Black Mesa
I'm sorry die hard Black Mesa fans. I didn't play Half-Life 1 nor HL2 before when I played BM (in 2024). I couldn't help it, but there are tons of things that I disliked. First, the positive side. From the little knowledge that I have about HL1 it had multiple advancements over previous FPS games. Compare HL1 to Quake and Unreal for instance. HL1 brough NPCs with dialogues and character interactions, which the other games didn't had. The opening of the game inside a tram line is considered legendary. There are many gameplay elements such as interactive turrets that would only show up in later games such as Halo and Return to the castle of Wolfenstein.
The last boss is strikingly similar to the last boss of Thunder Force VI. They clearly took inspiration from japanese shoot em up games. The plot pretty clearly borrows ideas from Doom. You have scientists developing trans dimensional travel tech. Something goes wrong and they open a portal to another dimension, one where the enemies come from. There are some sounds effects from doom 1 in BM if you pay attention.
The Xen dimension in BM is beautiful and colorful. It's impressive how better hardware allowed for such a huge upgrade in visuals. The music there reminds me of some music from some level of Monster Hunt for Unreal Tournament. It has this mystical and magical feeling. After playing BM and reading the lore of HL1 I've finally understood why there is a community called "Interlopers".
Now for the negative side. Black Mesa overemphasized graphics above everything else. In HL2 Valve took great care to create good looking levels and at the same time guide the player properly. In BM the levels can even surpass the level of detail of HL2, but at the cost of making the levels confusing. There are modern techniques of level design and environment art such as guiding lines, lights x shadows contrast, colored lights, enemy placement, item placement, scripted events, moving objects, etc. All to draw the player's attention to the correct path. In BM they focused on visuals and forgot about guiding the player. I became lost just about everywhere in this remake.
After playing HL2 I finally understood why BM was so confusing. Because they made BM by borrowing content and ideas from HL2. They expected players to already know the whole universe and all the gameplay from HL2. They didn't expect that maybe there were players who were new to this universe, which was my case.
HL1 followed a very old design pattern of room -> corridor -> room -> corridor. In this remake they did keep the same areas and overall structure of each one. They focused on upgrading the visuals and changed the scale of things. This had the side effect of amplifying the now obsolete design pattern of the levels. The original HL had objectives to be completed in the levels, this was at a time when FPS were still in the first stages of 3D graphics and cinematics and full fleshed worlds as in Bioshock were still far away from being standards. In the remake many of the objectives were sub divided into sub objectives to make the game longer than the original. The adverse effect was that this also caused me became lost everywhere because I had to guess what the objectives were in the first place. No dialogues or quest markers for instance to tell me what to do.
I wrote down a long list of design notes and won't mention everything here. The original HL had very low poly assets, textures and very few lights. In the remake they added so many colored lights, details everywhere, higher poly models, that what was once obvious because there weren't distractions now becomes lost amidst so many distractions. One example are doors. They placed dozens of extra doors and rooms to fill in the space. Many of those doors lack handlers and they did it to signal that the door won't open. It's literal, no handler, no way to open it. However, with so many of them and so many extra rooms that didn't exist in the original game the player wastes time looking at things that don't do anything. They are just there drawing the player's attention away from the real objectives. Another example are the control panels. With so many buttons and lights in high resolution, what was once an obvious button to press now becomes a "forest" with so many trees that you take a long time figuring out which one is the right one.
An example of objectives that were really confusing: in "On a rail" there is a pool with cables and the water is electrified. First you have to turn off the power. Then jump in the water to plug a cable. Then turn on the power back again. This puzzle is illogical. Who would build a facility with electrical cables crossing a pit filled with water with the plugs on the other side of the said pit? This puzzle also didn't exist in the original game. There was electrified water, but it wasn't a puzzle.
Another example: in "Questionable ethics" there is a powerful laser that blows up a wall for you to get through. In the original game there is a sign on the wall which reads "Don't obstruct the laser shield" and a box that you can push. In the remake they changed it. Now the sign reads "Ensure the shield is powered before firing the laser". Instead of blocking the shield's path with a box, we now see a cable. I didn't understand that I had to disconnect the cable for two reasons. For starters, nothing in the game told me that the path was through the wall. Second, if I have to turn on the laser, it feels illogical to have to disconnect a cable. Third, with so many details in the room I missed the sign itself. The room being dark didn't help me read the sign. The original room was brighter and much smaller, making the sign much more visible.
I didn't use any laser trip mines. First because I didn't know that they were laser trip mines. Nothing in the game told me what they were. Second because they added an animation of "cleaning up" the lens of it that really made it appear to be something that wasn't an explosive.
The HEV suit that Gordon wears has an electronic voice that tells you its power levels. It's playback is extremely lagged. It plays "power 30%" for example. But when it does you have already taken damage or picked up some battery, making that voice sound like a game bug. Not only that, but they didn't record that voice in increments of 1% to make it match exactly throughout the gameplay. Speaking of voices, the Black Ops voices were all desynchronized and seemed to play at random.
Many players disliked how Xen was overextended. Me too. They transformed HL into a platforming game with a maze of jumping and platforming that was super confusing. HL had platforming and puzzles, but in Xen they went too far with a maze of platforms, conveyor belts, lifts and the puzzles had too many parts. The game autosaved there in a no escape situation. I just turned no clip mode on and flew straight to the end to fight the final boss.
Loading screen in the middle of corridors? Really? Why not program streaming or redesign the levels then?
They didn't separate the audio into different channels. In Xen for instance the volume of the music is too high.
The ladders were a pain. I died multiple times because of the terrible grab / leave controls that the game was built with.
The AI is dumb. In F.E.A.R. enemies would notice the flashlight. In BM they don't. They've changed the behavior of headcrabs, now the literally bite your head. In the original HL it wasn't like this. The new AI make them jump on your face and then you look around only for the headcrab to be nowhere to be seen. It was really annoying!
I think that they created at least one point in the game that the level design locks you with no way out. It happens in "Blast Pit".
Because I didn't play HL1 I can't compare, but it seems that they've completely changed the AI of all enemies and all combat encounters have been completely changed. This is a sign of a remake that clearly didn't know about the decisions behind the enemy placement, the AI and how the levels were designed to account for those.
Too many crashes and the performance in Xen takes a hit. I have made levels for Quake BSP based games and one of the big reasons for low FPS is occlusion. The level design part has to have proper occlusion and vis portals to not waste power rendering what is not seen.
