We didn't have the luxury of porting a single thing from HL1. Pretty much every sound effect, every texture, every voice-over - all of it. Black Mesa is mostly made from scratch, excepting a few assets from the SDK. It is literally illegal for us to port anything. RPS: OK, so Black Mesa's no longer just a Source port of Half-Life, but what exactly are you changing? What, specifically, have you redesigned? Which systems, levels, weapons, etc?Ĭarlos Montero: First off - Black Mesa is a not a port. We aren't going to put out something that isn't good enough for us. We are dying to get this game out and show everyone what we've been working on, but we aren't so eager that we would sacrifice our values and what we believe will make this game great. So no, I don't think it is tempting to over-polish at all. Sometimes along the way we have learned things that fundamentally changed our way of thinking, and sometimes we have gone back and fundamentally changed parts of the game to reflect that. We just had to learn by doing, by making mistakes, by screwing things up and starting them over again. This hasn't been about polish for polish's sake it's been about learning all there is to know about how to make great games, and using it to make a great game. If we are examining level flow, pacing, weapon progression, puzzle challenges, player intuition, where people get lost, or stuck, or confused, is that polish? Perhaps it is, but often I think many people are specifically thinking we are sitting around remaking the same assets over and over a little better each time, or trying to find and fix every bug so our game can be "perfect". There is also work that some may casually classify as "polish" that is really more about making sure we are hitting the quality bar we want. It is true that over the last year we have put a ton of polish into the game, but this has largely been because some members of the team are less needed on the forefront of development and have taken to polishing old things and trying to achieve quality and consistency across the board. There were and are still parts of the game that we are actively developing, because the game isn't done yet. RPS: What stage of development are you on at this point? Are you still designing content, or is it mostly polish now? And, if the latter, is it tempting to over-polish - to tweak every last thing relentlessly because you've already put so much work into the project, and anything less than perfection could be viewed as a failure?Ĭarlos Montero: There's been a lot of speculation that we have been doing nothing but polish for the last year or longer. But how much time? One more year? Two? Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (aka, a billion)? And what state is the remake in now? I spoke with project lead Carlos Montero about all of that and more. Now, though, the Black Mesa team's pouring its own blood, sweat, and tears into one of gaming's most sacred holy grails - for better or worse. Once upon a time, this was Valve's firstborn with a fresh coat of paint. No, gaming's favorite man of zero words and 1000 crowbar swings per minute hasn't suddenly affixed a chainsaw to his gun or moved his adventures to an unnamed wartorn Middle Eastern setting, but a lot's changed. It has, however, been over three years since Gordon Freeman went for an all-too-brief jog in his shiny new hazard suit. The rumors of Black Mesa's death have been greatly exaggerated.
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