Black Mesa feature 2
News

Black Mesa 1.0 is now available on Steam, full patch notes revealed, launch trailer released

21 Comments

Crowbar Collective has announced that the final version of the Source Engine remake of Half-Life, Black Mesa, is now available on Steam. In order to celebrate this announcement, the team has also released a brand new trailer that you can find below.

Black Mesa is a fan remake of the first Half-Life game in Source Engine. The game hit Early Access on May 5th, 2015. However, Crowbar Collective has been working on it for the past 15 years.

Furthermore, the Black Mesa team has revealed the full patch notes for version 1.0. According to the changelog, the team has done a complete overhaul pass on the combat design and guidance for all the earthbound levels. The team has also redesigned the HECU marine AI, upgraded the Vortigaunts AI, and built a new, modern user interface.

Below you can find the complete changelog for Black Mesa 1.0.

Have fun!

Black Mesa 1.0 Patch Notes
Game-Wide

Our time in Early Access gave us lots of opportunities to beta test new content and talk with our community. We took what we learned during the development of Xen, and applied it to the Earthbound Chapters.

  • Improvements to every major combat arena in the game
  • Redesigned puzzles for clarity and intention
  • Enhance environments to highlight objectives
Art

We took a number of sections throughout the game and updated them visually to help the game feel more cohesive. We also made better use of the dynamic lights that we created for Xen.

Artificial Intelligence
HECU
  • Better utilize cover and movement in general
  • Put suppressing fire on players last known location and where they expect you to be
  • Use grenades more strategically and more often
  • New environmental analysis lets them track, flank, and move in for the kill
  • Use weapons and abilities depending on their class
  • Occasionally use RPGs (grenadiers)
  • Use under barrel MP5 grenade launcher (commanders)
  • Drop med kits properly (medics)
  • Marines wearing a gas-mask will now use alternate, radio-filtered, deepened voice lines, which sound much more like the original HECU!
  • Use more voice lines and communication
Vortigaunts
  • Dodge on spawn or dodge when player aims at Vort
  • Better navigate to the player
  • Use close-range charge attack (Dispel)
  • Use dynamic lights when attaching
  • Vorts AI now behave differently depending on how brave or scared they are feeling, which is based on damage taken / done to the enemy.
Balance
  • Slightly nerfed assassins to have lower health and accuracy
  • Nerfed Abrams 50 cal damage to make it less murderous
  • Buffed Apache 30mm damage slightly
Code Fixes
  • Optimized sun shadows
  • Optimized dynamic lights
  • Fixed bug with popping sun shadows
  • Removed view punch from smaller caliber weapons
  • Fixed trip mine hitbox
  • Added dynamic lights to portal effects
  • Fixed NPC teeth being black or bright colors
  • Made sure all tripod and ceiling turrets use tracers
  • Fixed gravity in Earthbound
  • Fixed HECU calling wrong SMG animation
  • All new, modern user interface
  • Expanded options with descriptions and performance cost
  • Fixed HEV chargers giving you 76 charge instead of 75
  • Fixed slide sound effect playing each time the player crouched
  • Changed tank machine gun accuracy for better game play
Black Mesa 1.0 Launch Trailer