Half-Life Fan Project Black Mesa, Released on Steam

Now full-fledged remake of the legendary Half-Life game, Black Mesa, was just published on Steam Early Access. Developer Crowbar Collective launched its first version with updates the game with smarter enemies, new levels, and outstanding detail.

The game has long been playable as a mod for Half-Life 2 in 2012, which earned massively positive reviews. The valve then granted permission for a standalone commercial game that appeared in Steam’s feature in 2015.

Crowbar Collective released the ending late last year with a dramatic reworking of the infamous Xen levels.

As of 2020, the game saw its official non-beta release.

Now, the developer plans to launch a “Definitive Edition” update with small tweaks in gameplay. Its modding workshop will also receive improvements as it holds community events for people interested in working with them.

The current revision tackled issues raised by its beta testers since the first launch in late January 2020. In an announcement earlier this week, Crowbar said will keep looking into “major game-breakers” or issues with its UI.

Previous Black Mesa Updates

Black Mesa 1.0 was first announced near Lunar New Year on Steam’s community website.z`

The biggest change under the 1.0 preview is in its complete overhaul of the HECU AI. Solders can now lay down suppressing fire, flank positions, communicate better, and more.

It also changed a number of combat spaces that utilize the AI to improve its Earthbound. Developers were careful to redesign areas with a constraint to make sure it doesn’t completely rebuild most of its levels.

Furthermore, fans can expect to see redesigns and repairs for some sections for players who can keep up their momentum.

A few sections of Earthbound also improved in quality, especially its art design. Crowbar claims it now matches Xen better to match current graphic standards.

The next version, 1.5, will be released months after 1.0 to identify rough spots and polish art from both planets.

The Steam News Hub

Steam just launched its own version of a personalized news page in its platform. Valve’s Steam News Hub is a mobile-friendly hub that highlights live events such as live streams with developers.

Users can also choose to get an email or mobile reminders for the events they choose.

Valve also said the hub’s content will fully depend on the games users have in their libraries and their wishlists. Although, users can also choose to follow store pages as well.

Steam will also recommend the latest news from recommended titles based on what users play. That said, they can also choose not to see some titles or from specific sources.

The hub will show the latest news from other branches such as the Steam Blog and the Streamworks Blog.

It comes a month after Steam first launched its Play Next platform, which is an interactive game recommendation system. The feature uses machine learning similar to its Interactive Recommender to choose three games based on what gamers own.

Despite showing results of previously daunting tasks, both features are still in the works. Valve will continue to work on both sites and plans to add more options that let users personalize them even further.