Crowbar Collective has announced that Black Mesa will leave Early Access and will be fully released on March 5th. This basically means that Black Mesa will be feature-complete, and will have both the “Black Mesa” and the Xen levels.
Black Mesa is a fan remake of the first Half-Life game in Source Engine. The game hit Early Access on May 5th, 2015. Thus, it took almost five years for its development team to complete it.
If you have already purchased the game, you can try its release build, version 1.0, in its beta phase. Naturally, the final build will have some additional bug fixes and QoL improvements.
As the Black Mesa team concluded:
“Black Mesa is a video game, it is our video game, and it has its strengths, and its flaws. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned” and while we plan to fully support this game after 1.0 with bug fixes and more, it will never be a perfect game.”
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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wow it only took SIXTEEN goddamn years to finish it…
Yeah it was originally targeted for Winter 2005. Not at all “five years for its development team to complete it”.
Wow. To be honest i stopped looking at the slightest info about it for more than 10 years now. And stopped caring actually, backlog is always at your side in such cases. Good thing though that the time finally came to move it from my betas/ea folder to the backlog one.
I see that you love both Half-Life and Tool, you must be a really patient person lol
12 years without HL, and now 2 HL games in the “third” month of the year, this is really weird lol. Congratulations to the team, HL modding community at it best, the most creative and passionate community in gaming in my opinion
I’ll believe it when it actually happens. Been following this project from the start and it’s been missed deadline after missed deadline.
The game is playable from start to finish right now, with Xen levels. This release version just has bug fixes and tweaks to the AI.
I’m aware.
Just played the original half life. It came out the same year as the other greatest games of all time. Ocarina of time and Metal Gear solid. It is still more impressive in some ways. The level design is perfect. It’s like a well perfected symphony instead of a bunch of noise coming your way. After that I beat the second and realized how it created the last 15 years of gaming from it’s teat. Halo was clearly inspired by Half life but it did lose something in it’s scope. The perfectly perfected levels were instead shelved for giant levels with some different angles.
This is bullshit. Nothing beats a perfectly tailored experience that has be hand crafted for the best possible experience for the player.
Alyx is going to be sweet. VR gaming is life changing with all the possibilities but just needs the killer app to push it into the mainstream. There can be no better killer app than a new half life.
Lets just face it boys and girls. We are about to once again watch history drop. Get prepared. Experience the gift and take a ticket because the ride is about to arrive and we are all getting on.
Just make sure you aren’t late because this is the seminal moment. The moment when the table flips. The moment when the smart phone became ubiquitous. This is the next episode. We just need to clear some space and have fun moving around like Nintendo intended with the Wii.
Agree for the lvl design, Doom/Quake fans always thought that HL’s lvl design is inferior because not so complex, this is BS, HL’s lvl design is crafted in some continuous way to maintain pacing like nothing before back in 1998, it was a fresh new way to craft interesting levels with narrative elements and enough space for the outstanding IA to operate, and you can even feel some sandbox vibes coming straight from a “linear” level design which is sorcery lol, rarely seen this kind of lvl design recently, TLOU on PS3 is the last game i experienced using this structure as brilliantly as HL… I really love 90s shooter, and i still play them a lot, but back in 1998 HL felt superior to any shooter i played prior
Hahaha
The moment when I realized I’m reading b*llshit and I can’t get back one minute of my life.
At last !
Love Black Mesa. Played the free version then paid for the released Valve version and patiently waited for Xen to release. It’s a really small team so I understand (but wow it’s taken a long time lol).
Now Im a little confused, I think I finished what was done with Black Mesa so long ago. How do I launch the Xen part of it? Do I need to replay the entire game until it gets me into the xen levels?
Side note: Crowbar Collective’s statement doesnt convey a positive note, seems pro-actively defensive. Weird. I think they did a great job with Black Mesa.
there is a remake of half life one, its called residual life. Latest version just came out.
That’s a shame about Xen. If only they would have cut about 2 hours of it out of the game.
Finished this yesterday and I might say, it’s absolutely amazing!
Besides the great feelings it brought back, the Xen levels are just wonderful.