I really don’t want to be rude, but… It honestly isn’t that difficult. But if your issue is the Zombies, then I can understand. In Half-Life, you only fought one enemy before getting a weapon. There’s a workshop addon that puts the crowbar and the pistol back to their original locations. That being said, this version has flares and you can recruit the guard by talking to him.
I think so, I downloaded the free version (original release) three weeks ago and found it hard in medium difficulty level, something I love in games. Yesterday I bought the steam version to support the team efforts and play the uncut version and multiplayer: I was a bit disappointed because the difficulty is much lower to me, there are many more bugs (such as the one which makes the scientists’ ties mooving as hell) and it has much longer charging times…
Now the hard difficulty is similar to the medium of the original release, but I’d like to find a way to play it in an harder difficuly, can anyone help me?
You mean loading times. Well that’s probably something on your end, STU even came with a number of performance improvements, loading times included, and the game should load up to 75% faster, depending on each one’s rig.
There have also been a number of balancing changes since the release, and the team is actively working on improving the game. The main reason for why it’s noticeably easier is due to the feedback received from the mod version (if I’m not mistaken). The mod version was significantly more difficult even on lower difficulty levels and many people (myself included honestly), didn’t like it, being widely accepted as a balancing issue (the HECU soldiers were also ridiculously accurate there, and enemies in general dealt too much damage). When the game version was released back in 2015, there was a noticeable decrease in difficulty, which was further tweaked since then. The last CU (STU) had some changes too, but it might’ve been just too much. It will likely never be perfect, as it’s also something subjective, really, but the team is actively working to improve it.
As about the tie glitch, among others, there have been many fixes and improvements since 2015, and many more are on the way, as more issues surface or have just not been addressed yet (there is also a special Bug Reporting section here, both for the game and the website, might want to post whatever you encounter there, for obvious reasons).
The tie glitch you experience is one (if not the) most notorious in the entire game, which is supposedly caused by the user’s machine not handling the game well enough (based on a comment made by Adam Bomb in a topic on the Steam Community page of the game). There have been a number of patches that attempted to correct it, but to no avail yet.
Thank you fr your answer.
But now my problem is: how can I increase the difficulty? Because in hard difficulty the game is too easy to me 
As for the loading time, I noticed it varies a lot depending on the areas, with some loadings much shorter and some much longer than the mod version.
The bullsquid and the HECU marines are the most frustrating now, 'cause I can just rUn at them and kill them with one or two shotgun shots and they deal no damage…
I think that most of Black Mesa auditory are casuals and even the medium difficult is hard for them.Black Mesa need more than 3 options because most of those casuals prefer to play on medium or hard which aren’t designed for them and force the devs to reduce the difficult for them even though it’s supposed to be hard and ruining the experience for hardcore gamers.Also it’s almost uselss to boost the enemy’s hp because they can’t outplay our brain,so we need a better AI.The HECU need a significant boost to their stats and AI to be on a par with Agrunts which are insane especially in Lambda Complex.Agrunts is almost a bio robots so the HECU should lose to them in close combat but not lose in open spaces because HECU should have the better AI than theirs.I understand that it’s a lot of work,but it’s the modern trend to have an insane difficulty(Dark Souls).Also it would be good to see the HECU redesign:
-Commanders.The brain of squad,should be killed as fast as possible not like now when it’s better to focus the medic who is just a low rank member.At least it would be good to see a script for them like in HL2 when the Combine soldiers are panic when you killed almost all of them.
-Balaclava soldiers.Insane damage and a lot of hp since they designed to be in close contact with their enemy and therefore need to be more protected than their mp5’s counterparts.Now you have a dilemma whom you should focus 1st :s oldier with a decent amount of hp with a lot of dmg or commander who coordinate the enemy forces?
-Medics.They should heal more and not rush on you since their main purpose to heal.They should have the lesser amount of hp but their healing ability need to be drastically improved.Also they should have the diffirent replies than their counterparts,“more civil”.
-“Old Hecu” or gray soldiers with cigars,they were such a badass guys back in 1998,I feared them the most in HECU besides the Black Ops that is not affiliated with them.I don’t know why the devs deleted them,they were one of the most recognizable HECU characters.They had Mp5 with attached grenade launcher so you can move the mp5 grenade ability to them,they will be like a middle ground between the balaclavas and commanders and don’t forget about cigar.
-Gasmask soldiers.Have you ever seen a Tracer in Overwatch?She is so annoyning and so should be the gasmasks.Their main purpose will be the flank attacks,they will kite you and use the suppress fire untill their balaclavas will reach your cover.They should be the most mobile soldiers in game besides the Black Ops since they don’t have a medkit supplies,mp5 grenade supplies or heavy shotguns.
