Or rebutted in a reasonable fashion…that does happen sometimes too.
This forum is still a hell of alot better than HIT or Facepunch.
Sorry I took so long to replay to my thread, I actually had a female species over last night! It’s been a while so I had to pretend I wasnt a nerd for a while 
Anyways my complaints aren’t that the game was too “hard”, I played the game on hard the first time, beat it without using quick saves or loads, only the auto saves as I believe quick saving and loading is cheating akin to save states on console emulators. I just didnt like how there was only one way to fight the HECU, the aliens being super easy, too much crouch jumping(more than required in original hl1) etc small issue etc
My complaint is that the devs said they were “perfecting” the game, I’m just pointing out that the game is FAR from perfected even from a novice game tester point of view. Also the fact that fixes to these small issues would be simple for the devs to do. I’m just wondering why they would release something they said they were “perfecting” with such glaring “imperfections”. It’s almost like they didn’t play the game after they were done developing it. Like they just said “yep, this looks pretty!” (which it does) and released it.
Though no piece of software could possibly be perfect. Seems like you’re just taking the word too literally. They improved to the best of their abilities and gave it their all. They didn’t want to keep you waiting for the bulk of the game so they gave you the majority before the last, final bit was finished which they’ll give you a little bit later. What more could you want?
I know perfect is a strong word, but I believe if you say you are perfecting something then leave in the easiest things to fix, then you weren’t even trying to “perfect” it.
It’s like someone saying they are taking so long on a cars paint job because they are trying to “perfect” it but when they are done they forgot to paint one of the doors and used the wrong color on the hood.
If you want to go literal, most literal definitions for the word perfecting describe the process of making something perfect OR complete.
Now I will agree that BM isn’t complete ( obviously ) but the team never claimed that the process was complete. The perfecting process isn’t done yet by their own admission. Therefore, by the definition of the word, they are still perfecting their work…we just get to play with what they’ve released so far.
I would suggest reading this article by Valve. It explains the mod creation cycle from start-to-finish, from Valve’s perspective. The article is more geared towards multiplayer mods, but the ideas are the same.
The article explains that you want to get the mod out as fast as you can, in smaller(but polished) parts (and this is, unfortunately, the fastest that the devs could come up with a polished - not perfect, but polished - product). In the months after release, come out with updates based on the users feedback.
The mods should really hire that guy who is making Xen levels in the other thread. I’m impresed with what he accomplished in like 1 week time. I think we can all agree the devs obviously didnt have the time/man power to work as quick as they could of the last 8 years(it’s a free product so I’m not going to say they were lazy). Ughh I just really don’t want to wait another 8 years for the actual completed “perfected” product, because judging on the BETA version the mods potential is huge. But let’s face it the technology is already dated, it needs to be completed as fast as possible to still be as relevant as the mod deserves to be.
That only really applies to agilist projects, though, not waterfall ones- and a ‘when it’s done’ approach is about as waterfall as it gets. If BM had been a true agile project then it would have provided nightly builds.
Not that I think agile works well for these sorts of projects, mind.
I don’t have any reason to believe the devs were/are not working as hard as they could (or had the resources/time to do so) for the past years. I’m sure the goal was and still is to perfect the mod before releasing something, but like almost everyone has stressed it’s not possible to work 24/7 on a mod, and it already sort of a great accomplishment to manage to work on this for 8 years. Real life always gets priority, and most of the time can be a reason to drop the development completely for months.
Also after a few years the initial enthusiasm diminishes, especially when the starting challenge of producing something new/exciting is lost and you are stuck with closed beta testing (this is a most awful process in a mod for the simplest of reasons- few take it seriously, and the feedback can be sometimes of low quality) and bug fixing what is a Total Conversion mod of the size of a full PC game title. And of course your (volunteering) team can’t always be available and/or on stand-by.
So if you are an absolute perfectionist mod developer, you are pretty much screwed at this point. They chose to release the main portion of the game when it was perfect enough for them (and it’s very easy to understand that this mod has been iteratively polished for some time) and it was a smart decision. Yet, I’m sure that the main motivation always remained “release when it’s perfect” throughout the development. (I am also sure that getting more than one people/team members all to agree that something is perfect is not an easy feat).
