I just wanna say the same thing I said in the youtube channel:
The point is not to criticize, the point is that the whole video is based on the negative stuff. I agree with many things you say, but I find more positives things than negatives.
All that stuff about the voice in the game, the music is too loud (you can modify that in the menu) and the place for the weapons…well, all I say is that all that are the “minor” stuff.
The bugs are the big stuff, and in Black mesa 1.1 ; I hope all of that is gone
Ah! A developer commentary mode would be so awesome. If you opted to include one, would it be like in portal where you walk around and activate the speech bubbles? I hope the commentary will talk about all the little hidden Easter eggs
@Stormseeker
Hello Stormseeker, thanks for taking the time to respond.
For that particular scene I unfortunately fell into an inbetween area, and I wonder how many others will do the same. As I entered the ambush I waited, and then after a while wondered what was going on. I didn’t notice anything happening or any wheels churning so I decided something must not be triggering. Here I immeadiatly went to thinking the game was broken, not that something was still being set up. The Music starting in the first place told me that “Here it is! Things going down!” I didn’t have time to notice those nice details you set up. Instead of feeling apprehensive I was just confused that this supposed ambush did not start when they managed to lock the doors on me. A more interesting approach would have been to have the scientists come with me, and as we cross the now dark and silent main hall. I’d have a chance to notice that something isn’t right. When the scientist gets to the door, it denies him access. THEN the music kicks in and the ambush starts. That’d have utilized every asset and trick to you that you already used, but this way people get to notice them, and you’ve set up an awesome scene. If people want to skip it they could just run up and use the scanner themselves.
Unfortunately, no matter how good a job you might do setting something up, if people can not experience it, then it is essentially wasted. Sometimes I need to be smashed over the head to get a point driven home, other times I pick up on little details quickly. I will give that portion another try to experience the guard comments but was there any indication that’d have something to say in all those rooms? I know I missed it at least.
For testing, and choreographing things, I actually found that some areas were TOO scripted to a fault. Things would not interrupt, and I could trigger things in funny ways. In an office room with a scientist that is supposed to get Barnacled, I saved him, only to have him stare at me and shake his head silently if I tried to interact with him. On a Rail would (seemingly) not spawn all enemies unless you had the tram with you. I could bypass portions of levels with barrels and subsequent rooms would be empty of enemies. The lobby was a case where there was an appropriate fail safe to cover someone rushing in, but if you decided to let the scene play out, the player may not realize they are on a timer.
For the encounter I played it on hard by accident (I switched the setting to easy during a level change and it did not stick), and found the encounter to not be too difficult. I got sniped by a roof Mp5 guy while I attempted to find where I was being shot from but that only resulted in a single death.
I’d certainly be interested to read more commentary on the decisions made and why they were.
Stormseekers post seems to strengthen my discussions in other topics that the ambush isn’t as hard as some people are making it out to be. Like he said: Run, Shoot, THINK…
As for the…“debate” in the thread, it seems like things are getting more frustrated and angry. If you feel yourself wanting to just curse and swear, step away from the keyboard. I apologize for my post last night saying to just go play Half Life Source because like OldDirtyBastard said, it was not something to say when everyone was being civil.
I think the main thing I see people saying about the review is that it focused on the bad rather than the good. I know there are glitches, bugs, errors, etc in the game. I know that they can be fixed and it isn’t game breaking. The weapons balancing that people complain about is typically brought up by not using weapons properly or for the right situation. It should not be like HL1 where you can use 1-2 weapons the entire game and never use the others. All of the “If it’s not broke don’t fix it” comments are basically saying “Let us use the same weapons the entire game” and that kills dynamic gameplay in my opinion. Sure, I liked being able to use the same weapons because it worked. Now, I found myself using tactics I never used before. I used to spam attached grenades and the mp5. Now I have to be careful not to blow my ammunition like an idiot. I switch weapons to ones that have the most or would be best for the situation. I like that. Maybe it is just me.
There is constructive criticism…and then just criticism. I feel that in a review, you mention good things and then a section for negative things. “The gameplay was good in this aspect but there were issues with this aspect.” or “The graphics were amazing in so many ways but there were some issues with this.”
I know, I know…I am a “fan boy” which is an irritation term that I see people throwing around in this topic, I guess in a way to discredit arguments. “He’s just a fan boy, of course he is going to overlook the negative and shoot right all of the positives.” I see the negatives…which is why I am on the forum discussing them so that the devs can fix them. I am not, however, going to base my opinions on the game on things that don’t break the game. My game crashed a few times. Know what I did? I went and took a break. I read a book, I went outside, I ate something. Sure it made me go “Ah shit…come on I really wanted to see that section.” It crashed in some key areas and music was starting so I thought it was going to be really awesome. When I restarted the game later and played it without it crashing…it was awesome. Maybe I am just a blind optimist.
