The Crowbar

[Athelstone]

Crowbar[/SIZE]
In the original Half-Life the crowbar had an intensely satisfying WHOMP sound when hitting an enemy, a DONG sound when hitting a wall, and Gordon swung it side to side like a ninja. In Black Mesa it feels a bit like he’s chipping at something. This could be easily improved in an update. I think its an important one because the crowbar is Gordon Freeman’s symbol. When you’re out of ammo and it’s all you have left, there’s a lasting impression when you overcome adversity with it…the impression could be more powerful and memorable with better feedback.

Grates[/SIZE]
In the original Half-Life, when walking upon grates (such as the one where you exit the tram for the first time) there was an echo-ey sound effect. You could hear your own footsteps echoing into the space below you. In Black Mesa it sounds like you’re walking on a flat grate that’s laid upon the ground. The echo gives players a sense of scale, a feeling of just how enormous and gigantic the Black Mesa complex really is. Something as subtle and simple as an echo-ey sound effect can deliver this feeling of scale throughout the whole game, since there are many such grates to walk upon.

Love Black Mesa, thank you very much for working on it and congratulations on this masterpiece

[HEVcrab]

Athelstone, well noticed and said, you’re 100% right)

Gordon swung it side to side like a ninja

That’s what I loved in HL1, and what I disliked in HL2 Series and, unfortunately, in BM.
I tried swinging the crowbar IRL, this is just the ONLY way to deal blow after blow with the crowbar, you swing it ∞-like, first blow goes down-left, then you raise it, then strike down-right, then raise again…

Hope the devs will fix it and there will be one less imperfection to tamper with the awesome experience BM is.

As for the gratings, I would add that the echo effect would be even more atmospheric in Blast Pit, in the huge chamber where the waterfall of toxic waste is!

[MrSnaztastic]

These aren’t really bugs, but definitely valid criticisms.

I hope that they continue to improve on and refine Black Mesa with subsequent releases, reacting to feedback like this. Taking on board the community’s ideas for improvement after release is a luxury that mods have which retail products most often don’t.

[Malidictus]

Half-Life was, as far as I can remember, one of the first games to make use EAX technology, which makes it basically the “echoing game.” I don’t believe Half-Life 2 retains much of that, or if it does, it’s not as obvious and, by extension, Black Mesa doesn’t have much echo to it either. I, myself, miss the reverberating sound effects as they really did gave environments a sense of scale and verisimilitude.

[Athelstone]

@MrSnaztastic

These aren’t really bugs, but definitely valid criticisms.

I was expecting this forum to have a feedback section, but since there wasn’t one this seemed the next most appropriate place. I think feedback is particularly important at this release stage when first impressions come flooding in with all the excitement. Hopefully the Black Mesa team have a way of coalescing and collecting the very many comments that are flying about. (I saw somewhere that Valve had a white board in their main office-room, where developers would scribble notes onto it at their own leisure for everyone to read. Perhaps a shared Google-docs or something similar could prove useful).