We got a very polished mod which plays great (personally I have had no problems with jumping or the weapon/enemy balancing, and have yet to experience a single crash).
And Xen can wait. Basically, it puzzles me that more people are not realizing that the devs have to be very devoted to this mod if they are going to spend more of their free personal time (after eight years of doing so -no less) to redesign and develop… Xen?!
Alright, I had something wrote up but after re-reading it, I sounded like a complete asshole so in an effort to keep the mods from beating me with hammers…this is my reply…version TWO!
Your opening post struck me immediately with the thought “Dude, the Devs have been saying for awhile now that Xen will be released later, why can no one read?!” but I rethought it through and decided that you were just puzzled that it couldn’t be released all at once. As I see it…it is better to release it, let people play, let them discover things that need fixed, correct them, and then patch it up. Rather than holding out on a release because you keep wanting to tweak things and can’t decide if it is a certain way.
I have been waiting for this mod for 8 years and I am very impressed with it. Sure there are things here and there that aren’t perfect, but it is up to us (The players/gamers/nerds/developers/etc) to play through this and find out the imperfections. Then the developers can correct things to a degree. I am unsure how they will tweak some of the difficulty curves that some players are struggling with, but I know they will not abandon us. Just wait until Xen is released and we will see if it makes up for some of the things that made us pull our hair out(if you have hair, that is).
Peace
EDIT - If you are talking about the one man person doing Xen as being dky.tehkingd.u then I really hope you realize that Xen is basically exactly how it was in HL1…not Black Mesa’ed.
I can agree mostly with that, though there are valid complaints regarding the balance issues and this is coming from a big Half-Life fan. Its comes down to little touches in gameplay balance that can makes the game either more fun or more frustrating. For now, Black Mesa is instantly more fun than hard, though there are some hair-pulling moments.
About the enemies… making the Soldiers, Houndeyes, and Bullsquids harder to combat are the strokes of genius and made the game enjoyably harder. However, they’re perhaps tad to difficult even in the Normal settings, especially with the Soldiers gaining some superhuman powers. You can put the original Normal difficulty to Hard since Soldiers in Normal difficulty are already notoriously hard already. That’s goes for the Assassins, too.
Houndeyes from original Half-Life are sluggishly slow with their attacks and your team did the right thing by making them attack faster, yet they seems to be too insanely fast this time in Black Mesa. Kinda frustrating trying to deal with large pack of them in Normal setting. The neat solution to this would be to keep their quick blast attack intact in Hard mode while adding maybe a second or two for Normal and Easy. That would throw the players off guard by their discrepancy in difference between charge times.
About Bullsquid… well nothing bad to talk about, gameplay-wise. I like that the team added the spit attack from Antlion Guard of Half-Life 2 series. That made them more scary and dangerous than the pathetic version in original Halif-Life. Headcrabs, Headcrab Zombies, Barnacles are pretty much hard as what I expected to be and that’s a good thing.
Now about the Voltigrunts, they seems to be too easy to combat this time around, whatever it is due to their health level being bit low or whatever our weapons are slightly overpowered. I did like that their Lightning attacks are faster, even if they’re bit on the weak side. Before you guys jump on me about complaining about Houndeyes attacking too fast and praising for Voltigrunts attacking too fast, keep this in mind: You can dodge Voltigrunts’ attack easily without damage if you can react fast enough. You barely can with Houndeyes unless you run to minimum safe distance in time (which rarely happen) or shoot it dead fast enough.
About the Alien Grunts… I like that they’re much harder this time like the Soldiers. Part of me like that their cool weapons can definitely home toward you faster this time and have more punch, though part of me hate that they can kill you faster. At least, they have far less appearances than the Soldiers so the players would know that Alien Grunts are something to be seriously dealt with since they ARE and SHOULD be harder to deal with than the Human Soldiers. I would leave their values alone.
Alien Controllers? Much better this time around, too.
My two cents.
I disagree and I am a Half-Life fan and I am used to crouch jumping. What frustrate me about it is that I have to constantly use it to jump not over a fence or box or even a table, but over the smallest of ledges and debris. Encountering it often left me wonder whatever Freeman has such a stubby pair of legs. This break the illusion of realism and is very distracting time and time again.