Sorry this topic has to be a rage-fest for some people. I would hope that if the VT review had be 2-5 minutes longer, it would have been more balanced. Even so, it points out fixable things. Let’s be constructive here folks.
This harkens back to another reason why your review grated on me: I got the impression that you were going at this like a playtester. That’s great (if I was on the mod team, I would be a big fan of this kind of feedback!), but I don’t see it as particularly interesting, especially from the view of a potential player. If you go out of your way to find bugs, they will be there.
And I, for one, can not imagine how you encountered this many scripting issues unless you were actively looking for them. It looks like you broke every scripted sequence in the game. Granted, I’m not disagreeing that they are there — I encountered a couple (and I do like to explore), and those bugs definitely show that the game would benefit from even more polish, but that’s pretty well it: ‘game is not perfectly polished, you might get stuck in scenery.’
If you really did encounter these issues without looking for them, you have a gift and you deserve a significant following. Perhaps even a religion.
I do tend to go a little farther out of my way than perhaps a normal player would, but I have to say I really did not go as far as I would if I were testing. Usually the only times I went out of my way was if I happened to die. I want to get back to where I had been before and so rush things, as was the case with the scientist I saved from the Barnacle. The strangest bug I encountered was the Bee Portal bug which I found purely by accident while playing totally normally. Then the bugs that involved bypassing locations were usually moments of instant action as opposed to searching or premeditation. I see a wall and I see barrels and I treat that as the puzzle to overcome, hoping that it was intended and accounted for, but more often then not this appeared to not be the case.
The impression that I was given is that the testers were not given the tools and direction to properly help out the development team. That’s not to say it is their fault. They may not have been given proper instructions on what to look for, or how far to dig. For me proper testing is doing things like using a single weapon for the entire game as much as you can. This way you can knock out one weapon at a time of major overall bugs. That’s far from fun, but it is thorough. I’d also have done playthroughs using phys objects to skip anything and everything I can and then report it so the team can decide what they may want to keep. The best games are the ones that let small details build up or augment the broad strokes, while trying to suppress the small bugs and detractors that can damage an overall impression of a game. 10 small bugs may not fully add up to one large one, but it can have a harder to describe measurable impact.
Half-Life had many small details I did not even know about, but which impacted my experience. Such as the cockroaches having AI, or the Houndeyes attack, color of shockwave, and I think even pitch of attack augmented by the number of enemies present in a squad.
Half-Life wanted to be as alive as possible and while in the end much was cut, what remained really made me feel like there was life in that facility. Black Mesa dropped the ball on this set of details (and not just the examples given) and as a result it feels less alive and more hollow. As others have addressed elsewhere there’s hardly any of the monster in-fighting I loved to play around with in the original. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is the Garg and the Hgrunts. In Half-Life it felt like there was a true invasion happening and worst, that we were not winning.
As a trained theatre professional who has been trained by professional directors in the art of direction, and has logged hundreds of rehearsal hours directing actors on a stage, I understand plenty about how actors and directors work together to make characters come alive.
So I will give a breakdown of how the voice direction and voice acting influenced my experience of the game. I will preface this by saying that my opinion is that the claim of “lack of direction” is clearly not true, and will attempt to give examples as to why I feel this way. There is evidence throughout the game’s simple dialogue that directorial choices were made, and that the choice to keep things simple has worked out well for the developers. In this game there is no voiced lead character, and there is no significant character growth to be demonstrated by the voice acting. In short, we’re not talking about Oedipus Rex or Hamlet. There’s no lead, there’s only “extras”. With the exception of the PA announcements, every voiced character is expendable in some way, and the voice acting reflects this.
All of the people you encounter in the game have lines of dialogue that serve a utilitarian purpose. All of the relations between the “characters” (scientists/guards) are strictly professional with the exception of the two scientists that emphasize “we ARE an old married couple”. The sarcastic tones of the scientists in Anomalous Materials establish Gordon’s lack of seniority on the science team. Why? Because you’re Gordon Freeman, the chump that has to risk his ass while all of his colleagues sit around in front of computer screens. Once the resonance cascade happens, you encounter scientists and security guards hidden in rooms throughout Black Mesa. The NPCs are generally useful to the character in some way, and their dialogue reflects that. I can’t think of how I would direct the voice actors in those situations to go above and beyond the utilitarian nature of expendable NPCs. They’re not meant to be fully-developed 3-dimensional characters, and this is obvious. Even so, they are given at least some level of dimensionality by giving each NPC unique dialogue.
