IMO, while they help the narrative to be there, most of them aren’t significant enough gameplay wise to feel like I’m missing something if I don’t go back and play them, except for maybe certain parts of On a Rail.
Why would you?
Not really. Though it comes pretty close to replacing the original. It adds a bit more coherency to HL2 than the original did. It also fixed some of the small things in HL1 that didn’t make much sense to me (such as placement of obstacles and such).
Completely for me. Assuming Xen isn’t somehow worse than the original when it releases, I can’t see myself ever playing the original for fun again.
However, I have no nostalgic attachment to the original and having played HL2 first it was always sort of awkward to me. I really had to force my way through HL1, I just don’t find it that fun at all, and the bland, empty envioronments and unbelieveable characters just feel so archaic compared to HL2, and are really shown up for it more than ever before by Black Mesa. I appreciate what it did for shooters but I guess you had to be there at the time.
I suppose I’m slightly jealous of those who were “there at the time”, although it seems I’ve been able to appreciate BM Source all the more for it.
Oh, and finally… there are no words for how much I adore the Black Mesa soundtrack. The original HL soundtrack always sounded so awkward for me, like it wasn’t sure what genre it wanted to be or what emotions/feelings it wanted to put across to the player. Almost all the tracks that weren’t reused in HL2 just sound so “off” to me. Meanwhile Black Mesa does the whole “using sad music at times which aren’t really all that sad at all to make them strangely epic and beautiful” which is literally my favourite thing a soundtrack can do. And of course the rockin’ action scene songs are just amazing too.
A game that made its place in the deep of your heart cant be replaced, i still will play HL and BM too.
There are several critical moments that are unique to Half-Life, so no. I do still love Black Mesa, though, and in my personal, purely hypothetical Half-Life reimagining, several moments that it originated are incorporated.
Yes it has replaced Half-Life.
One of the major reasons is that Black Mesa feels so alive and Half-Life now feels so sparse- empty- etc.
That’s not to say that I don’t still play Half-Life but I now use Black Mesa when I’m going to play with the objective of playing them all in mind.
Not yet. If with the Xen update there will be bugs and AI fixed, added few missing parts and tweaked the game mechanics a bit (IE mp5): maybe.
Isn’t that part of Half-Life’s appeal? You’re not supposed to feel like you’re in normal, everyday, happy life - you’re supposed to feel like you’re in a devastated facility with very few survivors, with survival and escape as your main priorities. I always felt like one of Half-Life 2’s main weaknesses was that the world didn’t feel empty enough.
I’ll always love HL, but I don’t think I’ll be spending much time with Goldsource from now on, except to play the few HL mods still in development. Black Mesa will replace it in my series runthroughs once Xen is released.
I think they mean more in core scenery. Black Mesa really makes the facility feel like a place that was once somewhere people worked - every room seems to have a purpose, and is filled with little details that make it a believable world.
Meanwhile the original Half-Life has lots of seemingly pointless areas/empty rooms and really sparse scenery detail. Obviously it’s just an artifact of the time, back then we filled in the bad graphics with our imaginations, but going back now is a little awkward.
I feel BM and HL1 are different enough that I can enjoy both of them in the near and far future. Even if I were looking for a replacement I feel BM falls short of BM in a few areas.
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The game just feels a lot more like a quicksave/quickload grind during the soldier part of the game as well as many of the jumping bits. I like the game despite this but my patience often approaches the limits.
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Sound effects. The pathetic explosion sounds and tentacle head-smashing sounds completely kill the mood of firefights and the tentacle bit in Blast Pit, respectively. This could be easily fixed with modding BM but I’m no sound engineer.
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Visibility is a lot poorer than in HL1. I’m having a really, really hard time in Surface Tension due to this. I simply can not see the tiny, thin, yellow crosshair in the bright deserts well enough to be running and gunning. I find myself running like hell to lure soldiers to a long ass valley where I can take my time to aim with the pistol while they are running towards me from an extreme distance (yeah and of course they are aware of the fact they have infinite ammo and spray at me from a mile away.).
The good stuff is very, very good but there are little things here and there that make HL1 imch forward in my book.