I think the Nihilanth fight could be made infinitely more fun just by making the teleportation balls dodgeable. I would always try to run as fast as I could away from the green balls, in the hopes they’d dissipate and I could continue to fight, but nope. They don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’, and they don’t stop comin’ and they don’t stop comin’.
Or by making the shock balls dodgeable actually, since they’re impossible to avoid unless you hide behind something.
Basically his attacks follow the player in the original, which is nothing but frustrating since there’s barely any cover to take.
Weirdly enough they extend Xen the area that a lot of people dislike but with something like On a rail they cut it down.
Well seeing as most players hated on the rails maze structure it is understandable. that and there is a mod to fix that.
I personally liked all On Rail content. I enjoy more exploring the world than being always led by straight line corridor. It makes the world more natural and believable.
I more had issues with the changes that were made to OAR’s general style. Originally OAR looked like an actual rocket assembly facility with cranes, rocket parts, and blueprints. In Black Mesa I really don’t know what it was supposed to be; generic maintenance and materials transit stuff, maybe.
I do agree that cutting OAR in BM so damn much and leaving it like that sucks since it holds great potential for exploration and lots of cool stuff if it’s re-imagined properly.
But it was bad in HL1, we’ve got to admit this.
Yes, it was interesting and all that, but it was very confusing. It was really, really easy to get lost there and never find the way out. I never made out of there in my first playthroughs, only many tries later when I got pissed and started shooting everything I noticed, by pure luck, that the signs actually rotate and change the course of the tracks. But, I still ended up in weird and creepy areas…
The great thing about OARU being cut is that it’s still just a click away in the workshop.[/size]
something about having cake and eating it yada yada[/size]
Yeah, what I meant was that a lot of players also disliked Xen but instead of cutting it down they decided to improve upon it. Why couldn’t they have done something like that with On a rail?
And yes mods exist I know.
simple the best way to improve on a rail sadly was to cut it down.
remember that chapter had some of the worst areas in the game outside of xen. though there are some events I miss. the rocket hall for example. but it had some bad choices including the first sniper in the game which if you didn’t know was there could and would kill you just after you fired the rocket.
Name iconic moments in on a rail. then name the area before and if you would have found them with out getting lost. most “iconic” areas for that level only appeared if you got lost. which is another sign that something is wrong.
example: I know players who have never seen the dead end that has the large TNT bundles. many think they only appeared in the rocket firing area. I know people that haven’t seen the bottom of the rocket area, or even the hall where you randomly hear what can only be considered the screams of the damned.
their are a lot of cool things in on a rail form the original. but I can see why they where cut out. most where useless not even there for world building. and many where there just to make a dead end less frustrating, which many of the areas failed to do.
That said. if there was a “minor” rework of on a rail, similar to STU with 1 or 2 maps added to make the chapter not a short I would not complain but to the scale we have in the mod would be to much.
"simple the best way to improve on a rail sadly was to cut it down.
remember that chapter had some of the worst areas in the game outside of xen."
That’s what people said about Xen, that it had some of the worst areas yet they decided to rebuild it and even make it longer. Cutting something out is not improvement, it’s removal of content. Weirdly enough I never got lost in On a rail even on my first playtrough, plus on the second playtrough I already knew all the shortcuts and it felt rewarding beating the area in a way which involves you knowing the levels beforehand.
They could have improved it, if it was a “maze” they could have made it more straight the same way people complained about the “bad platforming” in Xen and they decided to make entirely new levels instead of just cutting out most of the chapter.
“Name iconic moments in on a rail. then name the area before and if you would have found them with out getting lost. most “iconic” areas for that level only appeared if you got lost. which is another sign that something is wrong.”
No it’s not, it’s reward for exploration, you can still include the iconic areas without making them “hidden”.
For instance in the vent crawling section of “We’ve got hostiles” there was an area where you can hear marines talk about how the scientists don’t fight back. That was an area that by your logic was only found when you “got lost”. Yet in black mesa they removed the vent exploration and just placed the sequence in a different area which was easier to find. The same can be done for On a rail so I don’t see how “cutting it down” is the best way to improve it.
Anyways it’s a thread about Xen so it’s pointless to delve deeper into this.
Btw guys, regarding Xen’s Soundtrack: I’m just gonna leave this here.
I still find myself listening to End Credits 2 and all the Surface Tension tracks. Joel Nielson is a damn artist.
I’m on the edge of my seat in anticipation for the Xen tracks! To be honest, I bet that even the soundscapes will be amazingly ambient and mood-setting.
Well damn, the new xen exterior looks gorgeous AF. Too bad that it’s pushed back to december, but I was kinda excpecting it 
UPDATE ON XEN, it looks epic.
As darkone said, the devs released two new screenshots of Xen.
First new screenshot
Second new screenshot
And yes, it’s epic.
Damn the new Xen looks indeed stunning. It’s so beautiful it’s almost like from a dream, and by simply looking at the new images I can feel they’re sucking me in. This is quite a good thing.
Terrible they had to delay Xen until December, I’ll most likely be in the exam session when it will be out, but I’m not complaining, it’s well worth it. But I can almost hear the morons bitching and threatening with refunds due to the delay…
Definitely looking forward for more updates, especially to the more grim and intimidating areas Chon’s been talking about in the comments section on Steam. We have stuff that looks like it’s from a dream, now we can have the nightmarish one in the future.
Also, so good they added better color correction and a new lightning system (well optimized they say, awesome). The new CC makes quite a noticeable difference on ST indeed and is just infinitely better than the irradiated brown/yellow mixture we have now. I wonder what else they have in store on the technical side, still looking forward to performance improvements.
The color correction in ST makes the mesas look a LOT more like the mesas in the 3D skybox in the cliff climbing scene. Really digging it.
As for Xen, it appears like they went for an underwater look, which I absolutely love. The Xen plants are kinda reminiscent of corals and reefs…
Do note however that all the Xen images we’ve got now we’re taken in the same map. Later levels are certainly going to look very, very different than what we have here.
I’ve seen all the pictures and info.
I’m digging the new dynamic lighting system. Surely @Admiral Sakai will love it.
December is the new dead line now, eh? Honestly i would feel sad, but i’m kinda not because
lately i don’t think about the BM Xen update as much as i used to.
Still, #WorthTheWait