I ran into fewer bugs in Black Mesa than I did the original Half-Life and far fewer than I did in say, Skyrim.
I had like three or four crashes to desk-top that were far between.
HL2 is about the only game I can think of that ran smoother.
I had like 15 together: engine errors, crashes, freezes.
Before anyone tell me to upgrade my PC, it’s above what Source Engine entails, not to mention happens to my brother as well, and he has even stronger PC.
I think this might have something to do with with no multi-core rendering
I agree. I had a total of 1 crash to desktop and two bugs. Both bugs were visual and inconsequential.
Oh, and regarding the multi-core rendering: I have a quadcore with 8 strings, and it almost always ran smoothly without fail.
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BM is a linear FPS and around 10 hours long. Skyrim is a WRPG with a massive world that takes over 60 hours to explore. It’s expected to have some bugs.
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I played through BM twice. On both playthroughs I had around 3 crashes each. One time in Blast Pit I could quickload or restart the level as many times as I wanted, the game would always crash at the moment I turned on the big ventilator. I had to reboot my PC. And I had the same performance issues during the final battle at the Xen teleporter with extreme fps drops.
Not to mention many small glitches that are not gamebreaking but are still not “VQ”. And who knows how many bugs and glitches there are in the game that you and I didn’t notice? Just because the game doesn’t crash on your machine doesn’t mean it won’t crash on other machines.
But as I said, that’s ok.
Bethesda has shit coders. You can expect bugs with an open world game, but they still have way more then they should. They’ve always had shit coders, they use hacky workarounds to implement things and hardcode things that shouldn’t be, and generally just do really stupid things.
On topic, I’ll have to see how I feel in a week or 2, but right now I prefer BM to HL1 mostly.
BM is better than Valve quality.
In terms of visual quality, it’s extremely close. There are some areas of the game that just look hands down better than anything in Half-life 2 and Episode 2 but then there are a few areas and assets that aren’t quite up to scratch. But then I can point to parts of Half-life 2 and Episode 2 that I think aren’t quite Valve quality either, so please don’t take offense at this, devs. (Edit) One clear advantage that this game has over any of Valve’s Source engine games is that you guys are clearly not afraid to stress the engine (or the users’ hardware). High res textures and light maps everywhere, tons of physical objects to get shot around in a fight, insanely detailed models - I’m just glad I upgraded my video card before Black Mesa came out. Valve tends to be very reserved about this sort of thing so that the game will run well on just about anything.
In terms of gameplay, there’s a bit more of a gap. I had a blast playing it but there are a few pretty major issues and a number of minor issues that are all pretty well documented on this forum that need attention. Most of these issues are fixable though, so with a little more work I think the game could start to approach Valve quality.
I’d like to ask people to keep in mind that Black Mesa is not a new original title from scratch when considering quality. Black Mesa being a remake of Half-Life 1 is already utilizing potentially hundreds of man hours of time that Valve put into the original game. Including their story, level design, weapon balancing, enemy balancing, creation (or assembly) of ideas, play testing, etc. When Black Mesa does anything that reaches even close to Valve quality it is built upon work that Valve had already done.
If I take a classic painting and repaint say the Mona Lisa, you can say that I have masterful command of a brush, but you can not say I am a master of composition.
wow… just wow… your review makes sense now
Jab jab
I just played HL2 whic has the same engine of Black Mesa, and I wanted to throw up. The graphics are really outdated. I mean, the textures look like crap. And its both episodies are almost the same, although they are 3 years newer. The only Valve work that is at the same level of BM is Portal(both 1 and 2) and L4D.
If you mean the content, actually it’s almost the same than in the original, so it’s obviously Valve quality. Maybe the only flaws are the parts that were cut. But if it wasn’t because of that, it would be a perfect remake.
Note:It’s not the first time I play HL2, but the first in a very long time.
Is that inaccurate? They worked off of another company’s hard work. “We stand on the shoulders of giants,” kind of thing. It’s still impressive, don’t get me wrong. It’s not fair to people who work on new games entirely from scratch though to act like one team took 8 years to create an amazing gamer experience. In fact it took over 15 years. One companies entire game development attempt. Their creation of a new engine. AND the 8 years of development time of a modding team. To ignore the massive underpinning of the work is just not accurate.
I wouldn’t compare it to a copy of a painting, since there isn’t much room for variation in that. Rather, I’d compare it to a new rendition of an old classic concerto, arranged to make it your own.
You still need your talent to make it fresh. You’re still clearly building on what came before you. But in the end, it’s still your own interpretation, no? You clearly deserve credit for performing well. And the variations on the original theme is what makes things interesting.
Not sure if trolling …
HL2 is a masterpiece, even with outdated graphics the artstyle is beautiful. And it will be beautiful forever. Art > Textures and Polygons.
Well in my opinion, when you start from scratch, you are left with complete creativity… you can make and do what you like, no boundaries… with this there was only so much they could do, and change to make people happy. I think they did an amazing job in bringing this all together on the source engine.
any way, I’m guessing your a “glass is half empty kinda guy”
That’s not what I meant. I say that Valve didn’t make anything groundbreaking with HL2, nevertheless it’s considered one of the best games ever made.
TBH I’m not sure that the staticky screen isn’t just to hide the fact that the radioactive goo looks incredibly bland. 
At the time, the graphics were astoundingly good, and the implementation of its physics system was the best of nearly any game. Not sure what you’re trying to say…?
It’s almost like looking at Half-Life now. At the time it was almost revolutionary for its AI and graphics, among various things. Now it doesn’t seem all too groundbreaking.
Still not sure if trolling …
Have you seen their presentation at E3 2003 (or was it 2004)? HL2 was groundbreaking in many ways.
Firstly there’s no such thing as no boundaries to creativity. There are always limitations. Perhaps Black Mesa had a few more limitations than a brand new IP, but to imply that it is hard to go from infinite possibilities to a limited one is not quite true, as there are always limitations often really hefty ones to creativity in the development of any project.
Also, they changed plenty of things. I just disagreed with much of it because it often tossed out good ideas that Valve had had 15 years ago in favor of whatever decision someone made at the time, which unfortunately did not seem like it was made with an overall concept of improvement. If you write up a list of differences I don’t think you’d find evidence of a guiding hand.
Also I do agree they did a good job pulling things together. I just disagree with the notion that the Black Mesa team made a game of the same level as a Valve Product on their own, they in fact had a lot of their work already done for them by Valve in the first place.