As for the HECU soldiers, it appears a directing choice was made by the development team to have these soldiers come across as over the top. This example negates your claim of “lack of direction” in the sense that a choice was made and they stuck to that choice faithfully. No matter how ridiculous you think they sound, they followed the directions given to them quite well. People lose their humanity if they are put in certain situations. I’ve never seen nazis portrayed in a movie that didn’t come across as over the top, so I think making the soldiers overdramatic to be a fine choice.
As for your comment: " It is hard to do a good acting job in a room, alone, away from the actors, unable to feel the set, to know the sets not even REAL. I did voice direction for a mod and well frankly I let my volunteers down. I did not give them the context required. I did not give them the needed cues, segues, and suggestions."
It is an actor’s job to make the role they are playing come alive, and the director’s job to interfere only when necessary. Actors of all types, amateurs and professionals, if they’re serious about what they do they spend many many hours alone at home warming up their vocal chords, speaking lines of dialogue to themselves, trying to figure out the context of the content they are to portray. If they rehearse the dialogue 1000 times, you’d think each actor would form an opinion of their own about context, what their cues are, et cetera. A good director would encourage this process and guide the actors toward making it real for themselves, rather than dictating every little nuance. Sometimes you do need to micromanage, but generally it is better for everyone involved to give the actors a little breathing room. Besides, with voice acting you have the option of having multiple takes to choose from, and that’s where the director’s job comes in: making the final decisions. If the actors still don’t sound like you want them to, then you can micromanage every intonation and nuance of what they are saying.
I’d like to address that when a member of the VT staff posted here that we would not cover anymore Black Mesa material that he was not speaking on behalf of the rest of the VT staff. It was a decision he made on his own and should not have hoisted upon the rest of us and claim in our name. We dealt with that situation in house and (at least to my knowledge) spoke with the Black Mesa dev’s about it as well.
@Insomniak
I don’t personally feel that the directing choices are as apparent as you are claiming. The voice work for Barney and the scientists stick rather true to those of the original game. Down to the inflections in some cases even. The direction given to the voice actors was to copy the direction and acting choices made by Valve. That’s not the Black Mesa team making a directorial decision. It’s making a default one in performing a remake. The simplistic style was not BM desiring a particular effect, it was them telling the actors “here’s how it sounds in the original, please impersonate it.” When they decided they wanted to improve the HECU soldiers the choice made was a poor one that was at odds with the original default choice of the Guards and Scientists. As a result they clash in style, performance, and purpose.
You mention an instance where new dialogue is used with the Married Scientists. Here the dialogue WAS better. Possibly because the actors could not just be told to copy an old sound file. They could play a little more and had freedom to make choices that they may not have been instructed to take for pre-existing lines. This is an exception however, as even in some other locations being that the voices are largely impersonations of Barney, Mossman (who I know wasn’t there), and Kleiner the actors have to push themselves to do the character voice first, the acting second.
My problem with the HECU soldiers is more that the voice and radio filter just aren’t very good. I am incredibly impressed that while I can hear the effort in the scientists and guard’s voices to sound in a certain way that it rarely screams out. The HECU sound like they are constantly trying way too hard to perform out of their range. Someone should have said, “This isn’t working, let’s see what we can do.” and to have worked with the actor to make it work. It sounds like the developers said, “Make it like David Hayter” and then never turned back.
For the relationship between directors and actors I’ve participated in both hands on and hands off. Usually an actor can given the proper information get to about 90% of the end goal, but needs some interaction between a guiding force. The best guidance will be at the start, with the initial information informing the performance. In a mod it’d be locations, physical descriptions, intended personality traits etc. What is important though is if there are problems that there be someone with answers to questions able to step in and guide things if they go off track. The HECU I feel is a great example of this. It clashes with so much else, that someone should have said something. The testers, actors, developers, anyone.
The panic and urgency that this gave could very well be my favorite scene in the entire game. It was wonderful losing contact with him in favor of amazing music.
I’d be all for a commentary. Learn some more about the mod and explain a lot of the decisions made. Maybe more things like to music volume can be explained.
