Playing on hard here and just killed the Gargantua and am heading into the tram tunnels: 357, cooked nades and double-shotties handle them no prob 
Few reloads here and there when I’m trying something out, but so far Hard feels the way it should be, at least imo 
That was a god-post my friend. I agreed with every single thing you said there, and it was all so well put. Especially the end bit. Applauds
well maybe then i really am playing a different game because it isnt like that for me.weird. see, i had 3 encounters with those marines while playing today and in 2 of them i did what u described…got out of cover,marine sees me and i see him and i shot first.one time i had the magnum shot em in the head and didnt get hit, second time i used the mp5, gout out of cover, 1burst in the head, his bullets hit the wall beside me,2nd burst and hes dead.so obviously it cant be impossible and their reaction time isnt zero.
but im only through half the game and maybe it was an exception, i shall see.
however…if it really is an issue for some people im sure the devs will fix it or whatever and all will be happy. hf 
Just came to say the reaction times should be slowed down. It’s no fun fighting the vortigaunts when they teleport in (on hard) because it isn’t even a fight. In most cases you end up just quick-loading and killing them as soon as they teleport in before they can hit you. It’s like there’s no way to have a proper fight with them because they shoot insanely fast. In half-life the timing was perfect honestly.
While I think Black Mesa is awesome, I do agree that the grunts are a tid bit too difficult.
Alien balance is pretty nice. Houndeyes are about as hard as the old bullsquid was, and the new bullsquids are downright terrifying at times. Vortigaunts have a nice new niche, although I was starting to hate them in Lambda Core (I can’t see them on the catwalks above/below me, and they’re killing me without my ever being able to fire back). Controllers are also quite difficult for me to see, let alone kill before they beam-spam me to death.
While the HECU are trained soldiers, they’re doing miracles with those MP5s that just can’t be matched. The shotgunners are doing the same thing the player can, but with little or no reaction time for the player to get out of the way before they get gibbed. They’re close to being perfect though…when they’re surprised or running, they still present a nice challenge while being easier than they would be if they’d noticed you first. They also don’t grenade-spam as much as the original Half Life HECU did. But they do tend to notice you well before they should…it’s possible to surprise them, but it’s hard. Apart from that though, the AI for the marines is exceptionally good.
I’ve had the same issues with the MP5 as other people. For all the shortest burst it seems to be able to do is 4 rounds (which feels slightly too long, somehow), making it possible to burst-fire pretty easily, it really doesn’t perform as well as any of the other weapons, even when you take the grenade launcher into account. Generally I ignore it and use the pistol if I’m in a fight where 9mm rounds are going to be useful. At long range, the pistol is accurate enough to win…at close range, you just want to blast the hell out of whatever it is with something that works.
That said though, the Hivehand, shotgun, magnum, Glock, crossbow and any form of explosives works fine against them, although because of their reaction time, using the laser tripmine in anything other than “they’re a hundred metres off, get ready” situation is moderately suicidal…if there’s a shotgun-wielding soldier anywhere near you, he’ll blow your head off as soon as you move to plant a mine. I’ve gotten all the way to Lambda core without using snarks, so I can’t really comment on them. They killed me fine when I found the first nest of them though, so they should be nice.
I liked the balancing for the most part. Although the MP5 is a little too weak compared to the Glock with the same ammo. Most of the time I used the Glock to kill soldiers more efficiently. I couldn’t say that solders where too hard to kill that way.
To make the Vortigaunt have a quicker shooting frequency changed the way to fight them, but I liked it. The quick houndeye shockwave also was a great change to the original.
I think the guns feel fine. The marines in Half-life could take a lot of punishment so I don’t mind that I can’t kill two of them by spraying into their chest with a single clip. If you’re hitting them in the head, they go down pretty quickly. I think the .357 feels fine too. I disabled iron-sights and I’m not sure if that increases its accuracy, but the thing feels like a tiny sniper rifle, just like it did in HL1 and 2.
Agreed, 100%. It seems that their recharge time (time between shots) is too long as well. It’s almost never worth trying to dodge their lightning (by taking cover I mean, I know I can’t sidestep it) because they’re way too fast and the hit does so little damage that I don’t mind anyway. I just take the hit and pump some bullets into them while I’m standing there. The vorts were pretty scary and dangerous in HL1 (on hard mode), but not so here.
Absolutely. I don’t claim to know what the solution is, but the marines are a real balance problem. They react too quickly and are too accurate at a distance. It seems that they take and can deal as much damage as in HL1 (which was a lot, and I’m cool with that) but their reflexes are superpowered now.
Right on. I had the exact same experience.
P.s. I just wanted to say, after all that criticism, that you guys have done an AMAZING job. It would be lovely to see these issues get fixed up, but they are only tiny blemishes on a game that is better than I could reasonably have hoped for.
Let me put it this way - I screwed up and was left with 2 HP and no armour. Stupid mistake on my part, I admit. But here’s the thing: Remember the two “I killed 12 of those dumbass scientists and none of them fought back! This sucks!” Marines that you drop in on from behind? I insisted on killing them, and I had to reload no less than 20 times for one simple reason - no matter what I do, no matter how I react, no matter how little of myself I show, they’ll always land a few shots on me. One is easy to kill since he has his back on me - half a clip of SMG will kill him. The other, though?
