Wonder how long until “XEN CONFIRMED!” becomes a thing…
Xen has already been confirmed, and the devs are working on it. 
I was mostly referencing the old “Half Life 3 confirmed” jokes, as I know that Xen is in the works.
So if anything, the joke would pertain to a release date, rather than its existence. Probably should have made that clearer in my initial post.
Let’s stay on topic folks. Thanks. 
Hey, guys! Dr. DKY stopped whipping me long enough to give you a quick update, just to keep you in the know (and since we’re pretty close to the end of the year).
We’ve come to clear most of the major obstacles needed before release. Pretty much all of the VA has been completed for some time. One final character remains. We’d expected to do our final recording session today, but there’s some complications so that may not happen. Choreography is still a big issue right now. It’s coming along, but very slowly, as there’s quite a bit of it, and it’s currently all resting on Jif as he’s the only one of us who knows how to do that to any degree.
Level design is practically done. We’ve got one particular area nearing completion but we still want to do a little bit of work to it to ensure it’s up to the same standards as the rest of the mod. Speaking of standards, I’ll be finishing off the last of our prop textures today.
Other than that, we’re mostly down to bigfixes and further optimization passes.
For the sake of transparency, we’re confident that we’re still on track for release this year, even if we end up cutting it close. Shizzle hits the fizzle (you know how development goes), we cut slightly into 2016, but certainly not far into it all. Regardless, we’ll be sure you guys are completely aware of what the plan is by the end of this month.
I agree, bananas are good.
VERY nice! Let’s see if the pre-disaster people can get a tram station working to go to the hazard course by the time it’s released.
Oh, yeah, for anyone who doesn’t ModDB, we did post an article with a couple small bits of content if you’re interested.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/black-mesa-hazard-course/news/november-update26
It’s great to hear you guys are finally reaching the end of the road, really looking forward! Also something crossed my mind when reading this, will there be any soundtrack in this chapter?
We don’t have anything I’d consider a proper “soundtrack.”
For something like this, a soundtrack wouldn’t really fit I think. It’s pretty much a tutorial, so it’s not like a singleplayer campaign storyline. You’re being talked to by Gina and the scientists. Just my thoughts.
I’d argue we’ve gone at least a little beyond being “just a tutorial” as we were originally aiming, but I digress. Most of the BM chapters had one unique track each, and a handful of shared ambient tracks reused throughout. HC will be no different.
Alright, sounds interesting!
Great News ! Is there english closecaptions on your maps ? It will be nice if we could have translations of your mod ! That’s absolutely not priority since the Black Mesa game is locked in english until translations are out, but it can be cool that when there are released, HC also has translations 
.
I’m working in the French Translation Team, so if you’re interested, you can directly contact me or go on the official translation forum : https://bmtranslate.darkbb.com/
We do have English captions which are almost complete, courtesy of @Mr. GameCrazy. We’ll be sure to get in contact with you once everything there is finalized.
Say, speaking about the soundtrack, what do you guys think if the old version of the anomalous materials track played after picking the suit, mimicking the same event from afterwards in the game, do you think it would fit or not really?
Now hold on, there’s no need for large, yell-y font sizes.
We don’t have our own, ‘proper’, self-made soundtrack. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to use stuff from the Black Mesa soundtrack. We simply haven’t gotten around to deciding what tracks to use at what point.
I don’t think we’ll be using the AM track on suit pickup, since we don’t want to steal BM’s thunder with that, but we’ll consider it.
Ho ho ho! Merry Holidays to you too, Santa Crypt!