Black Mesa, Valve’s expansive remaster of Valve’s seminal original Half-Life, is getting a remake, adding tons of new assets, improved visuals, and polishing the game in one of its final major content pushes. Crowbar Collective is currently working on the remastering of Half-Life’s first piece of DLC, Blue Shift, which is being released chapter by chapter, meaning that now is not the best time to look into Black Mesa, particularly for anyone who has never checked out the first piece of Half-Life DLC. For a remake of a 1998 game built on top of a highly modified 2007 engine, Crowbar Collectives Black Mesa is still a very well-made, impressive recreation of the original Half-Life.
What makes Black Mesa, a remake of Half-Life, stand out is the fact that it was made by Crowbar Collective instead of the game’s original developers, making it all the more exciting to see the team now planning on branching out to making original games of their own. The lead-level designer for Half-Life remake Black Mesa responded, saying the team had considered continuing on with more remakes, but they were burnt out on them and were more interested in making original games at this point.
While content updates such as these would be discontinued, developer Crowbar Collective is still promising fixes for a few issues that are still in the game. If an even better version final version ends up being the final piece of Gordon Freeman-related work by Crowbar Collective, at least it seems Valve is genuinely excited about making another Half-Life following Alyxs VR release.
Highly polished versions of these levels have been on Early Access for weeks, but they appear to have been received very well, as a full Black Mesa 1.0 is available now. Since then, the focus on details, Black Mesa’s adaptation to a better version of the Source games engine, and a full overhaul of the often-derided last Half-Life chapter known as “Xen” have stretched out the remastering efforts. According to Adam Engels, project leader on Black Mesa’s completion, Half-Life developer Valve had in fact approached the two teams at around that time, suggesting they pursue a commercial release of Black Mesa, and thereby obtain licenses for the Source game engine.
The Half-Life Blue Shift DLC was a DLC extension developed by Gearbox and released in 2001, which retold the events of disastrous events at Black Mesa from the original games point of view, through the eyes of a security guard named Barney Calhoun. Nothing makes that more apparent than the section in Black Mesa that has the player traversing through an elaborate alien-built structure in the alien world of Xen, which ends with players getting a few subtle hints about early segments in the original Half-Life.
