Happy Holidays! Did you remember to get your Steam tokens and cards today? Xen is OUT, Black Mesa is on sale for 20% off, lots of other great games are discounted, and I am sure everyone has caught up on their gaming backlog in anticipation of the Steam Holiday event, right? Yeah, neither have we...

Xen is OUT!

We have pushed a major patch to the Xen levels and released the full game on Steam mainline. This means you can play a polished and tested version of all Black Mesa without having to switch into public-beta. If you have been holding out for Xen, this is what you have been waiting for! https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/ With this update, we not only bring the beta over to mainline, but also implement feedback to refine the difficulty, increase player guidance, fix bugs, as well as increase performance throughout the Interloper chapter. See the detailed change list below. The game is still in Early Access (EA), so that we can get even more data and bug reports from a wider set of players and machines. We will be watching people play the game and listening to how we can further improve the game for the next big update to take us out of Early Access. In addition to polishing the levels, we want to look at the game as a whole before switching out of Early Access. Note: It is extremely likely that workshop mods will currently break the game in strange and unexpected ways. During the beta we noticed odd issues caused by seemingly unrelated mods, such as players long jump modules not jumping them far enough. If you are experiencing strange issues with your game, try unsubscribing from all your workshop mods. This may resolve some issues. In the future this will hopefully be less of a problem, as workshop modders update their mods to work properly with the latest version of our engine/game.

Road Map

With the Xen levels complete, we have got a lot of questions about what is next for Mesa. Here are our current plans. Keep in mind these are our plans; they can change based on new priorities and new data.

0.91 and Achievements

There may be more bugs found as the game gets played by a wider audience. We will fix any major bugs as they come up, and also implement any small quality of life changes for the levels. We have a new set of achievements that are ready to be implemented for the Xen levels. We would like to release both of these as soon as possible, but if no major issues are found right away, we may roll these fixes and achievements into the 1.0 release.

1.0 Release

We will do a thorough review of the games systems and levels to work out any bugs and broken bits for our release out of EA. This includes:

• A Multiplayer Pass. There will not be any features added to MP for 1.0, but we do need to make sure all the current features are working and work well.
• An AI Pass. The alien AI between Earthbound and Xen is completely different. We want to evaluate if it can be ported back into Earth without breaking the gameplay balance. We also want to look at the HECU Marines and make sure they are using all their features, and see about reining in some bad behaviour.
• Workshop Pass. We would love to utilize the workshop for our own experiments and to see what the community can do with our assets and tools. The first step in this will be making sure all the workshop systems are working properly and improve usability.
• Bug fixes and refinements to the entirety of the game. With Xen, Gordons adventure clocks in around 15 hours. We want to make sure there are no major sticking points, and that everyone has the best Black Mesa experience they possibly can.

Earthbound Update

After the game leaves EA, we would like to go through and touch up Earthbound to make sure we are using all our new graphical features, improve gameplay, and try and make the whole game feel cohesive. We jokingly call this the Black Mesa: Definitive Edition but the scope will be fairly small. We want to add a couple of gameplay improvements based on what we have learned over the years, and add a couple of visual improvements now that we have a lot more experience making natural structures using Wallworm. A major goal of this update would be to add these changes without drastically affecting performance.

0.9 Change Log

We took in A LOT of feedback from the last beta, and worked hard to get some major improvements to performance in Interloper and other chapters. Here is a comprehensive list of what we have changed and improved in this update. Thanks as always! The betas have been more valuable they we ever thought possible!

