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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.
Over an ocean? That's a long bridge!!
I think you missed the biggest impact of Half-Life: while it presents a single narrative, as a game it's more like an anthology. Each chapter uses the same low-level gameplay elements (same guns, same movement, same enemies) to create a different feeling game. "Unforeseen Consequences" was a lot of ammo conservation, a bit survival-horror influenced. "We've Got Hostiles" throws much more dangerous enemies at you, with the squad AI you correctly identified as revolutionary. "Blast Pit" was mostly puzzles, with stealth interludes. "On A Rail" was all about the rail carts. "Residue Processing" focused on platforming, timing and conveyor belts. "Gonarch's Lair" was a single continuous boss fight.
This was not the first such "ludic anthology" - Nintendo had been doing it since around Super Mario Bros 3. But it was an innovation in the first-person shooter realm, and absolutely essential for making games that don't get boring or tedious. I wasn't a shooter player during that era, but I've gone back and played the major titles (I'm a game designer, I'd better learn my history). Quake 2 gets repetitive within the first two hours. Unreal is a bit better by alternating between cramped corridors and large areas, but doesn't really evolve the core gameplay. Sin might have thrown more variety at you, but most of it was bad.
I sort of compare it to Citizen Kane. If you ever take a film history class, and watch landmark movies from the invention of film moving forward, Citizen Kane is the first one that feels like a modern movie. Like if you went back in time and gave the camera and editing crew modern equipment, and changed nothing else, you could release it in theaters today and nobody would bat an eye. There were good movies before that, but they feel undeniably primitive; there were better movies after that, but they all take cues from it.
Same with Half-Life. Every linear shooter of the modern era uses those same tricks to preserve variety. Some do it to a greater or lesser extent - Titanfall 2 used the technique heavily, really an underrated and unexpected gem, while the new Wolfensteins are fairly limited in their variety. The only games that don't are the open-world shooters, which can't really have that level of focus, and even they tend to dole out new gameplay at set points.
I love this analogy - I've been talking about "The Citizen Kane Effect" for years, although my take is slightly different from yours. The premise is that groundbreaking work looks banal in retrospect, and Citizen Kane is the perfect example. Everything in that movie was a fairly radical departure from the movies that came before it (the acting, the lenses, the camera position, its use of point-of-view, etc), and it changed everything that came after.
Because of that, when modern audiences watch it, they don't see anything new or interesting or groundbreaking - it just looks like a normal movie. We've absorbed all the lessons it taught us, it's become the new normal. The same thing happens in all forms of art - watch Hill St Blues or (especially) Peyton place for TV examples, or see the work of Andy Warhol, or read Tropic of Cancer - I could go on.
This leads to a bit of a disconnect when parents try to get their kids interested in whatever blew their minds when they were young, because whatever it was is no longer likely to be mind-blowing. The pace of change has increased, which just magnifies this effect.
Anyhow, sorry for the tangent, I was just very excited to see the reference.
It is not the doing of things that is difficult. What is difficult is getting in the right mood to do them. ~~ Brancusi