Half-Life remake Black Mesa is almost ready for official release

The developers of Crowbar Collective have been building their Half-Life remake called Black Mesa since 2012, and it is now clear that the official 1.0 release version will be available in the short term. The game has been available on Steam as an Early Access version for some time now.

Crowbar Collective says on Steam that the Black Mesa 1.0 release date is approaching. The developer just doesn’t give an exact release date yet. Once the game is finished, that version will be released in the form of a public beta, as Crowbar Collective claims to have done with previous versions in the past. After that beta, there will possibly be patches, after which the game will come out of Early Access.

According to the makers, the biggest change in the 1.0 version is a complete overhaul of artificial intelligence. That should lead to soldiers trying to pin you down with cover fire, trying to circle you and interact more with each other. Also, the AI ​​opponents would be more effective with throwing grenades and using grenade launchers. In addition, the development team has graphically polished up the design of some sections of the Earthbound portion.

The developer says that Black Mesa will be fully supported after its official release and updates will follow. After the release, there will also be a 1.5 version, which the makers jokingly refer to as Black Mesa: Definitive Edition. However, this is not a version that requires extra payment. Crowbar Collective writes that after the 1.0 release, it will take a few months to go through the game and identify rough spots, then polish up the visual design of the Earth and Xen. Black Mesa already got a partially playable Xen chapter in the summer of last year; Xen is the alien world from the original Half-Life.

Black Mesa came out as a free mod of Half-Life way back in 2012. Then a commercial Steam Early Access release appeared in 2015. This is a graphically revamped version of the original Half-Life, with the developer using a modified version of the Source engine. The levels and designs for Xen are largely new material, so they aren’t just a graphical remaster of the Half-Life world.