Build Changes

• Fix for static / screeching sounds - rebuilt the soundcache. Please let us know if this does not resolve issues with static / screeching sounds for you. We think this fix should resolve the issues for everyone but we need reports to know for sure.
• Fixed Interloper / Nihilanth / Endgame not unlocking correctly.
• Fixed missing song in On a Rail. This was a bug and not an intentional choice!
• Fix for the Rare Specimen achievement not triggering in Lambda Core.
• Fixed some Vort sounds. They were not being properly positioned by the engine, so now will play correct positional sound.
• Optimized sound code for Controller energy ball attack. Helps with performance, especially when lots of Controllers are attacking you.
• Fixed "Always Run" (again!)
• The player will no longer drop items if they are holding them and walk onto a bouncepad. This helps with the purple hat!
• Fixed incorrectly written / formatted names in Credits. Tidied up some elements of the credits in general.
• Fixed Sound Effect and Music volume sliders. You can now turn down or up sound effects and music independently. Also added a Master Volume slider that controls overall volume.
• Last, I am the last...

Gonarchs Lair

• Fixed map B mortar related crash. Also fixed crash related to shooting the gonarch mortar in mid air.
• Reduced Gonarchs health in the final battle. Health reduced from 3300 3000, meaning it now requires 3 less rockets to kill him.
• Fixed basalt columns in the final fight. There was a bug where the basalt columns in the Gonarch final fight would either deal far too much damage or even one-shot the player.
• Updated Gonarch death sequence for higher impact.
• Re-balanced Gonarch final fight on hard difficulty.
• Fixed incorrect web texture in map C chase. There was a breakable web texture on an unbreakable web which was causing a lot of players to die during the map C chase, because they thought they could go down a route which they actually couldnt.
• Various visual and lighting improvements throughout the chapter.
• Soundscape improvements throughout the chapter for better blending.
• Fixed RPG colliding with acid mortar fire in Gonarchs Lair final fight.

Interloper

• General optimisations throughout all Interloper maps. This should improve general performance for everyone.
• Optimized dynamic light settings throughout all Interloper maps. This should improve performance, particularly on lower end systems. In some places this has improved performance quite a lot.
• Fixed the no free edicts crash in map D.
• Split maps C and D for significant performance gains (10 - 20 fps) on CPU bottlenecked systems. No extra content has been added. Map names used to be Interloper C, C1 and Interloper D. Maps are now Interloper C, C1, C2 and Interloper D, D1.
• Fixed map A crash.
• Lighting, player guidance, and pathing improvements across all Interloper maps.
• Significantly re-balanced elevator fight throughout map D. The fight now starts much slower/easier and ramps up throughout. Controller spawns are much more spaced out, and the dynamic cover system on the elevator has been significantly tweaked to provide much more cover for the player, and variance in where the player is covered from. You now only face a full-on 360 assault of controllers during the final pull-down sequence. Otherwise youll always have cover.
• Fixed Controller telekinesis explosive barrels sometimes one-shotting or dealing massive damage to players, and significantly reduced their damage. Changed these barrels from 120 explosive damage + uncapped impact damage (physics) to 45 explosive damage with no impact damage.
• Many visual and lighting improvements throughout map D.
• Reduced panel health in elevator fight in map D. All panels should be a bit easier to break now, reducing the amount of time you spend at the final stop.
• Removed cover barriers in the middle of elevator in map D. This makes it easier to path freely around the elevator without getting stuck now.
• Fixed many spots in map D elevator fight where you could get crushed against walls, killing you for no reason. A lot of players died to this, as there were multiple causes. We have resolved most of these now.
• Fixed a bug in map D elevator fight where some Controllers could use electrocluster attack. They were not meant to, and this made the fight harder than it was supposed to be, as the electrocluster attack significantly limits your movement.
• Reduced panel playertouch damage in map D elevator fight. Previously, if one of the spinning panels touched the player, it would break and deal 20 damage. This has now been reduced to 10 damage. This makes the spinny panels more forgiving if you fall into them.
• Added sirens to closed ceiling doors in map D elevator fight. This should help make players more aware that getting crushed against the ceiling is potentially imminent.
• Fixed elevator visibly clipping through surrounding geometry.
• Fixed player clipping in/out of massive healing pool in map D1. It was very hard to climb in/out of the pool, it is now buttery smooth. And there is also now a mega HEV crystal in the middle. This replaces an old (and redundant) healing shower slightly earlier in the level.
• Fixed some floating props in map D1.
• Made the parkour pistons alternate in map D1. This makes it a bit easier to climb up if you missed one upward timing.
• Adjusted island positioning on tower top sequence in map D1. This makes it take a little bit longer to get to the tower top from the starting island (giving the sequence a bit more length and pacing), and is also easier to jump around than before.
• Many visual improvements and tweaks to the tower top sequence in map D1.
• Split map C1 (conveyor sprint) song. The song is now in 3 parts, so players cannot end up doing the 2nd half of the conveyor sprint with no music playing.
• Made the map C forcefield hearts glow. We had a bug where these did not glow, so were not attracting player attention as much as they should. This will make them easier to see and understand now.
• Made map C ledge drop down before machine 3 more clear. We noticed a lot of people got confused here so we removed the top platform.
• Reduced length of Vort Village intro sequence. Removed an unnecessary wave animation that one of the Vorts does in the introductory sequence, to reduce the amount of time the player has to stand around watching them.
• Fixed many map skips across the entire chapter. Its a bit harder now to break maps by totally skipping certain sections or doing some clever jumping.
• Removed a few illogical healing showers in certain parts of the maps.
• Fixed broken hologram screens on map B.
• Fixed lots of pod pile ups across map C. This can also help performance by preventing pods from building up (they are performance hungry).
• In map B, Vorts will now fear you and run away if you attack them unprovoked.
• Potentially fixed gibs floating above water in map B2.
• Fixed B1 first control room controllers that did not attack the player.

