Black Mesa - legendary vaporware Half-Life remake finally out

[JDR13]

I really like the new Marine AI. They throw grenades at you, flank, lay down suppressive fire, heal their comrades. It's been a while since I last played the original HL but I vaguely remember the marines being able to do these. I hope more games incorporate this kind AI. I'm really tired of braindead AI.

I never saw enemies healing each other in the original game. That's definitely an improvement if they do it in BM.

AI followers did that in Opposing Force, though.

Opposing Force was great. Wasn't someone working on doing a Black Mesa type remake of that too?

 

[Lemming42]

Operation: Black Mesa and Guard Duty are the fan remakes of OpForce and Blue Shift. Hopefully the completion of Black Mesa spurs them on.

 

[lightbane]

I really like the new Marine AI. They throw grenades at you, flank, lay down suppressive fire, heal their comrades. It's been a while since I last played the original HL but I vaguely remember the marines being able to do these. I hope more games incorporate this kind AI. I'm really tired of braindead AI.

Had they fixed their near-hitscan aiming skills of the first release? I remember the marines from the mod being annoying to fight due having absurdly precise aim compared to the original game.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

I really like the new Marine AI. They throw grenades at you, flank, lay down suppressive fire, heal their comrades. It's been a while since I last played the original HL but I vaguely remember the marines being able to do these. I hope more games incorporate this kind AI. I'm really tired of braindead AI.

Had they fixed their near-hitscan aiming skills of the first release? I remember the marines from the mod being annoying to fight due having absurdly precise aim compared to the original game.

Imagine the cultists in Blood but with more HP.

 

[schru]

The cultists in Blood II ?

 

[Origin]

Did any of you cunts actually tried this game? Typical Codex...

Only a spoiled brat would conclude that this remake is lacking.

 

[Origin]

Did any of you cunts actually tried this game? Typical Codex...

Only a spoiled brat would conclude that this remake is lacking.

I've played the game multiple times when it was still a free mod, and even then, when I still kind of liked it for what it was, it was in no way a replacement for the original. It's not being ‘a spoiled brat’ to expect a remake to live up to its name. Am I supposed to accept mediocrity just because they bothered to make it at all? Who cares. No one ever needed Half-Life to have cinematic HD graphics and a silly soundtrack. You're the one who's a cunt, cunt.

Nobody said it's a replacement of original, retard.

It's HL1 on source engine, made by a bunch od modders, sold for 20$. Not by Valve, or some big budget AAA developer. Repeat this until it sinks in, idiot.

They managed to remake it properly without ruining lore and atmosphere, which is a feat on its own. Everything else is a properly balanced added value.

Very polished, no problems so far, feels exactly like Half Life. You get the feeling it's made with love.

I don't like the trailers as they concieve the impression that the game is dramatically altered and popamoled somewhat. Not the case at all.

I was pessimistic about plans to add some bigger things, without falling out of the context, but it's all smooth actually.

 

[Origin]

This isn't even a point at all. It's a mod... so what? I have no right to complain? They just, like, can't help it that their game is shit, it's not their fault, duh. Truly, I should be ashamed of myself for being so arrogant as to criticize them.

You played it when it was a mod, what 10 years ago? Your opinion has no merit at all, as this is a much better product.

 

[Lemming42]

Unreal, why are you still in the thread 8 years later? We're not even talking about the same game anymore, it was nearly a decade ago.

 

[Origin]

Stop crying.

 

[Lemming42]

This post makes no sense at all. I wasn't even on this forum eight years ago, and the game is not much different from how it was as a mod

I was asking why, in 2020, are you in a thread for a game you apparently last played in 2012 that's gone through plenty of revisions since.

If you've played the more recent builds, what exactly are the major problems with the game that render it "shit"? How is the current version "actually worse" than the mod version? The only complaints you've made so far are "cinematic HD graphics" and "silly soundtrack".

