There’s only one thing I didn’t like, and is that you kill too much HECU soldiers. Much more than in the original. You must kill like one hundred. Damn man, it feels like you’re a semi god and that the real war is between you and them and they finally pull out because of you.
It was somewhere way back in my head, but now that you mentioned it, I generally felt like there was much less aliens than HECU.
Also, someone mentioned Vox, and oh shit he’s actually right - I haven’t heard it ever since it was taken over. Question is - why? While I get the maps being cut due to some of the devs quitting out of the blue (I really do hope small additions can be somehow integrated with the release of Xen, but doubt it will be done) - Vox absence is a bit puzzling.
Thing is though if content was cut to get this out will we see this content released with Xen. I rather rest assure knowing that the game will be complete with Xen being released vs getting something that is unfinished due to cut content.
I hate cut content, too many games I play that I enjoy would have been 20 times better if content wasnt cut to get it released.
I agree, I’d like to see more aliens! Hope the devs take this onboard.
I’m sure if it was put to a vote whether to delay longer to keep content or to release ASAP, people would pick the release. Then complain. Life sucks sometimes and I am sure the devs know that shit happens. I am sure they would have loved to have kept those surface tension parts that people keep mentioning if they had the time.
My thoughts exactly. I hadn’t realized how important those little fights were to the plot until someone pointed it out, but it’s really pretty egregious now that I think about it.
I loved that scene, the dogfighting manta rays and jets were just so spectacular. There also a few groups of ospreys that fly over during that scene, but they’re really easy to miss when you’re occupied with the grunts and the tank. I wish that they handled it like they did the scene on the cliffside where the Harriers bomb the building; the broken catwalk makes you pause and look in the right direction to see the jets fly over.
I concur that it doesn’t really feel like a war in Black Mesa. Although I do like the additions of the planes flying around attacking the Manta Rays and the smoky sky, it really does feel like the HECU has everything under control. There weren’t many scenes showing the Xenians having the upper hand or slaughtering the Marines, storytelling I feel a lot of the cut Surface Tension scenes would have provided. I remember the point where the radio announced they were pulling out and thinking to myself… “why?”
Granted, I love Black Mesa and all the new things they’ve done with it. I was in awe most of the time. However, I do sincerely hope someone on the team will pick up the pieces left out by the developer who quit and add in all those missing parts. It would definitely benefit the storytelling.
Oh definitely. From the player perspective, you never lose the impression that you’ve struggled through one hell of a warzone to crawl to the Lambda complex. It’s just one hell of an HECU-controlled warzone. Though this scene is after the order to withdraw, so you’ve still had that “well, why are they going?” feeling…
At least until the fight above ground. To be honest, I should have seen the Xen’s pushing harder, more destroyed environments, signs that there was a battle here. I wouldn’t even mind in the armory if there were holes in the roof. The worst looking place was after the armory in that destroyed building before coming to the helipad and the osprey.
Engine is already crashing due to overload and you want even more stuff 
I doubt they will change anything besides bug fixing.
What’s VOX?
You seriously don’t know?
VOX is the announcer voice from HL1. He had a huge vocabulary and could could construct sentences dynamically from text.
Oh, remember it now. Weird, as I have missed it’s absence in most of BlackMesa
It’s not like you find out that it’s called that when you play the game
I noticed this, actually. In fact, at one point I straight up thought to myself “Wait, why do I feel like I’m playing Modern Warfare all of a sudden?” I didn’t know why I felt this at the time, but a thought occurs that… I just hadn’t fought many aliens period, and the ones I did fight weren’t that scary. I never got the sense that this was an ALIEN invasion, so much as that we got invaded by an enemy army.
And I WILL complain about the missing parts of On a Rail, because it’s not just more jumping puzzles and tunnels that got cut out. What’s missing is a lot of fighting with the Xen aliens. Water full of those nasty worms, bullsquids all over the place, ambushes by headcrabs. What’s also missing is multiple fights between Vorts and Marines, as well. There’s a lot of ambience, atmosphere and source of immersion in those lost tunnels.
Half-Life was never a game about narrative. It’s why instances where you’re blocked and have to go through a conversation stand out so much. It’s a game of subtle cues, context and visual presentation of events, and this is just missing in a lot of Black Mesa. Much more is said, but much less is shown and the game just “feels” less complete because of it. It feels like a modern military shooter with aliens thrown in, complete with jock humour and fourth-wall-breaking, and it just doesn’t feel like sci-fi almost at all outside of a few set pieces.
As others have mentioned, the end parts of Surface Tension in the original game really convey the sense of a situation becoming out of control and turning into total war. Most of these were cut in BM. For example the part where you see an alien grunt throw a soldier through a wall, and the human vs alien fights around there. Also, not sure whether this is a glitch or not, but when you encounter the garg in the underground parking lot it just ignored the 2 soldiers and came running after me straight away, In the original game you see it crushing them with a car which was pretty cool.
I did like the revamped outside area in Forget About Freeman, where you see the jets fighting it out overhead and it really has an epic feel around it. But then you enter the large hangar (just before Lambda Core) where there is another human vs alien fight. In the original game I remember this battle went on for several minutes unless you intervene. In BM it was over before I even got there (the aliens won, but you don’t really see them winning).
VOX is in the game. He makes his first appearance in We’ve Got Hostiles. Before that, Black Mesa uses a friendlier-sounding female VOX instead.
In We’ve Got Hostiles, f-VOX begins an announcement, saying “Attention! This announcement system…”, then goes into static, before she is replaced by the more ominous-sounding low-male VOX: “… NOW. UNDER. MILITARY. CONTROL.”
I really like that they did this. In the original, that announcement was just the same old VOX you heard throughout the game. Now it has thematic purpose.
This battle also shows where the Abrams causing area damage to objects around it is a weakness to gameplay. I found that typically in that battle, the ALiens almost always win… Except for that tank that’s left. the Agrunts walk up to it and try to blast it with hornets, while this is ineffective, it allows the tank to fire and kill the agrunts with the ‘area effect’ damage caused just by them being next to it when it fires. Since the aliens have no weapons that can cause enough damage to take out the Abrams, the Abrams will always ultimately win out. So once again, we see the military easily trumping the aliens through the use of hardware.