While I generally see the quality of voice acting in Black Mesa as pretty damn good, THAT dialogue is easily the worst in the whole game. Please forgive me for doing this, but I need to hurt a few feelings with what I’m about to say.
That bit of dialogue was horrible, and the blame lays both with whoever wrote it and with the people who acted it. The conversation goes thusly:
-They argue like an old married couple.
-We ARE an old married couple!
-What do you mean “old?!?”
As he Transformers would say, this is bad comedy, and for the simple fact that it’s not funny while obviously reaching for a joke. This is not how people talk, it’s how parodies of people talk. It’s trying to play on the woman taking offence at being called “old” because… That’s what women do, right? But it doesn’t work, because the “old” comment isn’t addressed to her, it’s a very clever bounce off of the guard’s speech.
I get the idea - it’s to make it obvious these two will argue about anything, but even people who will argue about anything won’t argue about EVERYTHING. It still needs to make sense, and “What do you mean old?” doesn’t. If you want her to take offence at something, then have her take offence at the male scientist use their relationship as an excuse, something along the lines of “Don’t make excuses! We wouldn’t even be in this mess if we’d gone for the emergency rail system like I told you!” Hell, why not even go the Dr. Kleiner speech from Episode 1 route and record a good five minutes of bickering then have it loop over so Gordon is forced to leave the room with them still bickering? I get that this might have been very hard on the actors, but it would have made this look like a professional piece of work. Right now, it comes off just… Corny.
And I really have to hold the voice actress playing the woman to task here. I don’t want to say she’s not good, but her delivery of “What do you mean old?” is just bad. It’s stilted and it ends on an inquisitive intonation like she’s actually asking her husband what he means. You know full well what he means, lady! You’re angry BECAUSE you know what he means. You’re angry because your husband is brushing off your marital problems as “Meh, we’re an old married couple. We’re supposed to fight.” No, you’re not, and you know this. You know it’s his fault and he’s making excuses. You know this and you’re ATTACKING him for it, not asking him for clarification.
I know it may seem like I’m just being ugly by picking on this dialogue and the poor woman who was tasked with saying it, but that’s only because the rest of the game’s voice acting - even the Marines - are of such high quality. Yes, I disagree with the ValveTime review on this point pretty much categorically. I believe Black Mesa has amazing voice acting, vastly superior to the original in quite a few places, even. But THAT dialogue stands out because it’s just bad, and it really is the one place in the whole game that pulled me out of the experience and had me thinking “Oh, right. It’s not a professional game. It’s just a mod.”
Black Mesa is NOT just a mod. It IS a professionally-made AAA title, which is why flubs like that really shouldn’t be left in.
The end fight in Questionable Ethics was so epic that I played it 3 times in a row after each other. The whole tension when the music starts and when you know shit’s about to get real. Awesome. Also, the fight forced you to think. Because the first time around I rushed it and pretty much died, like stormseeker said.
And to stormseeker, thanks for adding that part. Seriously, its the part I enjoyed the most in the whole game.
I’m surprised that everyone’s missed the real problem with the video (and it has nothing to do with their opinions). They start off by saying that “the opinions discussed in this review are based around our impressions of the mod as a comparison to the original Half-Life”… which isn’t what Black Mesa is. The developers have always said that it is a re-imagining, a re-design, a remix, etc. If you go into it expecting it to a be a 1:1 copy of Half-Life, of course it’s going to let you down, in the same way that it’ll let you down if you go into it expecting it to be a flight simulator or accountancy package.
I think the worst thing you can accuse them of is being unable to manage the most cursory of research.
I, myself, replayed it around 30 times, basically ending up memorising where each Marine was going to show up and where I could hide for how long before someone flanked me. I liked the idea of the encounter and the presentation was nice, but the difficulty is a little too steep. At the very least, can we get rid of the assholes on the roof taking pot shots at me? It pretty much reduces any cover I have to that corner of boxes, instead of the lobby desk where I could have hidden.
The interesting thing about this thread is that for some reason, I have witnessed very few modern professional games getting such an indepth debate. On the one hand, I appreciate that it happens with Black Mesa, because that makes it seem like a serious effort, on the other hand, it’s a shame that you really have to tear apart a free Mod like that in order to find aspects to criticize. And I’m still not convinced that this is something different than getting attention and clicks.
@Malidictus
You’re right. This dialogue is probably not on par with the rest of it, I have to agree. And I can even imagine how you must have felt in that situation. But while you mention that you refer to that specific dialogue, ValveTime take a chain of those pickings and generalize specific problems as problems of the whole game. And the grade B- is nothing but a really bad and unfair joke, comparing this with what other games and Mods got. Black Mesa is one of the best shooter experiences I had in recent years, and I have never seen so many people here and elsewhere sharing the same positive opinion on a game. It’s pretty damn obvious that in such a situation, some reviewers must write controversial reviews.