The graphics look absolutely fine to me, preserving the art design of Half-Life very well while fleshing out rooms believably and remodelling areas so that the whole facility feels slightly more like a plausibly real place. The soundtrack does suck but I assume they couldn't use the original music.

 

[GhostCow]

The soundtrack is the worst part imo. Not so much because the songs are bad but more because they don't match what's going on in the game half the time. I'm most of the way through Xen and I'm enjoying it though. At the worst I'd give it a 7/10. There's nothing terrible or offensive about it.

 

[Lemming42]

Since you can't read: Yes, I have actually played and completed the game recently. It is the same game. Sure, they did change it a bit. They replaced HEV Suit's voice just for the sake of replacing it. They... added some dynamic shadows? Now the boring lighting is unnoticeably improved, but still boring. Where in this did the game suddenly transform into something incomparable to the original release?

You just started by saying "I PLAYED THIS SEVERAL TIMES BACK WHEN IT WAS A MOD", so people assumed that was when you'd last played it. It was only after I posted that you clarified that you'd played a more recent version. Major communication breakdown, Unreal, and it's all your fault!

It's no longer really comparable to the mod release because the difficulty/balance has changed, the Marine AI has radically changed, some alien enemies now have new behaviours and abilities (vortigaunt doing the annoying Skaarj-like dodge), several levels have been reworked (mostly for the worse IMO), Xen is now about half the game for better or for worse, there's been a lot of graphical changes (didn't they move to an entirely different build of the Source engine at some point?), the weapon animations and sounds are different... I get the feeling they've also changed the amount of enemies in some levels.

It was worse than I remembered. I know, that's ‘subjective’, but it still bothered me somewhat, even back then. The graphics are undeniably amateurish. They're high fidelity, but the aesthetic feels off, even for what it's trying to be. The modern cinematic style was never appropriate for Half-Life, anyway. Half-Life 2's visuals were really the more proper evolution of the series. Black Mesa just looks like a boring Xbox 360 game, but worse. The tone is lost with the ‘emotional’ music and boring voice acting. Their performances just sound so flat, which was rather surprising, really. I didn't remember it being that bad. Well, except for the stupid things they did with the Marines and the announcement system. We can't just have an amusing scene involving a falling elevator, no, it's gotta be some fake dramatic Hollywood shit. The whole game acts like that, and it's really distasteful.

The graphics are probably about as good as anyone's gonna get from an antiquated pile of shit like the Source engine. It is indeed subjective but I think the aesthetic is great - I genuinely can't see what more they could have done. Half-Life has a lot of rooms that are oddly empty but where the intent is clear, and all Black Mesa does is act on that intent - the best example is Residue Processing, where the sparse central room of Half-Life is reworked into something that makes a lot more sense as a waste treatment facility with lots of entrances and exits, catwalks, control rooms etc. The old decommissioned areas of the facility from Blast Pit through to Apprehension look really great at times with all the rusted cold war computers and machinery.

They take a lot more liberties in Surface Tension but IMO it largely pays off with some visually impressive areas and new puzzle rooms that are fun to play and fit right into Half-Life's design philosophy.

I don't think "the whole game" puts in tryhard dramatic Hollywood shit. There's some of it but it's very sparse - the only part I can think of is the completely fucking awful part where you have to sneak through the aircraft hangar with the guard at the end of Surface Tension. Most of the game is just a one-for-one remake. I suppose you could describe some of the new scenes like the ambush at the end of Questionable Ethics as "Hollywood shit" but I don't think that one is a huge departure in tone from Half-Life.

The Marine sounds actually changed one last time in the new update and they have deep obscured voices now. Still don't sound as good as they did in Half-Life but it's a lot better than the lame nerd voice they had in previous builds. VOX sounds alright to me. The soundtrack is definitely one of the biggest weak points, the terrible orchestral shit is incalculably worse than the original industrial/techno stuff.

