General gameplay complaint: not enough visual hints

Black Mesa Archive In-game Issues (Mod)
#1

The game is overall good, and a gorgeous recreation of a game more than a decade and a half long, yet I feel it lack that clarity and subconsious acrhitectural hint Valve explores in its games. I even feel that were they remaking the original game, they would make many parts even better than they were in HL1

bm_c2a5a was especially egregious in that: that one level in “Surface tension” where you jump off the bridge into water to escape a helicopter machinegunning you to death.
I played HL:Source, so I vaguely remembered there is some ladder, and a trigger/button/valve to open the underwater grates (you can get to the other side of the dam trough the pipes).
It took me HALF AN HOUR dying over and over again to find that ladder on one of the towers in the water. See, when your have your hands full with staying out of harm (the machinegun can, surprisingly, get you tens on feet underwater even at flat angles), it is not that easy to find a sand-brown ladder on a sand-brown wall through underwater blurring.

There are other examples - like the ladders in the rocket shaft (bm_c2a2b), which don’t attract attention due to bright (and useless) gates and posters hanging around.

Residue processing: at the water purifying facility bm_c2a4b THAT opaque substance doesn’t look like something one can dive into (moreover, it resembles radioactive waste from HL2). I would really want it to be somewhat transparent.

In the next, production line level (c2a4c) the layout was damn confusing even in the original… Maybe make it slightly less so by adding extra ladders? It is not that hard once you did it. However, the moment you fall of the belt, you need to go back by untrivial spaghetti of corridors, so you instantly lose the feeling of what room you are in… Or, probably, you can force stronger visual contrast (color, texture, environment) between the different rooms, so once you get into the one with the production line, you know instantly which part it is.

The first teleporter system (c3a2g, vertical shaft)… The area is shiny, bloomy and all, which looks pretty but harder to comprehend. To remind, you have a vertical shaft with several sets of rotating platforms and several teleporter orbs in the centre. It took me long to actually get it that there are THREE of them, i.e. you get into different areas depending on what side you enter the central part from.
It shines so intensely that you can hardly see what’s inside the central column - and to get the system, you MUST know that there are three orbs around, not just one central teleporter beam. I would suggest making the glow less intense, or inserting a darkened glass tube around the ray, to make glowing orbs stand against the central glow.

#2

I agree, there should be more visual hints, bright lights, flashy buttons and shit to indicate where the stuff which we’re supposed to active is

#3

Just a hint… how about destroying that chopper with your guns? Not really a tough match with you gauss gun

#4

Ha! That works. Didn’t think it could harm a helicopter. You got me here :slight_smile: However, given that I didn’t come to that solution in half an hour, must be far from the most obvious. Good to know for further replays (admitedly, I forgot to use it at all in the first one).
I don’t see the game as the battle between the developers and the players. Sometimes the design distracts a player in most unexpected ways from what a developer would think an obvious path, solution or strategy. Certain flaws make a player see a challenge where there is no challenge.
Was HL really a game about finding ladders caferully designed to remain unnoticed? Because in Black Mesa I can think of, like, 4 or 5 cases where I spent about ten minutes (sometimes in a peaceful environment) trying to figure out where is the exit.
I think we should fix such things in our games. Lighting doors and objects that are useless, inserting details, buttons, rooms where they don’t do anything and so on… All this breaks the pacing and makes a player spend more time on the areas of no interest (still, visually suggesting “you should check here”). I got tired of brigthly lit doors that are there just for the pretty look of brightly lit doors (they are purely cosmetic doors… mostly).

I see where that’s going. Making things extremely obvious may harm the game where some exploration is expected.

Still, as the graphics got more advanced, the level designers can and will put more details in the environmet. You don’t need visual cues when there’s a room with a door, a ladder, a computer and a button - you just ignore the computer, press the button/climb the ladder/try opening the door.
When there are lots of carefully modelled, shiny and contrast details in the room, the important objects start to get lost among the eyecandy.

One of such examples is the last battle around the portal: I certainly don’t remember it beign so chaotic. First, it makes the framerate drop, which makes me feel sad. Second, many visual effects like rays, lightning and so on - layer on top of each other to a point where I had to make consious attempts to find enemies on the screen.

#5

I agree, there could have been more visual hints in a few places but I can appreciate that this aspect of game design is really difficult to get right, so I can understand why it’s not perfect. Some areas that I noticed, it was often difficult to tell which controls/computer terminals were interactive. Half-life 2 made it very obvious with big stand-out buttons that you quickly learned to recognize. There tended to be big green lights on the things we could click but it wasn’t quite enough.

The worst bit case of can’t-find-the-exit for me came in Lambda Core, trying to get into pump room 2. You have open the underwater door and then jump onto it to get a lift up to a platform where the door is. The problem is, I didn’t even know there was a door there - you can only seen it from one side of the room and even then it’s very hard to spot. I only stumbled into it when I got bored after wandering for 30 minutes and decided to grab some energy packs that were down there.

#6

I agree also. I mentioned something about this in another thread, how I learnt through Valve’s commentary’s that they often change stuff due to playtesting, to make things more obvious, something that I guess was lacking from BM. I’m quite patient with BM so I was able to figure out things eventually without getting annoyed but I imagine others would stick to one idea and keep trying it without realising its the wrong solution. I mean some of the threads asking for help are good examples of this - People constantly trying to reach a ladder that isn’t even climbable - things like that.

