Feedback & a few suggestions

[Wolfhram]

Hello there o/

I’ve been playing the old good HL and its add-ons and mods since 1998 and it’s pretty much one of the very best games in my life. I really love seing the same atmosphere the devs put in the Black Mesa remake, it FEELS like the original HL but with modern shiny textures and such. Hats off for the devs!

But there are a few things that IMHO could be improved (not mentioning the long Xen development xD):

1. Revolver ammo: my favourite HL weapon bcoz of its firing and reloading animation, sound and high power, had 36 spare rounds of ammo in old HL, but currently only 12 in BM. Seriously, that’s not enough - 1 pack of ammo restores all of it, except what’s already loaded into the gun. That feels especially out of balance when compared to whole bunch of 60!!! rounds for the shotgun.
   My first suggestion is to give the old good .357 some love and let it be at least 18 rounds carried with it (as it was in early, non-Steam BM downloaded manually). Or even 24? x6 packs of ammo really shouldn’t take much place in the suit.
   Keeping in mind the ~realistic~ overall ammo load in HEV, maybe at the slight cost of some excessive shotgun ammo?

2. Game difficulty. HARD mode doesn’t really feels hard - med kits/stations and HEV batteries/chargers restore as much on hard mode as they do on easy. And although enemies hit harder, they still die fast. All of that feels wrong compared to early version of BM and the original HL, IMHO hard mode should not be that walk-in-the-park ez pz gg wp. Would be nice if that was rebalanced, or if just another difficulty mode was added for masochists like myself.

It also feels like the game is missing 1 destroyable helicopter around Surface Tension, but that’s minor. In general, the game is totally great, but if the things I’ve mentioned were to be changed - it would be just ideal!
Can’t wait for the final release!

[Sieben]

I concur about the revolver part.
But I really don’t agree with you on the difficulty part. Apart from the amount of health/energy restored by the machines, BM is much, much harder in hard mode than the original HL in hard mode. I play HL in hard difficulty quite easily and without saving much. In BM, it’s a nightmare sometimes. Some parts of the game are insanely hard, especially most encounters with the military.
Everything is harder than the original HL: fewer energy/health machines/packs, less ammo carried by player, enemies deal more damage, marines are insanely accurate, they instantly spot you when you’re in sight and instantly fire at you, and they always know where you are, choppers are ridiculously hard, and so on. Also, I didn’t check that point, but I’m pretty sure houndeyes and vortigaunts fire at you more quickly than in the original game.
Did you seriously enjoy the dam section? Or the chopper fight at the cliff in Surface Tension?
I like difficulty, but BM’s hard mode is not just hard, it’s unfair.

Anyway, if you like that kind of difficulty, I wouldn’t mind some “very hard” mode though, I just don’t think I’d play it.

While we’re at it, I’ll make a few suggestions too:

• Bring back all the secrets, puzzles, traps and some other nice details that was in the original HL. Many of them were removed in BM. I provided a few examples at the beginning of my post there: https://forums.blackmesasource.com/t/earthbound-chit-chat-thread/61975/8?u=sieben
• On A Rail doesn’t feel like a long trip like in the original HL. It would be nice to have it enhanced so it fits better the original atmosphere.
• Bring back the vent maze in We Got Hostiles!
• Improved AI for marines. Like I said before, those guys instantly spot you and then instantly fire at you with unreal accuracy.

And some details that could be improved:

• All zombies limp. It’s like all zombies have a broken leg, always the same leg. I think it breaks the immersion, because it’s unrealistic that all headcrabbed personel have broken their leg. More diversity in zombies’ animations would be more than welcome. Also, zombies in the original HL don’t limp, so it wouldn’t be shocking if BM zombies didn’t limp, at least some of them
• About zombies again: I don’t like it when the headcrab is detached from its host even after I shot at the crab several times. It doesn’t feel like a coherent feature.
• In areas with radioactivity (especially in Blast Pit), it would be nice to have that green light on Gordon’s weapons. It’s already there a tiny bit, but it’s extremely subtle. It would be nice if the green light intensity was closer to what it was in the original HL (for example, see here: https://youtu.be/UYxtVKSuSzc?list=PLR2vpfke_UnB6o0t0bpiZo3wuUg0ql1pK&t=1560). I think it brings a lot to the game atmosphere.

There must be more, I’ll update this post if I can think of something else.

[Nickademus]

I agree with Wolfram. Hard mode is not hard at all in this game. Not sure what game you are playing Sieben, but it is not the same one I am. And it is not because the ai is bad at all. It is very good in fact. It is because you have a ridiculously high amount of health with a full health and a full shield. Enemies die realistically but you do not. That design philosophy is fine, Gordan freeman is a badass and that should be so. But it needs to be balanced around that fact. They can literally double the amount of enemies and it would still be playable. Now I am not saying to do that for every encounter, I think the military fights are actually mostly fine, though a few more Marines in a squad in hard mode would be nice, headcrabs, zombies, basically all alien encounters are a mediocre challenge at best. Now of course we don’t want to turn this into a different type of game so I am not saying put enemies everywhere. In fact, keep them where they are. Just adjust those encounters and tweak them a bit to increase the challenge.

My suggestions

-More teleporting in of enemies during the encounters when they already teleport in. Have a second or third or fourth wave come in much more often for the Zorg and Agrunts and headcrabs. I can end most encounters with the at 75 % health or better. Keep em coming. Also, have some enemies teleport in behind you. It makes no sense that they just teleport in directly in front of the player in his line of sight.
-Zombies. Zombies are no threat at all and only require a crowbar. The entire facility was just taken over by aliens. People would group up in clusters. I shouldnt be fighting one lone zombie over and over after maybe the initial reveal. They should be in groups of four or more and they should be accomponied by headcrabs because that is how they turned. Also Seibans suggestion of a non shuffling zombie variant is a good one.
-headcrabs. They are also no threat. They can jump across the screen so fast but they move around as slow as a turtle? Give them actual walking and turning speed please. They are the size of a small dog or cat with long legs so they should be able to move faster.
-Those alien spit enemies ai could use a tweak as well. I can attack them from far a way and they seem to not respond at all. They have a long range attack have them chase after and move more to get into firing range during a long range battle.
-The marines I dont agree with Seiban above at all the AI for the marines is very good. They flank you, the move around very quickly and the advance on you like real marines would. They need no change.

Most of the other enemies are pretty good for the most part balance wise, just like I said have them cluster in larger groups together. It makes sense from a lore perspective as well. The game is fantastic though even if I feel it is very easy.