I am 99.9% sure there will only be xen creatures, no race x
That’s not how crystals look. Crystals have a highly ordered microscopic structure, which is why they tend to have flat faces and sharp, sometimes 90-degree, angles. That looks like glass or obsidian.
Could be chipped.
Developers taking so long it take to finish, they should add more creatures in the XEN, it would be fucking fun. 
unlikely they will add anything to new.
though there have been hints of them adding cut things to xen, which when it comes to xen and anyone that knows half life’s development xen was more then cut it was deboned on release.
EDIT:
Overthinking things but something that I wish would happen in blackmesa’s xen is for an mtm-8 (image link for referense https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/932682303626440362/9448B1FE5CF8DD540E6646D34EEF81E004F39CBA/) to be used in xen even if it is just a destroyed model seen in a base or something the robots are epic, even if they only existed to show off the engines ability to have none standard skeletons.
I mean I Have seen atleast 3 mods which use a model of them with a minigun as a boss… though apparently the animations used in said mod are taken from cut content of half life.
Lets just put it this way, Xen will be more in general. If you remember, there were a lot of people that simply did not like xen. That it didnt flow, and offered more nuisance than enjoyment. Crowbar Collective is working to change that. To make it more than what it was so that it isnt a remake of a part of the game that folks didn’t like.
That’s the thing, crystals don’t look like that when they’re chipped. They chip along flat faces because their molecules are ordered like a lattice. That looks like uncrystallized volcanic glass.
you do realize it is a crystal in lore from another dimension right? though admittedly the “sample” from half life does appear in half life 2 and is chipped like an actual crystal would be. (for anyone who doesn’t know black mesa east you get to see strange lasers going through it, its just a minor prop that you can push buttons to rotate)
Anyway the xen crystals could be a none standard crystal, cause we do not know what the inviorment that grew them is, and how that effects the molecular structure.
that said, yeah the gif doesn’t look like a crystal, it looks more like badly cut amber.
the original xen crystal.
There’s no such thing as a non-standard crystal, not in this or any dimension. “Crystal” is just a word that we use to describe a type of solid with a highly regular molecular structure. If Black Mesa’s geologists analyzed a sample of this material from Xen and it didn’t have an ordered lattice-like structure (and it’s that structure that creates the well-known flat faces and hard angles of crystals), they wouldn’t have called it a “crystal,” they would have called it a “rock.”
I know this is trivial, I’m just saying, the modeler used volcanic glass as inspiration for this, not crystal.
Now that you mention it, that would be cool! More ‘proof’ of human research on Xen. Personally i’m totally fine with a radically changed Xen in terms of feel; a slightly psychedelic, non-intuitive trip through the border world would be most welcome 
There is no such thing as Xen, headcrabs or tau cannons.
It’s artistic license in a fictional universe.
I feel like you people aren’t paying attention. A crystal is a crystal in any universe, fictional or not. Half Life’s crystal looks like a crystal. The thing posted on twitter is not a crystal in any way, in this universe, Half Life’s universe, Xen, or your grandma’s sitting room coffee table.
Does anyone in-universe in Black Mesa ever even say AMS specimen is a crystal? The only dialogue I heard described it just as ‘the sample’ or ‘the specimen’. There’s crystallographic terminology in some of the whiteboard notes, but those also include drawings of something that looks nothing like the AMS sample and so could just be a completely different specimen.
Whether the AMS specimen is a crystal or not is kind of a moot point when it’s never claimed to be anything of the sort.
Riiiiight. Because you know what happens in a fictional (not real, does not exist, opposite of the truth) universe.
It is you who is not paying attention.
Look up “artistic license”, “dystopian universe” and while you’re at it “fiction”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_license
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dystopia
They could add polyrobo with minigun maybe, it was cut in final version
https://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Polyrobo
youtube.com/watch?v=SZnD7ya8x0o
I’d rather it to be the same size as the Shock Trooper.
I’d just like to say that I think Sakai is right. It’s not really mentioned anywhere that the sample is a crystal to begin with. It could easily be a glass-like substance like Obsidian formed from molten material. And it is very obvious that volcanic glass was an inspiration for the model, regardless of what the material was intended to be.
It’s also possible that it was chipped and carved at, to remove excess material, to make the sample more pure.
the only time I can think of it being described as a crystal is in blue shift, when Rosenberg gives that exposition dump.
However, it is likely he was just dumbing it down for Barney at the time.
Given that the specimen is an anomalous material, it’s likely it exhibits many of the properties of a crystal, but does not form a crystal lattice.
that is my guess as well as even in half life 2 the crystal is curved a bit though I genuinely can not tell if that is do to the texture or not.
Well…technically, Eli in Ep2 mentioned it as “a crystal” while talking to Gordon about their “mutual friend”
youtube.com/watch?v=FmXRonhFnvo 7:04
I honestly don’t give a damn about wether it’s a crystal or not …for me it’s “the purest sample we’ve seen yet”
Even scientists can be guilty of using inaccurate slang or short-hand in conversation. Yes, the model from the twitter post is not a crystal. It looks like volcanic glass, but is - as was just pointed out - an ‘anomalous material’ from another dimension, normally referred to in the game as just the sample or the specimen. If it is referred to as a crystal a couple of times, it really isn’t a big deal, the main thing is it looks cool.
If it bugs you, since scanning it apparently opens up inter-dimensional portals in a silly sci-fi plot, here’s your pseudo-science jargon-y explanation for it being a crystal: the sample only appears curved and rounded in our 3 dimensional perspective. It has a rigid, crystalline lattice like structure on the molecular level but that lattice extends through other dimensions, tightly curved in on themselves. /mic drop