#7

I believe there was a hint that you could destroy the chopper with the gauss gun (I also tried jumping into the water at first though). In the warehouse just before the heli, there’s gauss ammo in one of the crates. Was enough of a hint for me at least.

#8

Yeah I didn’t like for one example how you had to turn 2 valves in the “Unforeseen Consequences” chapter to advance because it wasn’t really that obvious. (Talking about the part where you escort a scientist to open up a room and get the glock)

#9

No offense to your intelligence… But just the nature of jumping in to water where you can’t move very fast, and you certainly aren’t going to outrun a helicopter, suggests that you are intended to deal with the chopper before moving on.

Standing your ground and fighting really is the “obvious” choice because the alternative makes you more vulnerable to attack, not less. To say nothing of the Ichthyosaur in there which is no fun to deal with on top of the chopper that’s already chewing you up…

I think this is a case of “it worked in the original, so it’s what I should do here” biting you in the ass.

#10

Well, had I known Tau cannon can harm vehicles, maaany places would have played differently. As far as I knew back then, I had no weapons to deal with a helicopter. Thus, try to run–> try to explore --> try to find a new weapon --> ok, try escaping once again.
The main logic behind jumping in water is that Gordon moves there surprisingly fast + bullets don’t move far through water (supposedly, in RL). Well, the situation does look you are supposed to run, just need to find where. Maybe I would try smth else in real life, where I still can’t swim.

Anyway, I went here after having completed the mod, so, obviously, I wasn’t having grave problems with the game. Rather, finding ways through the levels and solutions to certain problems were… tedious. This one about helicopter even involved reading forums :wink: . However, helicopters and tanks are few. Barely noticeable ladders, highly noticeable background elements, several panels with cosmetic big buttons while the working one isn’t even in this room… plenty of that. Too busy right nowto post the full list of such places… Probably, there is already a compiled list of game’s level wiuth screenshots, so that one doesn’t need to look up the map name in game?

#11

The only level, where I really had problems, was the Lambda core. Took me quite a while to get that cooling system started.

#12

I knew I could take out the chopper with the Gauss Gun/Tau Cannon (seriously, which IS the official name?) because I knew it from the original, where the Gauss Gun was a lot more awesome, and you could tell it was. Back then, a charged shot of it knocked you 20 feet back and clean on your ass, so it was telling you “If you shoot something with me, it’ll DIE!!!” When you have a weapon that has such a visual kick, it’s natural to want to try it on the biggest target you can find, and a chopper is a very big target indeed.

The Tau is downplayed a lot in the sequel, though. It still does a lot of damage, but the hideous kick is gone so it’s natural you’d see it as more of a precision weapon than a vehicle killer. As well, the original had a wide circle for a crosshair, meaning it didn’t look like it was a precision weapon, whereas the Black Mesa version has a much more precise cursor. It feels weaker and more precise, so it’s natural to assume it’s not a “heavy” weapon, despite the cutscene where you get it.

In general, as game graphics become more complex and intricate, you need much better design in order to “train” the player to spot what he can interact with and what’s just decoration. This isn’t “hand-holding.” It’s good game design. You CANNOT expect the player to walk up to every single console and attempt to press every single button just to see what happens. You need a means by which to inform the player that “this is important, pay attention to it.” Black Mesa is actually VERY bad about this. Aside from a few isolated instance, buttons that are pressable are elsewhere reused as static props and vice versa. About the only way I was able to figure out what I could press was I knew Half-Life, so I knew when I would be running across a button I could punch and looked for it.

Again, take lessons from Valve. They make their games complex, but impose rigid order on the complexity so the player can learn what “important” things look like and doesn’t have to stare at every bit of background detail.

#13

Do you people have MPD or something?
I basically posted the same sorta thing, and everyone tried to troll me:

https://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=13993

But instead you guys want big flashy PRESS THIS!!! signs plastered all over the game. It’s meant to be confusing and hard to figure out in purpose. It adds to the replay-value and also to the total possible game time.

You lot are agreeing on ruining what makes the game a challenge, but you disagree on fixing parts of the game that are unbalanced and don’t require skill, but instead just require patience and luck…

You people just blow my mind…

#14

#15

Nope, they just couldn’t fix all of this. Black Mesa team is no Valve to playtest their levels over and over again, fixing, removing, relighting, then dropping more and more testers.
However, now that more and more people play the game, it’s no harm to say “OK, spent more than 15 minutes looking for a button in that room”. There were some potentially confusing places which I solved rather quickly. Maybe luck, maybe residual memories from HL:Source played a few years ago. There were pretty straightforward places where I overlooked something. The more players you throw in, the more obvious it is, what is random, what is not. I found it especially fruitful to let play your level, quest or sequence a person who has not seen it, and just sit behind and watch, suppressing your itch to just say “Hey, how can you not see, you are supposed to look under the boxes!”
Takes time, though. And, after all, you have a finite number of friends, so eventually you may run out of them.

Uneven difficulty or bad placement of obstacles is one more problem that can be found using such playtesting. Yet the methods of fixing differ. It is relatively easy to make monsters less dangerous or less numerous (or more dangerous + more numerous).
When it comes to leveldesign, you are left with some tricks unless you want to change the level significantly. My experience suggests that raising centre of attention is often relatively cheap. Some lighting tweak, recoloring, and maybe adding more objects to make your eyes “expect” something in a certain direction.
It is another thing when players are suddenly attracted to things you placed there just because. That makes hard cutting out branches of walktrough, as people tend to notice the design of “places of interest”

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.