After several months of beta testing, Black Mesa’s long-awaited Xen update has finally been pushed to live servers.
Although the update 0.9 adds the final batch of levels to Black Mesa, the project remains in Early Access as developer Crowbar Collective looks to iron out remaining kinks.
Black Mesa's Xen Update
Alongside the Xen portion of Black Mesa leaving beta, update 0.9 also refines the game’s difficulty, increases player guidance, fixes a number of bugs and increases performance during the game’s Interloper chapter.
Developer Crowbar Collective expects to “get even more data and bug reports from a wider set of players and machines” now, which is why it decided to keep Black Mesa in Early Access after update 0.9.
The bug reports and feedback will be addressed in update 0.91 which will also add Achievements. The final step before Black Mesa’s 1.0 update involves taking a look at all the game’s systems, as follows:
- A Multiplayer Pass. There will not be any features added to MP for 1.0, but we do need to make sure all the current features are working and work well.
- An AI Pass. The alien AI between Earthbound and Xen is completely different. We want to evaluate if it can be ported back into Earth without breaking the gameplay balance. We also want to look at the HECU Marines and make sure they are using all their features, and see about reining in some bad behaviour.
- Workshop Pass. We would love to utilize the workshop for our own experiments and to see what the community can do with our assets and tools. The first step in this will be making sure all the workshop systems are working properly and improve usability.
- Bug fixes and refinements to the entirety of the game. With Xen, Gordon’s adventure clocks in around 15 hours. We want to make sure there are no major sticking points, and that everyone has the best Black Mesa experience they possibly can.
You can check out the full update 0.9 patch notes alongside the complete look at future plans for Black Mesa in the post announcing the release of the Xen update.
Black Mesa is also discounted by 20% as part of the Steam Winter Sale 2019, bringing its price down to 14,39€ or your regional equivalent.
