Happy Halloween!
We wanted to use the holiday and the sale to announce our rough timeline for Xen. We are currently targeting a summer 2017 release. We will keep you up to date on our progress and we plan to show off some media as we finish developing Xen to give everyone a glimpse at what we are working on.
Why so Long?
We can’t overemphasize how much work it was to get the game on Steam. Most of our effort before launching was put into porting to the retail engine and getting the game to work better than it did in the mod. Since release, the team has been focused on developing Xen. We even planned our updates to have features that would help improve the earthbound levels and Xen (for example CSM).
We want to do Xen the justice it deserves, and have it be the definitive climax to the Half-Life 1 story. To do this we have completely redesigned and expanded the Xen levels to what we think Valve would have done without the limitations of the time.
To help illustrate this, here are some comparison shots of our levels to the original Half-Life levels in Hammer. Not only are our maps substantially bigger than the originals, there are more of them as well.
Comparison of HL1 and Black Mesa's first Xen Map
Comparison of the first map of Interloper
As always we want to thank our awesome community for supporting us in Early Access and for being as passionate as us about Half-Life. We have been working really hard on Xen and we hope you are as excited as us to see the full release of Black Mesa. We’ll have more in game media to show off in the near future!
Patch
We also wanted to quickly mention that we have a patch coming for our latest update. This patch fixes:
-The hitching on Linux multiplayer servers and on Linux single player
-Russian closed captions
-UI fonts being broken for people that do not have Steam set to English
-Workshop publish tool not launching
-ZECU torso crashing hammer and the game
Thanks!
-The Black Mesa Team