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Half-Life Celebrates 20th Anniversary With Fan-Made 'Black Mesa: Xen' Trailer (vice.com)
On Monday, developer Crowbar Collective released the first trailer for Black Mesa: Xen, the final act of its long running remake of Valve's 1998 game Half-Life, which marked its 20-year anniversary on the same day. "The finale of Half-Life put hero Gordon Freeman in an alien world, and Black Mesa: Xen's upgraded graphics and redesign makes the original's muddy palette look vibrant and strange," reports Motherboard. "It looks just as exciting as it did at the time of the original game's release." From the report: When Valve unleashed Half-Life, it changed video games forever. The first person shooter from what was then a relatively unknown company starred a silent scientist beating down alien headcrabs and shooting human Marines in a novel sci-fi adventure. It was a triumph. Shortly after, in 2003, the Crowbar Collective began work on a remake that would come to be known as Black Mesa. Fan communities routinely reimagine their favorite video games, often as modifications, or mods, of the originals. Black Mesa began life as a free mod for Half-Life 2, but grew into a proper remake. Crowbar Collective added new voice work, changed animations, and tweaked the original game in hundreds of ways big and small. Black Mesa: Xen has a target release date of early 2019.
... you do realize this is the same Half-Life remake that's been in the works since 2005, right? It's not one of those "we remade that train into in [engine] as an art project" things, this is a) an actual remake, b) not done by anyone at Valve, and c) a remake that released every chapter up to Xen in 2015.
They'd taken an approach of making the game better, not just a high-res reskin, and as anyone who played the game knows, Xen was far and away the worst section of the game. So they decided "fuck it, let's make Xen actually be fun", and that's taken about four years, since they're such a small team building to such high modern standards.
Alright, I'll bite.
HL was revolutionary for many reasons, most of those were not to be found in SiN, a tragic abortion of an FPS with criminally long loading times and some truly ugly graphics among other problems, like a terrible level editor and a bizarre scripting language for tying interactions among objects together.
So here we go, a list of HL's innovations that cement it as the best FPS of all time. And I do mean HL1, not any of its sequels which are good, but not *that* good.
1. Software mode 16 bit lighting. This meant people with crappy software renderers could enjoy coloured lighting. No other FPS supported this at the time.
2. Cinematic cut scenes which never leave the player's point of view. No crappy floating camera cuts with bad motion. Everything happened from Gordon's perspective. Again, a first for FPS games.
3. Seamless level design. Every area in HL occupied a real, physical space. Levels were connected by transition zones that transported the player AND any nearby NPCs to the exact mirror location on the next map.
4. An extremely capable level editor shipped with the game. No GTK Radiant bollockry here, Worldcraft (later Hammer Editor) was a hell of a mapping tool. It would later gain excellent texture mapping support and a mouse look mode.
5. AI that was actually intelligent. They would fight you, or each other, or help you, or run from you, or gang up on you. Marines knew when to toss grenades and many NPCs would also interact with the environment. All this and more for a single info_node type entity level designers placed in areas of interest.
6. Fully voiced NPCs, conversing NPCs, ambient sound effects with reverb effects, pitch shifted effects, and a CD soundtrack added a level of aural realism unheard of at the time, save for possibly FMV based games.
That's a small list off the top of my head. I do believe you are trolling, or too young to have played the game, or a fucking imbecile. If it's not the latter, I encourage you check the game out again, much of its design endures even today. Especially as it turns out, when compared to the Black Mesa mod, whose level designers felt that the best way to update HL's maps was to just add more clutter and broken stuff. BM is a poor remake of HL, but it is unfortunately all there is.