 

[Lemming42]

I played the beta from before the changes to the AI, and aside from Xen, it was mostly indistinguishable to the mod as it was in 2012. I never once even mentioned the gameplay, so whether the new AI changes everything is irrelevant. My complaints were about the rest of the game, which remains unaffected.

You asked generally how the mod and retail versions were different:

Where in this did the game suddenly transform into something incomparable to the original release?

There's some substantial gameplay differences between the mod and retail versions, that's really the bulk of the change unless you care about godrays or whatever.

How is Source ‘an antiquated pile of shit’? The best graphics we've gotten out of the Source engine are that of Valve's own games, and they even look better than pretty much everything else we've gotten in the past decade. They didn't have dynamic shadows, or whatever the hell nonsense, they were just nice and clean and didn't try clutter up the scene with as much artificial detail as possible. Black Mesa belongs to the latter, and stuff like that is just irritating. If anything, I'd rather they did less, not more.

Really? Half-Life 2 hasn't aged well at all, IMO. It's got that characteristic mid-2000s look that paradoxically manages to look far worse in retrospect than mid-late 90s games. Parts of Highway 17 in particular just look like total shit. And before we inevitably go down this road, yes I played it on release and yes I was suitably wowed at the time by the fancy visuals.

Might be a difference in taste, but the fact that HL2 doesn't "clutter up the scene with as much artificial detail as possible", as you put it, is part of why I think it looks bad. There's a lot of box-like bare rooms (Nova Prospekt has quite a few if I remember right) that look completely ugly, and most of the open areas with the boat or the buggy are sparse to the point of looking really dull. Episode 2 mostly looks good on the parts where it does clutter up scenes with random props and things, like in the mines and that weird car graveyard with the turret. You could argue that Black Mesa goes too far in the other direction at times and creates cramped rooms that have about 300 unnecessary props in them, I guess.

Some of the better uses of the source engine are from non-Valve games like Dark Messiah, which still looks awful at times but manages to pull off much more impressive visuals than HL2.

Black Mesa is one of the better uses of the engine I've seen. It still absolutely shits itself once or twice - the airstrip part in Surface Tension looks noticeably bad - but overall it plays to the engine's strengths. The recent lighting updates are a step in the wrong direction though, places like the shark cage room in Apprehension look like total dogshit now.

 

[Lemming42]

Yeah. Doom 3 and F.E.A.R. both have this same sort of awkward plastic-y look. Oblivion and Tomb Raider: Legend are other obvious examples of it. Call of Duty 2 suffers from it to a lesser extent too. I'm not entirely sure what it is that gives them that look, something about the lighting maybe? Games from just a couple years earlier where the devs weren't applying retarded amounts of bloom and post-processing shit look way better today - Max Payne, Red Faction, Mafia, etc.

STALKER looks fine. Far Cry's environments still look astonishingly great today but the character models look like ass. Jack Carver's face is literally made of latex.

HL2 comes off worse than those other games though IMO because a lot of the maps have really poor use of space, like I said earlier. Doom 3 and F.E.A.R. at least mostly stick you in tightly designed corridors where the game doesn't give you a chance to notice how crap it can look, while STALKER and Far Cry were just way better at designing big outdoor areas. HL2 just spazzes out with huge amounts of wasted space which doesn't pair well at all with the low-poly cliffs in the boat/buggy chapters and the fuck-ugly buildings in the city chapters and the Nova Prospekt yard.

By contrast, some of the indoor areas have aged a lot better - the ruined buildings during Anticitizen One and the canal tunnels near the start for example.

 

[Naraya]

I only have played Half-Life once, soon after it released. I am replaying this right now and I am having tons of fun. This game looks quite incredible compared to how it looked back then.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

Unreal

Unfair comparison. First, the hardware we have these days is much more capable of rendering those graphics. Second, Black Mesa uses a newer version of the Source engine and even that one is getting long in the tooth. Some of the Earth levels are quite dated, more like something that should have been released in 2009.