As a temporary solution you can follow this way:Steam->SteamApps->Common->BlackMesa->bms->cfg->skill.You can find there a lot of stats that you can change.
Thank you very much.
You are right, casual gamers ruin everything: only because they feel stupid to play a game in easy difficulty good players shouldn’t have fun…
However, your ideas are quite great, but I doubt they will focus on those changes. I would be happy for now if they added one or two harder difficulty levels, because we don’t want the casuals to feel noob, do we? 
Can we please keep the discourse in this thread at a higher level than “I hate casuals and console gamers, they ruin my video games” please? We’re supposed to be adults here, not angsty teenagers. That’s just sad to read for so many reasons.
If you want to argue balance or for a certain area/aspect of the game being made harder in some way, that’s fine. Make an argument or a discussion. Thus far, I haven’t really seen any actual feedback apart from “the game feels easier”. And sure, that’s probably true - we tried to weed out a lot of the bullshit difficulty that was present in the mod release. We didn’t really intentionally make the game easier so much as we wanted to make it not frustrating. There’s the right kind and the wrong kind of difficulty - many parts of the mod had the wrong kind of difficulty. Which is why the HECU are no longer aimbots.
There’s no point just making the game harder for the sole sake of adding difficulty. The challenge has to add depth or enjoyment to the game in some way. If you’d like us to consider your points, try and make them with a view of how each thing you suggest would make the game deeper or more fun. We don’t mind something fun making the game harder. We do mind something frustrating making the game harder.
No one hates them,but also you have a hardcore player base which should use the skill.cfg file to increase their enjoyment,then why not should you please also your hardcore players by adding another difficulty level for them or make some AI tweaks in future?It’s sad to see how the casuals want to see the HECU nerfs and get them while the hardcore gamers must use the file buried in the deeps and which resets with every patch.
Generally it would be good to have the lesser amount of ammo that avaible for “super weapons”.Logically why should I use mp5 or shotgun when I can use my crossbow,revolver,tau,gluon,rpg if I can find the ammo for them easily?That problem especially can be seen in Surface Tension when you have a lot of supplies there and hivehand that is supposed to be usefull in tough situation without ammo is simply underused by many people.It would be good to see more space for use for satchels,snarks,grenades because they provide a lot of tactical ways to eleminate your enemy meanwhile again why should I “play” with my enemy for dozens of seconds when I can simply charge my tau or crossbow and simply one shot them without losing so much health and time?Your enemy simply can’t react on your OP weapon and demostrate their beautiful AI if you mostly equipped with “BFGs”.
You implemented the medic class who was only in Opposing Force and not in HL1 that is the most canon game in HL franchise but cut some iconic HECUs from original like balaclavas and old ones with cigars that exists in HL universe since 98.It was made due to the development time or for another needs?I for myself and many HL fans want to see more diversity in HECU classes since we had 4 classes of them back in 98 and with the new technology we have only 3 that is not logicall.Yes,I read not so long time ago that you won’t do it because you can detect the shotgun soldier already easily in fight,but what about the design side?It will be much more fun to fight against five diffirent types of soldiers that you can introduce through the game with their own “skills” instead of having only 3 while in 98 HL1 had 4 of them.Also Valve did a model for shotgun soldier in EP2 even though I doubt that it was hard to detect them in HL2.It could fresh the fights with them a lot.I’m not a stat adjustment supporter,but most hardcore fans doing it only because they don’t feel that this game is hard enough for them,so I would rather support the idea about AI enchancement rather than stupid HP and dmg buff.
“Casuals vs hardcore gamers” is not a narrative that we support on here. It’s a bullshit “us vs them” mentality created by pissed off old school gamers when they realised games weren’t being created exactly how they wanted. I won’t tolerate discussion framed in that way, it’s like I’m on 4chan. If you’re truly a “hardcore gamer” (another bullshit term, honestly), then you’d know and understand that. It’s about good principles of game design. Not about “catering to casuals”. We never considered, even once, “how do we make this game easier for casual players”? I already explained our thought process, it’s about making the game a fun and deep experience first and foremost. Our changes reflect that - and coincidentally have made the game a bit easier. It’s not about a vendetta against “hardcore” players. I don’t want to hear discussion about “casual gamers” anymore. I’m serious. View things from a more mature and fair angle.
I’m in favour of adding another difficulty level. I’m in favour of diversifying and spicing up the HECU a little bit. I’m in favour of giving back the balaclava guy and making him the Shotgun guy like in HL1. I’m not sure where you’re getting half of what you’re saying about us from because I know for sure that nobody on the team has ever specifically argued against any of those things from a design perspective. The issue is really from an implementation perspective.
