Wow, I don’t know if this is the place to put this, but I can’t think of anywhere else except maybe The Test Chamber.
Something I noticed about Black Mesa and complaints people have about the mod is the replies are rather rude. People say things along the lines of: “If you don’t like it, change it yourself!” (Which I personally have been told before, even after showing that I have been attempting to do just that)
I want to touch upon why this is stupid. I’ve said it once in a thread somewhere and I’ll say it again, just because a person can edit the files to whatever they want to doesn’t mean they should have to. Because then they are not playing the mod the way the developers intended. They are playing a mod of a mod. For example, let’s say I change the weapon damage of the MP5. I just modded Black Mesa. It is a small mod, but I am not playing the same thing everyone else is anymore. If I were to play Black Mesa deathmatch, I would have to use the default values instead of my own because I can’t play my mod with other people unless they have it as well. And not everyone does. Additionally, the jump height is something I have seen many people voice discontent with. If a large number of people say something is wrong, then it is wrong. They shouldn’t be told to manually patch the game themselves to fix it. Imagine if Valve did this. Let’s say Valve made a huge mistake with something in a game they made, and rather than fix it like they normally do, they just say (or they just let their fanboys say), “Fix it yourself!” See the problem?
Also, not everyone is very good at “fixing it themselves.” Some people have no idea where to find the files to edit, some people get overwhelmed by all the lines of code and are too afraid to change values in fear of breaking something, and others just plain out don’t know what to change the values to. I personally hate the jump height, but I don’t know what number to set the thing to in order to get my desired effect. And I don’t want to keep rebooting the game to test it in trial-and-error. The devs set up a game which by all accounts should be fun to play at install. Players shouldn’t be forced to open up the mod’s folder,look for a .txt file, and crunch numbers just to have a good time.
Now some of you may say, “Just press two buttons, noob!” The problem with that is it may not be comfortable for me. I personally can jump-crouch with no problem, but not everyone can. Some people just don’t have hands that flexible. Maybe they spend more time with consoles or other PC games instead of playing Half-Life. This leads into another issue which I will discuss later. Back on the topic of comfort however, some people just can’t position their hands that way quickly and comfortably. While they can change the controls to something easier to press, it won’t be comfortable crouching anymore. You are leaving players with three choices: break their hand, play with awful controls just to make a jump, or stop playing Black Mesa altogether. Option three is something nobody should want, because then why did anyone make the game? What was the point of spending all those years if only a select few are allowed to play? Another argument is “Crouch-hopping was in Half-Life!” So was bunny-hopping. Also, crouch-jumping wasn’t in Half-Life as much as it is in Black Mesa. I should not have to make Gordon pull his legs up to his chest just to make him hop over an ankle-high wall. It is also rather annoying to get through a difficult firefight and then die immediately afterwards because I botched a crouch-jump. Maybe I don’t want to quicksave every five seconds. Maybe I don’t want to quicksave every time I have to jump. But anyways, now to transition to the other topic I promised to discuss later.
Some people feel way too entitled over playing Half-Life. They are the ‘true-gamers’ and others outside the bubble are absolute scum. If someone doesn’t play Half-Life, they are dirt. If someone plays on consoles, they are dirt. What does it matter? If anything, the community should be happy others are trying Black Mesa. Console players are saying, “Hey! This game looks neat! I want to try it!” They are so eager to try it they temporarily leave their platform of choice to play a mod they may know nothing about. And so what if they don’t know? Let them try the game and enjoy it, that way they can know. I’ve seen Black Mesa community members get so angry at X-Box Let’s Players because they are trying Black Mesa. Why the anger? Black Mesa is attracting new people to the Half-Life fandom, and as these people who have little-to-no experience play the mod and get interested, they will learn what Half-Life is. But the responses they receive only prompt them to say: “Welp, I’m not doing this again. I’m sticking to X-Box.” Nobody was born knowing everything about Half-Life and its mods. I still remember when I first heard of the series. But after playing the games I became so hooked that I tried to learn everything I could. And part of what made me like Valve was their updates. If something was wrong they would fix it. Nowadays it’s debatable whether they succeed or not but at least they try.
I’ll stand firm in the belief that there is nothing wrong with making a few adjustments to suit one’s personal tastes. The devs cannot please everyone, but my belief is that they should try to please as many people as they can. Some mods (NOT Black Mesa, thankfully) have developers with sticks shoved so far up their asses that they believe that their way to make a game is the only way to make a game. Whether there are bugs or annoyances galore, anything else is for “stupid COD kids.” Even if the suggested feature has nothing to do with Call of Duty at all. Trust me, I’ve seen it. Additionally, some people get so incredibly hostile (you’ve seen it yourselves during the Valvetime leak in regards to the .357) over something as simple as iron sights. Iron sights for crying out loud! And even developers will bash the shit out of the person suggesting the feature and rant over Call of Duty. Call of Duty did not even invent the iron sight mechanic, and in some ways iron sights can be traced back to Doom. The weapon was always in the center of the screen, and there was no crosshair, players aimed with the gun itself. Yet someone suggests iron sights and they get flammed to high hell over being a COD fag or something.
Last thing I’m going to say is that not everything can be fixed by players. At least, not without a buttload of work. The hitboxes in Black Mesa are absolute shit. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. When I shoot at the Vortigaunts in Apprehension before fighting the Black Ops there are tubes wrapped around pieces of wood. Even though the geometry is shaped like an ‘I’, the hitbox is a big square. So my crossbow round gets caught in the air as if it hit a wall. And this happens multiple times, wasting my ammo. Not okay. The Humvees have a shitty hitbox. The entire space above the hood to the roof is considered a wall. That is a large space that can even be hopped onto in Surface Tension on the dam. I can float in the air because of that box problem, which is actually a bounding box issue. Also, in Surface Tension there is a turret hiding in a truck before the armory event. By all means the player should be able to shoot the turret through the tarp, yet the tarp is made of steel somehow. This forces the player to expose themselves to the turret’s gun in order to attack it. The tarp could have been similar to the Combine force-field in Half-Life 2 in which the player couldn’t pass through it but bullets could. While these issues can be fixed by a player, they would have to get three or four different programs (some of which cost money, so much for a ‘free’ modification) in order to decompile the model, edit the boxes, and then recompile. And that’s assuming the programs don’t crash. I cannot fix these issues myself because every compiling tool I find crashes when I try to use it. So in this case “fix it yourself” isn’t even possible.
In conclusion, Black Mesa is not perfect. There are problems. These problems need to be fixed officially, rather than by the players. I am sick of seeing this come up over and over again, and would rather have a topic to link to rather than having to type it out every time someone tells me or some other person this. Also, give people a break! Not everyone uses a computer as much as you do, and that is okay. At least they are interested in Black Mesa enough to give PC Gaming a go. Don’t make them regret that decision.
EDIT: Hooray! My first wall of text!
