Black Mesa NEW Xen Trailer and update

Oh hell yes. Xen was always weird, unique and a little short (for the amount of art that had to be done for it too) but this looks like a beautiful way to add and re-make it. They put a lot of thought, reminded me a bit No Mans' Sky, they really captured the vibe of Xen well.
 
Cool. It's nice to finally see an end to a product you've been following and playing for so long. I hope once this is out, they'll fix some of the quirks in the base game. There's definitely some room for improvement.

I busted open a crate and a military guy was just hanging out. Like, he shipped himself to Black Mesa.
 
looks really impressive...but delayed again till 2019??...which will probably get delayed until 2020...
 
Bump.

Dunno if anyone has caught this, but Xen is available if you opt into the Beta on Steam. I don't think it's totally complete yet, but I've played 30 mins into it so far and it's pretty awesome... definitely a completely different level design and layout from the original game and definitely an improvement of it as well. I played all the way through the game again the past week or so and am pretty sure they've tweaked a few other levels and mechanics of the game overall since I first played it like 6 years ago, so may be worth another play through for you all as well so you can open back up that void in your life that HL3 never filled, hah.

Also worth noting that playing this totally maxed out at 1440p ultrawide is actually somewhat demanding on Xen. With my 2700X and 2080, the game would normally run at 150-200+ FPS with a few dips under 100 occasionally. But now on Xen it's running more like 60-100 FPS surprisingly.. not sure if it's the extra lighting effects, much larger map, or maybe just poor optimization of the engine on newer hardware.
 
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You're right, I do need t resume playing. Now that I've lowered the difficulty level back from Normal to "Enemies are no-longer Superhuman," it's fun once again.
 
Jim Kim said:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/362890/allnews/
They've still got some maps to release. I'd expect the game to come out of Early Access sometime in 2020.
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release the full game already...this is Star Citizen-lite (minus the crowd-funding)...constantly adding new features and fancy tech...next thing you know they're going to add RTX features delaying it another year...
 
Damn.. just finished the Xen maps and am pretty sure it ends right before the Nihilanth. There's at least 2-3 hours of game play in Xen and I don't remember it taking quite that long on the original game. They've done an amazing job of the redesign though; you'd think Valve really designed these maps and the music they have to go with the sequences is spot on.

This sequence was pretty badass..

bm_c4a3a10000.jpg


The Crab fight was pretty epic as well. Hope the Nihilanth is half as fun as that was, but I'm sure it will be.

They def need to optimize performance if they can near the end.. was seeing dips down around 40 FPS several times. But was still an enjoyable experience for sure.
 
Yay, just in time to try out my new PC build. I bought Black Mesa years back but have been holding off until I could play it all the way through.
 
Just beat it... was fuggin awesome as expected.

Nihilianth was a tad easier to fight than I expected since he never killed me and the Gonarch killed me several times. But it was a great fight nonetheless and they changed the strategy up a little from the original as well, which was definitely nice. I also liked the HL2ish type of ending scene.

They said performance was improved in this update, but I still saw plenty of dips down into the 30-50 FPS range. I put up the Windows game stats thing at the top right to show FPS, CPU, and GPU utilization and my CPU and GPU both stayed at around 30-40%, so I'm guessing this game still isn't multithreaded (beyond 2 threads at least) and my 2700X's single thread performance is bottlenecking the GPU still somehow at 3440x1440. I still averaged 120+ FPS I'd say, so it didn't stay that bad a lot, just several scenes made the framerate tank plenty, so performance varied wildly.
 
polonyc2 said:
you played the entire game or just the Xen levels?
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Well as I posted above, I just played the entire game and most of Xen with the October update last month, but I had to replay the last chapter of that update tonight since it wouldn't let me reload my save from the end of that chapter with this new update. There were only a few more additional areas added in this update (really just one puzzle area and then another action area/sequence which was fun) and then the Nihilanth fight. So this update only added another 90 mins or so for me to play through.
 
Well will have to give it a go, played the free version way back when. But even that was... 6 or so years ago now? Crazy how long this has taken and how long it has been in early access. More than likely I'd just replay it from the beginning as I assume they've made notable upgrades throughout the game.
 
This was the first game I played through after building my new rig earlier this year. Highly recommended.
 
This was an inspired remake of HL. They even made Xen playable and otherworldly beautiful instead of, well, looking like brown, brown and more brown.
 
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I remember playing an early release a few years back that ended a few levels before Xen and it was good fun. Worth another run now that is "done". Curious to actually play Xen.
 
There's a big update in the pipeline for Black Mesa. Impressive that they're still improving their product.


Highlights of the Definitive Edition
  • Massive polish and art updates throughout the game
  • Complete lighting and gameplay pass to the chapter “Power Up”
  • Complete redesign of second “On A Rail” map (map B)
  • Significant optimizations across the whole game that will improve performance on low to mid range PCs
  • Outdoor art passes for “We’ve Got Hostiles”, “On A Rail”, “Questionable Ethics”, “Surface Tension”, and “Forget About Freeman”
  • New shield and architectural art for Interloper
  • Full workshop support
  • Updated closed caption/translation files for:
    • English
    • Spanish
    • French
    • Finnish
    • German
    • Italian
    • Norwegian
    • Portuguese
    • Russian
    • Ukrainian
    • With all the languages from our Crowdin campaign on the way!
 
Anyone know how to unlock the framerate from 60? I would like to run this at 2560x1080 and 100hz.
 
I put in the following command under Steam launch options: -dev +fps_max 0. According to the wiki this should remove framerate cap. But it did not do anything. Is this the correct syntax?
 
biggles said:
I put in the following command under Steam launch options: -dev +fps_max 0. According to the wiki this should remove framerate cap. But it did not do anything. Is this the correct syntax?
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Hmm. I’m not sure that you need the -dev in front of it. There is some discussion on this in the Steam forums as well (Google ‘Black Mesa FPS cap’). The link above says that you can set a custom refresh rate also (in your case, 100).

Haven’t tried any of these myself, though. I was just trying to help. :)
 
Funny. I was thinking redoing this game again. Last I recall, I'm stuck at some water tank thing where I need to raise water levels. THat must have been four years ago.
 
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Westwood said:
Funny. I was thinking redoing this game again. Last I recall, I'm stuck at some water tank thing where I need to raise water levels. THat must have been four years ago.
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Do it. You won't regret.
 
travm said:
Do it. You won't regret.
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So, you're going to laugh.

I fired up the game tonight. It was portals I was stuck at. I had to jump through some portals, but 30m I figured it out.

I got to a part where I got the long jump, and the scientist dude opened a portal.

Assignment: Postponed
Subject: Freeman
Reason: Awaiting Further Data.

And the credits rolled. So, am I missing something? Because apparently I was less than an hour from the ending from when I last played.
 
Ah. Wait. So this is continued at the XEN thing that this thread is about.

Man, I'm so confused.
 
did you buy black mesa? or is this the old mod you were playing? There was an early release that didnt include XEN, and they took like 10 years to finish XEN, and it was "re-released" as alpha early access or something. IDK, i forget how much it cost, it's a sweet remake, that is all.
 
travm said:
did you buy black mesa? or is this the old mod you were playing? There was an early release that didnt include XEN, and they took like 10 years to finish XEN, and it was "re-released" as alpha early access or something. IDK, i forget how much it cost, it's a sweet remake, that is all.
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Looking at the files, 2014. I don't recall paying it for it. Must have been the early release.
 
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