Nihilanth

• Fixed Nihilanth voice lines. There was a bug where in Phase 1 he would only use his lines where he tells the player to die.
• Fixed Nihilanth shield panels (phase 2) not breaking in 1 RPG hit.
• Fixed Nihilanth song. Increased its volume and stopped it from pausing mid-song.
• Fixed collision of healing crystals not recessing into ground when crystals do.
• Nihilanth now has 50% damage resistance in phase 3 scripted intro, so that players cannot cut his health down too far and shorten Phase 3.
• Disabled the radioactive trigger_hurt when the player gets pulled into Nihilanth at the end of the fight. This fixes a rare bug where players can die after killing Nihilanth.
• Sped up the final teleport out at the end of the Nihilanth fight. Should make it less likely that players will clip into Nihilanth.
• Increased effectiveness of Gluon against spinning panels for shield pylon. The Gluon was too ineffective against the shield pylon panels, which didnt play well considering we taught the player to use the Gluon against these in Interloper. The Gluon now does 1.5x damage against the panels.
• Buffed Nihilanth mortar attack. Damage is the same, but falloff is reduced significantly, so the player will feel the effect of higher damage if they are stood on the edge of the attack.
• Buffed Nihilanth energy balls attack. From 8 damage at all phases to 12 damage in phase 1 / phase 2, and 20 damage in phase 3.
• Buffed Nihilanth telekinesis attack. Doubled speed at which he throws his projectiles at you.
• Re-balanced Nihilanth fight on hard difficulty. The fight should provide much more of a challenge now on hard difficulty.
• Fixed glitched clavicle on Nihilanth death animation.

Endgame

• Fixed being able to fall out of the tram.
• Fixed a bug where the player could move around inside the invisible room and cause issues during the good ending.
• Added teeth shader to gbuffer. This fixes the issue where G-Mans teeth were rendering in black.

Known Issues

• Minor exploits and collision bugs. The community has done a great job finding exploits and collision issues. We will be fixing these with the next major update.
• Glowing pink and green props. Some PCs have a small number glowing props. We hope to have this corrected with a hotfix (requires map recompiles).
• Saving holding items is broken. If you save while holding a physics object, when you load that save the object will float in air. We also hope to address this in a hotfix soon.
• Multi colored NPC teeth. The fix above for the teeth being completely black, may cause them to be rainbow colored on some machines. We will investigate.

Hope you enjoy! -Crowbar Collective Discord - https://discord.gg/PSZfh8N