 

[Naraya]

Unfair comparison. First, the hardware we have these days is much more capable of rendering those graphics. Second, Black Mesa uses a newer version of the Source engine and even that one is getting long in the tooth. Some of the Earth levels are quite dated, more like something that should have been released in 2009.

The comparison is that Half-Life 2 looks good and Black Mesa is literally brown as shit. Well, it's not always monotonous brown, but the colouring is bad in pretty much every scene.

I don't agree. Just finished a base level (Questionable Ethics) and it had a cool, blue tone which I liked. I think you are being choosy for the sake of being butthurt.

 

[Lemming42]

Oof, you know its bad when someone mistakes your "HL2 still looks great" post for a "HL2 looks like total shit" post.

 

[Lemming42]

Joking aside, accusing Black Mesa of lacking colour is a peculiar criticism because a) it's not true and b) it sticks fairly close to Half-Life's colour scheme for the most part.

Lambda Core is brightly coloured, Questionable Ethics has the blue-tinted weapons research lab, Office Complex has the same characteristic red doors and black and white tiled floors, most of Surface Tension and Forget About Freeman actually have more colour than Half-Life in some areas thanks to the bright sunny lighting of the former and the orange-tinted sunset of the latter. Blast Pit has the same rusted machinery and bright neon green radioactive shit, and so on. Xen is bursting with colour - it ends up looking worse than the original Xen most of the time, but it's still got a cohesive colour scheme of blues and purples.

As for Half-Life 2, we'll have to agree to disagree - I couldn't have picked a better selection of screenshots myself if you asked me to explain what I don't like about Half-Life 2. The first screenshot looks decent but the rest are various shades of shit. Ravenholm really is one of the scariest experiences in all of gaming - not for the zombies, but for the godawful blockiness of the whole place. That screenshot of the chopper battle with the boat is emblematic of what I don't like about HL2's outdoor areas and the bunkers near Nova Prospekt aren't much better either.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

So, is 1.0 any better than the EA release (which I played a couple of months ago)? What's different about the two versions? A few areas had framerates that ran like dripping feces from the walls of an institutionalized autistic child but otherwise was playable. The Xen levels needed editing to reduce the amount of those power cable puzzles, imo. Anything changed there? I have to admit, it was a fantastic effort on the part of the non-professional gaming community.

 

[agentorange]

Unreal

Unfair comparison. First, the hardware we have these days is much more capable of rendering those graphics. Second, Black Mesa uses a newer version of the Source engine and even that one is getting long in the tooth. Some of the Earth levels are quite dated, more like something that should have been released in 2009.

This isn't about sheer graphical fidelity though, it's about visual direction. Black Mesa can have all the modern shaders and lighting effects thrown at it but at the end of the day it's a game cobbled together by autistic modders with no restraint or taste, let alone the ability to maintain consistency on either a stylistic or technical level (especially bothersome is how they have these photorealistic npc models, because models are relatively easy to make/download from somewhere, but the accompanying animations are still archaic because animations are hard, and they can't afford mocap, so the end result is laughable). The game is filled with other examples of disparity between technology level and the brain level of the visual designers using the technology. And that's without even getting into just how plain ugly a lot of the visual choices they made were.

Spoiler

Stuff like the new Nihilanth portal is especially egregious since not only is it more ugly and messy but it completely misses the tone set by the original.

The ending sequence with the G-man is similarly terrible, looks like something that belongs in a 4/10 mod made by high-schoolers.

Half-Life 2 had talented artists like Viktor Antonov working on it, and the fact that the game didn't have access to all those modern shaders and overblown effects is why it still looks crisp and clean (although even with that modern tech they would have had people who know how to use it, in moderation, since Half-Life Alyx looks surprisingly clean for a modern game).

 

[aweigh]

I FOUND THE COOMER:

 

[GewuerzKahn]

The new Nihilanth Portal looks great. I'm gonna try this game out.

I never thought Half-Life 1+2 were good looking games. So it's interesting for me how the modder/developers changed everything.

 

[agentorange]

ok retard