I understand where you’re coming with this, but I am not sure if I can agree with it. Some players don’t like that they have to go straight into the coding and tweak it themselves. Heck, I don’t either. Heck again, some people aren’t even good with this sort of thing and it wouldn’t be fair to tell them to do it so, even if this is a free mod.
Then again, I have to agree that since this is a free mod, your team have the final say and there’s nothing we can do about it to change your mind… unless we go in and change those values by ourselves
Presumably by releasing the majority of the game without Xen the developers were able to alleviate the pressure put on them by the community, providing more time to complete these levels at a desired level of quality. Most likely the AI will be tweaked slightly given the feedback, and crouch-jumping may become optional. OP may be slightly exaggerating his frustration for the sake of emphasis; I find it hard to believe that a person could derive so much angst from a privilege as if it were an insult.
You seem to be under the impression that those Xen levels are actually new maps? They’re just the maps from Half-life: Source ported into Black Mesa, dude. It doesn’t take a huge amount of effort to port maps. It takes a lot more to design and create maps from scratch though.
So stop comparing BM to that Xen thread.
And no, it won’t take another eight years for Xen to come out, that’s completely ridiculous. It will be released sometime next year.
He’s simply porting Half-Life: Source maps. It’s not nearly as impressive as redesigning and creating from scratch. Stop bringing that up and using it as if it’s a valid point.
You won’t be waiting much longer. This isn’t the mod’s beta, why are you so angered by the fact they didn’t release Xen in the first release? Just pretend Half-Life’s Xen was released as an episode and your complaint will disappear.
What? Of course Source is starting to show it’s age, but only barely. What does this have to do with anything? That’s like bitching about Cry of Fear because it’s based on GoldSrc or complaining of Terraria’s graphics. It’s not meant to be top of the line, competing with new games. It’s meant to bring Half-Life to the Source Engine. If someone wanted to put Wolfenstein 3D on GoldSrc no one would even mention the dated graphics, but for some reason (seemingly because the game looks so good) a lot of people seem to think it should compete with freakin’ Battlefield 3 or some other new FPS. This is completely irrelevant to anything here at all.
Wow I must be the only person who played it for what it is and didn’t look for things to complain about.
I don’t think there are as many issues with the game as the OP says. For me, 95% of it is pretty much perfect, while there are some awkward scenes and in some cases not so great voice acting. However, these don’t take away from the overall sense that the game is pretty close to being perfect.
The lack of Xen, in my opinion, is not an issue at this point. We will see how long it takes. If it doesn’t take too long and it’s as good as the rest of the game, it was definitely worth it.
You’re kind of suggesting that they should only have released when it’s perfect, i.e. when Xen is finished. That would just delay the whole release. At least we get to play a huge chunk of the game while we wait for Xen, rather than waiting without anything to play!
And the end of Lambda Core was the perfect drop off point, and they did it just like Valve would have.
Of course it is! The next release won’t take place in Black Mesa will it? It’s called Black Mesa because that’s what it is
The only issue I had with the HECU is that they were too sourcy. The stiff movement from point to point, the auto lock on, the not-reacting-to-pain, all of that. It did make it more difficult, but that wasn’t my issue. It made it feel kinda wrong. Like, I’d be sucked into the game with the amazing voice acting and audio and visuals, then these floating torsos darting from point to point dragging legs behind them would show up emptying mags perfectly into my chest within a trillianth of a second of seeing me. Either that, or they’d stare at me for 13 seconds, run over to the wrong side of cover, start to fire, change their mind, and run back to where they were before and proceed to empty into me. The melee only enemies weren’t too bad, but you know. They’re them.
Basically all he has to do is get high res textures in place and it will be just like black mesa. All the hard work like entity tweaking is done. I think this is a valid point. Hell he even made a model for the gonarch in like a day. Making the actual structure of levels is pretty easy.
The whole point of this thread is debating the point that the devs said the mod wouldn’t be released until it was “perfect”. Sure there are valid reasons for not releasing Xen, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make.
What about when valve releases a new engine that competes with battlefield 3? We will all be wanting a HL1 remake on that engine won’t we? The longer it takes for this mod to come out on the current engine, the less time for glory it will have before someone comes along and makes black mesa on a newer engine. It will happen.