Don’t get me wrong. I REALLY love what’s been done with dialogues in Black Mesa. Replaying the original Half-Life now is almost grim, with how lifeless and bot-like everyone is because they have almost no custom dialogue. A Barney runs by me chased by Marines yelling “HEEELP!” so I save him. He stands there. I walk up to him, and he says “Hello. Why not? Didn’t wanna’ die alone anyway?” There’s just nothin’ there. He can’t even look at me as he speaks.
Why I pick on that dialogue is because everything else is so well done. You lead a bunch of guards and scientists to a dead end with an open lift shaft and a long jump. The scientist immediately taps out and the guard goes "Yeah, you go on ahead. I’ll stay here and look after these guys. In the original, there’s nothing. You brought the bots to a place and because of their limited mobility, they don’t go any further. So you ask them to stay and they go “Why are you leaving me here?” Asshole, because you’re incapable of jumping or climbing ladders!
But while you mention that you refer to that specific dialogue, ValveTime take a chain of those pickings and generalize specific problems as problems of the whole game. And the grade B- is nothing but a really bad and unfair joke, comparing this with what other games and Mods got. Black Mesa is one of the best shooter experiences I had in recent years, and I have never seen so many people here and elsewhere sharing the same positive opinion on a game. It’s pretty damn obvious that in such a situation, some reviewers must write controversial reviews.
[/QUOTE]
Black Mesa is a victim of its own success and quality in this case. The final product is so amazing that people are treating it as a legitimate, competitive, high-quality product. Because it is. And because Black Mesa ended up as good as it is, it ended up fighting in a whole other weight class, competing with legitimate multi-million-dollar AAA titles. That I can put Black Mesa on par with Half-Life 2 is telling, because Half-Life 2 was made by a corporation. Granted, they had to invent the Source engine to do it, so we can give that one a pass. But Episode 2? Yeah, that’s easily comparable. Episode 1? Black Mesa is considerably better.
Basically what I’m saying is regardless of what it is, Black Mesa is fighting in a weight class where excuses of “Well, it’s free!” and “Well, it’s just a mod!” just don’t cut it. This resembles a legitimate game far too much for it to not be judged like one and, honestly, it does the development team a disservice to treat their work as “just some mod.” If anything, not being as harsh as we would be for a full game would sell what Black Mesa is short. It doesn’t need the stand-by free mod excuses, because it really is something more.
That’s kind of why the places where it really does feel like a small-scale mod, as with that corny conversation, stand out so much - because they’re the only times you’re reminded that you didn’t actually pay $50 for this game over Steam like you should have. Those are the only times you can see the holes, and they’re memorable against the backdrop of what is otherwise a legitimate, competitive game.
Yep, but even if you treat it like an AAA title which, as such, might have some problems which are not acceptable for an AAA title, it’s a mystery to me how you could give a B-. Another thing is, there are a lot of bug reports, but compared to many AAA titles which get a release day patch, the technical quality of this product is still pretty damn good compared to other AAA titles, but very few people actually care about this. This aspect does not get the weight it should get in reviews, and by this, I am not only referring to the ValveTime BM review.
I could not stress this enough. None of my IRL friends (not even the valve fanboys who actively buy source games) could be arsed to give a fuck about Black Mesa. This mod is exactly what it says on the cover (many community provided DVD covers) “A modern re-telling of the original story”, abiding by strict HL2 rules (notice the changes in the puzzles?). And it does exactly that. By playing the old Half Life you have to use your imagination for how it could fit in with HL2, the two games are so far apart that it can be a bit(or very) disorienting to go from HL2 to HL1. So when you play Black Mesa, you can acctually get that HL2 experience and key parts of HL1 (as if you were going through the trouble to endure the low-resolution low-polygon noisy mess of the original). If you loved HL1 as a game (and for its quirks like insta-gib and other gameplay mechanics that were dropped in HL2), you probably need to step back and ask yourself, from what perspective do you want to see this mod, HL1 or HL2? If you want to do the former I am sad to say, this mod is not right for you. Just my 2¢
I actually played it with Hl2 in minds and enjoy it quite a lot, its hard to explain, its familiar and strange at the same time, I could say its an enterily new game, with nothing to envy from hl2 or hl.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
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