Hi,
I’m PJC and I’m a GoldSrc Speedrunner, SourceRuns.org Admin and Competitive Reflex Player. I’ve been playing Half-Life/GoldSrc/Source games as well as being a fan & enthusiast of various competitive games/scenes for a little over 10 years.
This is pretty spontaneous, but myself and friends were just discussing modern competitive gaming and since a lot of us have experience with HLDM and AG we got onto the topic of BMSMP, so I decided to create an account as I have some thoughts I’d like to share and some questions to ask. Whilst I have played a lot of Singleplayer for Black Mesa, I haven’t actually tried the Multiplayer out yet, but this isn’t based on criticism of what I’ve already seen; it’s more of a vision, analysis and enquiry aimed at the devs and fans of this game based on other games/series and their evolution.
First of all, we talked about how a remake/clone of the HLDM/AG style could be cool, just like how Reflex is based on Quake (CPMA mainly). We then talked about how BMSMP could serve that purpose, however I personally think that copying it straight up would be a bad idea and I think that HLDM/AG had plenty of downfalls that would not suit modern day competitive gaming, so Black Mesa could pick up on the good points and do better on the bad points. I’ve put together a list of points to be made about HLDM/AG, t’s community and eSports in general:
- Bad presentation/promotion of the HLDM/AG competitive scene in general; a lot of it seems very underground and non-expansive, though I obviously understand that this is a 17 year old game we’re talking about so naturally the game/scene is pretty much dead. I’m also aware that you guys are doing a really good job of promoting/marketing Black Mesa so obviously good job on that and keep it up; it would be nice for the multiplayer to play a key part in this also.
- Bad jumping/ducking method. The timing is too precise to be able to bunnyhop efficiently manually with keys/buttons, which means players resorted to using the scroll wheel or console scripts to do this. The scroll wheel isn’t much of a problem in multiplayer matches itself, but if some sort of speedrun-type scene develops (whether it be via the singleplayer itself or through multiplayer jump/race maps similar to KZ or DeFRaG) then there is an albeit minor problem of hardware advantage/disadvantage, especially as hardware is evolving with newer features such as unlocked scrolling and more than one scroll wheel. This is something that has been brought up in the SourceRuns community before and all we can really do is blame the developers for creating such a problem as it is considered unethical in the speedrunning scene to modify the game fundamentally. As for console scripts, people were using scripts that spammed jump/duck as fast as possible until the ability to create such scripts was eventually patched out in 2013. The console scripting itself makes the game not very user-friendly to get into because of having to mess around with config files outside of the game, but the update hurt the user-friendliness and scene even more because in order to continue to use such scripts, a copy of the older version was passed around (not very publicly) between players which you would have to patch in manually yourself.
Whether you want bunnyhopping to be a part of the game is another thing altogether which I’ve talked about further down, but here is my suggestion: if you do intend for bunnyhopping to play a major part in the game, please implement either a jump buffering system just like in Quake/Reflex where you just press the button at any time whilst you’re in the air and you’ll jump as soon as you land, or make it completely automatic. If you don’t intend for bunnyhopping to play a major part in the game, make it so that you cannot do it via the scroll wheel or console scripts. - Wallgaussing may or may not need to be toned down a little. In HL there was a lot of splash damage dealt when shooting at people through walls, which meant that you could often take people (sometimes multiple) out very easily, perhaps too easily. This may depend on the map, since in crossfire it arguably took less skill because the map is very small and has plenty of spawns that are easy to shoot at through walls, compared to a map like boot_camp where it relied a lot on sound and therefore required more thinking/improvisation on the spot as opposed to just shooting in the correct pattern/rotation.
- CTF was introduced in AG, and because AG is essentially a HLDM pro-mod, it meant that the maps were designed with the style of movement that skilled players were using in mind. This means that unlike vanilla maps like crossfire where things like gaussboosting and wallgaussing weren’t really taken into account properly and therefore led to a pretty “unbalanced” map (as in, it’s a very small map where gaussboosting is kind of overpowered and the strategy is to just to spawn kill the enemy as much as you can without them having much chance of bringing it back), the maps designed for AG were actually based around this kind of thing so they were a lot more balanced and enjoyable. Considering all the major competitive FPS scenes right now have been based around games that do have CTF-style game modes (CS and TF come to mind here) but are more focused on the other modes (bomb sites in CS, control points in TF), I think there’s a gap that needs to be filled for a game to push for a CTF-style mode to be it’s main focus competitive-wise; whether BMS is to fill this gap or not is obviously up to the devs, but I think it has huge potential if done right as I always found HL to be one of my favorite games to play CTF in. Of course, the other main team mode in HL/AG to play was traditional TDM; this is something else you could look into pushing as the main competitive mode as this is another gap that hasn’t been filled by a modern competitive FPS.
- A modern competitive FPS does not necessarily need to include bunnyhopping for it to be successful. Both CS1.6 and TFC had bunnyhopping that allowed you to traverse through parts of the map quicker, but both CSGO and TF2 do not and they both turned out to be highly successful eSports. In CSGO this is fairly appropriate considering the style of the game, but in TF2 you can still damage boost as the demoman or the soldier which is a positive point that has been picked up on from TFC. This leads me to suggest that you could do something similar with BMS here; HL had bunnyhopping, gaussboosting, damageboosting and the longjump module which allowed you to traverse through parts of the map quicker, but BMSMP doesn’t necessarily need bunnyhopping to succeed if it leaves gaussboosting, damageboosting and longjumping in the picture. Whilst having bunnyhopping in there also can arguably increase the skill ceiling, in my view having too much speed can actually harm the viewing experience (which plays an important part in eSports for obvious reasons). Even if you look at a game like Reflex which is very fast-paced, the maps are built in such a way that how fast you can actually go with bunnyhopping is very limited, and instead the focus is mainly on using bunnyhopping as well as parts of the map (double/triple jumps on platforms, stairs and through teleporters) to run away from or chase down your opponent, or to race them to certain items quicker. Similarly you could also take away things like gaussboosting/damageboosting/longjumping and leave bunnyhopping and/or something else in there, but it would be a bad decision to remove gaussboosting or longjumping from the picture in my opinion because these are things that are unique to Half-Life. The main point here is that games like CSGO, TF2 and Reflex are heavily based around a good amount (not too slow or too fast) of momentum.
- Multiplayer eSports nowadays are highly social and therefore heavily focused on team games. Whilst it wouldn’t be harmful to cater to the 1V1 community that enjoyed dueling back in HLDM/AG, it may or may not be a good idea to push for it to be the main focus, depending on if you decide to push for multiple modes to be the focus or just one of them. As I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of gaps to fill, so whether you decide to fill one of them or all of them is obviously up to you guys, but I think that if you aim for multiplayer to be a success in this game then you should at least try to fill one of them to introduce something new and exciting to the competitive community, because right now CSGO is the only competitive team-based FPS that isn’t dying.
So with all that being said, my questions to the community are:
Devs: Do you intend on putting a lot of focus into BMS multiplayer? If so, will you be catering much to the competitive community?
Fans/Players: Do you think this is a good idea?
Everyone: What are your thoughts on what I’ve said?
Sorry if I’ve hit on anything that’s already been covered, but as I mentioned I only created my account today to make this post, so I haven’t really had a chance to look around here yet.
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