That’s the problem. I’m hiding behind crates so I can barely even see the door. The other guy shows up and shoots me nearly instantly because at that range, his aim is perfect. I can’t even process that he has showed up and he pops me with an SMG shot. Or if I kill him first, it’s even worse. The second marine is below me, hidden by a ledge. I don’t know exactly where he is, so I step forward toDEAD. Only when I drop to the ground do I actually see where he was, because he shot me the very instant an inch of my hit box came into his line of fire. I saw the man for maybe a single frame and never had the opportunity to register where he was, just that he existed on screen in the fleeting moment before I died.
Again - the problem in that instance was mine - I got shot and grenaded and hurt enough to be within a single round of death. But what I’m saying is that this proved to me it’s nearly impossible to kill even a single Marine without taking a few shots, or it is for me, at any rate. They always fire before I can, and they always hit with at least one or two rounds. Maybe my reflexes are slow, maybe my aim is crap, maybe I’m unlucky. But the only way I was able to beat the above situation is pure statistics. Sooner or later, the computer had to strike out and the marine missed his entire clip until I could bring him down. But that was 1 in 20.
So why not try a different weapon, then? Or why not aim for the head and fire in bursts? I did have the Magnum, after all. Well, because I physically can’t. With the SMG, I can fire vaguely in the Marine’s direction and so get off the first shot. With a weapon that requires me to aim, I die before squeezing off a single shot because I take time to aim. And not a small amount of time. With the Magnum, it often takes me a good solid second or two, or even more in cases, to line up a shot at a decent distance. I’m just not that good. But apparently, the Marines are. Apparently, the marines are psychic and know exactly where I am at all times and are ready to fire even before I do it. Hell, I can’t do that half the time even when I reload and I KNOW where they’ll be…
The Marines aren’t impossible to kill. They just require me to tank their fire while I do it, and I don’t remember it being that way in Half-Life. Not to this extent, at least.
For me, the pistol feels too static.
Anyone?
I used the Glock most of the time. It’s almost pin point accurate. You can kill EVERYTHING very quickly using the Glock. Is it overpowered? I think so. I didn’t see the point of the MP5.
Honestly not trying to be snarky here: Have you played Half Life? Because you’re describing Half Life. People had the same complaints about Half Life, and history’s judged it pretty well.
Half Life was hard. And it was published in an era when the quicksave key was king. The average game difficulty curve was different 14 years ago.
From what I’ve played so far (til the bugs got hold), BM is being true to the original.
OP hit the nail on the head.
I have an idea, relating to the Glock’n’MP5 balancing. Simply incrase the MP5’s damage by about 2 or 3 damage per bullet, then give the Marines resistance to the Glock. This would even make sense in context, since I presume the marines are wearing bulletproof vests, which are only really good at absorbing non-point-blank pistol rounds.
I tend to agree that the early marines make life really hard no matter the difficulty setting. This mod forces you to really conserve ammo because, unless you are really intimately familiar with HL1 (when was the last time you played the original?), you only vaguely recall what is around the corner and the tricks needed to get by each part. IMO, shotgun ammo with good headshot aim is best for the marines. Shotgun headshots are almost always a one-hit kill - plus there is comic relief there since they tend to do their death animation, lay there for a moment, and THEN say something ridiculous like, “Ack, my left arm.” I died on the marines a lot until I remembered that rushing (holding Shift and running around like an idiot) tended to work fairly well in HL1. HL2 put a limit on shift-running, so I got used to sneaking around in those games. Honestly, though, I like the fact that the marines are hard. You don’t really want a bunch of pansy marines that can’t hit the broadside of a barn.
What I don’t like is running out of ammo. So the main thing regarding weapons that really got to me was I completely ran out of pistol and assault gun ammo around the time I entered the area with the green three-armed monster. I was without ammo for those weapons for that entire area and everything else was pretty scarce. I survived, but it wouldn’t hurt to put a couple extra weapon caches in there for those who like to spray and pray.
Shotgun ammo starts to be in abundance around the rocket launch area - so does health (another thing missing early on, IMO). I’ve only found grenades to be sort of useful. I really like the ability to roll a grenade to start an action sequence (I don’t recall the rolling ability in the original game). Roll a grenade to kill a couple of marine baddies with it, hide around a corner, blast and move as the rest round the corner. Lose only about 10 health. Find a med pack or station and replenish. Repeat the process. The strategy works for those who prefer sneaking.
I played through it on hard and found it too easy. How many of you played the original HL on medium let alone hard?
Trying to kill both soldiers at the “I’ve killed 12” part of We’ve Got Hostiles when I had 1 health left, I noticed something.
HECU Soldiers facing away from you can shoot you before they’ve turned around.
They’ll turn to face the player, but they seemed to be landing shots on me by the time they’d turned 90 degrees, let alone 180. I tried this a few times before working out exactly how to Magnum them both safely…every time I shot the near one first, the other would turn…and I’d be dead before he’d turned around.
So I’d say the MP5 isn’t the problem…it’s the soldiers using it that is.
…
This. I wouldn’t want fighting HECU to be easy, but I’d like it to be fun. I do remember that the original Half-Life was hard; it also was tedious at times. The Black Mesa team have improved and streamlined other things about it, I think this is another that would be better rethought.
(And yeah, the ichthyosaur could be more intimidating and difficult.)
Still, even with the problems I’m having with the HECU AI, I’m awed by Black Mesa. It’s so incredible I’d like it to be perfect. I’m getting the same vibe from many other posters.
Antoweif what difficulty are you playing on? Because the only part of the game I have actually struggled on against the HECU at all on hard was during Questionable Ethics.
I see what you mean about the reaction time, but it has hardly been a problem to the point where I have to instantly blast each enemy I face.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.