfishes said:
The Xen maps are massive and have complicated physics and puzzles that are probably trickier to do with Source than it was with GoldSrc, since they could fake a lot of stuff in the latter since graphics and physics were simpler.
Click to expand...

I'm not talking about Xen. It's Surface Tension that is missing
 
B

Brydo0

Neo Member
Interested to hear how different this recreation is, I've yet to play the 1st HL and wouldn't mind the source engine upgrade visually to finally get back in.
 
J

Jito

Banned
Sounds good and I'm looking forward to finally getting to play through Xen (sometime next year?).

I'd only buy this now if they've updated the marines AI. It's ridiculous how accurate they are in the mod.
 
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