Black Mesa’s Xen levels will release in Q2 2019

Today marks the 20th birthday of Half-Life, a game which revolutionised in-game storytelling forever through its use of heavily scripted scenes, setpiece enemies and storytelling elements that would later become commonplace in first-person action games. 

Being 20 years old, Valve’s Half-Life has gotten a little old for the taste of younger gamers, with even Half-Life: Source (its source Engine rerelease) being over fourteen years old. Half-Life is a game that deserves a remake, and that’s where Black Mesa comes in. 

Black Mesa is a recreation of Half-Life with new all new assets, a project that is spearheaded by Crowbar Collective, a group of passionate Half-Life modders who have received permission from Valve to recreate the PC classic. 

While most of the game has already been completed, Balck Mesa remains incomplete, with the game’s early access version lacking the game’s “Xen” missions, which bookend the Half-Life experience with locations, enemies and bosses that are not present elsewhere in the game. 

To most Half-Life fans, the Xen missions are typically considered to be amongst the worst areas of the game, giving the developers of Crowbar Collective an opportunity to not only recreate these locations but also tweak them to make them more enjoyable to play through. This means that the Xen missions of Black Mesa should be longer, and hopefully, a lot more enjoyable than their original incarnations.   

The Xen missions of Black Mesa are now set to release in Q2 2019, with major graphical tweaks being planned for the game’s existing early access version next month. 
  

You can join the discussion on Black Mesa’s Xen release timeframe on the OC3D Forums.