These are the kinds of issues that people often forget to consider. Remember, our attention at the moment is squarely on Xen. We’ve got a lot of AI stuff that our AI programmer is nailing out for it specifically. We’re focussing on the alien AI right now. Our incredible character artist is working on the big Xen characters. The whole team right now is Xen, Xen, Xen. Making these changes to the HECU is a tall order because it will affect the entire game in a drastic way. We’d have to redirect resources and attention. Adding the balaclava guy is not as simple as it might seem, otherwise we’d have already done it. Here’s something which will surprise you (but maybe ought not to), we don’t have the source files for our own HECU models. We don’t have the source files for a lot of things in our own game. That might seem very bizzare and disorganised (and to some extent, it is), but it’s also par for the course in a project as huge and old as ours. It’s a lesson we’ve learned the hard way and built into our new work with the Xen and STU stuff (where we’ve now been very organised with the source files), but it’s not something we can go back and apply to past stuff on peoples’ old computers and hard drives that have been thrown away and for team members who are no longer with us. Thus - adding balaclava guy = redoing the entire HECU models. Which is also a damn tall order and would be months of work for our character artist.
Now, the HECU right now might not be the most perfect or diverse set of opponents - but I firmly think they are considerably better from a design and AI perspective than they were in the mod, and they are pretty good overall. It’s not something we’ll discount, and as I said, I’d like it if we took another crack at them - but it probably won’t happen for some time because we really need to focus squarely on Xen now. So don’t hold your breath, but we do want to keep improving the AI and base gameplay however we can, over time.
Nice to hear it,I’m happy that you for it,I got info about balaclavas from blackmesa wiki.It was an implementation issue in 2009-2010 but it mostly my interpretation since we hadn’t a huge part of Surface Tension(uncut maps+tentacles) and On a Rail in 2012 and I’m quite new on forums so I’m using a wiki most of the time.
Also nice,because your Agrunt AI and Vort AI are good and it will make the Xen adventure far better than it was in HL1 because one thing that I didn’t love in HL1 was the alien AI.It will be interesting to see how they will interact with the HECU and change the feeling of surface tension also it will affect the whole game so that is cool.
Of course they are much better than the mod ones and it’s noticable since I met them in we’ve got hostiles.Also thanks for the AI support because very few games nowadays have a decent AI.I’m not a Black Mesa hater,overall that game is on a par with Half-Life 1 and better than Half-Life 2,I just want to improve it to be better than HL1.
I am just saying that I would like to see one or two more difficulty levels, because, a’s nova said, you have a vast range of players, noobs, normal (I won’t call them “casuals”) and good ones. Noobs and normal players have their difficulty levels, now you should give good players what they deserve, and I for now would personally be contempt with just a damage buff.
I never described myself as an “hardcore gamer”, I don’t play videogames more than 8 hours a week, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t be good at videogames.
Having read that you are in favour to add more difficulty levels is enough to me, as long as you actually work on this. You could tell me I’m not a dev, and you would be right, but I don’t think it would be much of a work.
It may, or may not be hard to implement, depending on how will it make it into the game. I, for one, am against a simple damage buff.
If we are going to see it happen at some point, I want the AI to be a lot more challenging and smart as well on that difficulty, to be impressive from all points of view, not only damage wise. I don’t want a ,cheap, nightmarish (yeah, sort of a contradiction, but you get it) difficulty.
By now, the team is working at full speed on Xen, so we won’t be seeing this for quite some time, but as long as it will happen, I’ll patiently wait for it.
We never made any other models of HECU other than mask, non mask and captain. It’s a lot of extra work that won’t really change gameplay and would take time away from other things.
To add my own two cents:
If you are ever going to add a new “highest” difficulty, please consider lowering the amount of ammo - as Nova Terra already mentioned. Especially later in the game there is almost no need for ammo conservation. Same goes for health kits and batteries. I’ve played through the game so many times I know the location of almost every single kit and battery.
I do generally agree that a hard difficulty should be HARD and not FRUSTRATINGLY HARD (something many game developers do not understand), but I’m one of those idiotic perfectionists who are willing to repeat a section of the game over and over again just to take as little damage as possible… especially when there is a cool, badass soundtrack playing in the background.
I agree with this too.
I’ve noticed that the game offers too much ammo and health since the mod version (although it was fine there due to the insane marines), and not once was I concerned with the ammo.
Pretty much always had some (or a lot, depending on the weapon) left, so yeah, definitely a good idea to take into consideration for the new difficulty, whenever it’ll be added. But not just that, I feel this should be done even in the current state of the game.