what's the elevator version of when you tell people the history of this project can you kind of tell us when it started go through the whole thing. please keep your limbs inside the train at all times do not attempt to open the doors... the original kickoff date was 2004. It actually started as two projects. They sort of realized they were doing the same thing so they joined forces and i think the original intent was to just upgrade some textures upgrade some models and then make half-life one be a little bit shinier and then once the projects merged they realized that they had like an even larger goal of sort of re-envisioning half-life. So, that probably takes us up to like 2006 when I started on the mod. All volunteer, everybody was just doing it because they really loved half life. It sort of evolved from there we did steam green light valve actually approached us about going retail with the product and then in 2015 we went out we released on steam and then after steam green light and after they approached us about going retail we had to form a company and we ended up on crowbar collective. It's like 50 to 100 people of varying contribution levels even if one guy comes in and does a fantastic model and leaves that was awesome for us but once we were a little more serious and going retail it was like 25 people probably that that were working consistently on the mod. Almost all of us had full-time jobs or at the very least part-time jobs. Some people are architects, some people are nurses, like they they like half-life and that motivated them to learn these tools. 25 people for the scope of this game really isn't that big to begin with. thanks a lot black mesa The story of black mesa isn't a short one. It takes place over the course of two decades it concerns the contributions of hundreds of people. It was once the story of a fan-made mod then a commercial remaster and eventually an ambitious remake. Black mesa source began in 2004 as a mod to remake the original half-life in the source engine that was used to create half-life 2. Y ears into development it was given valve's blessing and turned into a stand-alone commercial project after over a decade of work from hundreds of contributors it was released on early access in 2015. This version contained all the earthbound levels from the original game but was crucially missing the game's final chapter on the border world Xen. These levels generally regarded as the weakest part of half-life 1 and a blot on an otherwise perfect game would lay the stage for the team's greatest challenge - using all they learned from recreating half-life they would attempt to redesign Xen for the modern first-person player, while also trying to bridge the narrative of half-life 1 with its groundbreaking sequel. [so this is the guy? h.] [thought you'd never make it] The development of black mesa went on for so long that it began at the height of half-life 2's popularity continued past the episodes and throughout a 13-year gap in which the series laid dormant. While half-life was dead while people like me were making documentaries about how the series was gone forever the team working on black mesa were keeping the flame burning. Past the development and release of doXens of other source games they continued touching up the mona lisa modernizing a game from a previous century. The development of black mesa is impossible to sum up in a single documentary even one that's over two hours long. So, what exactly is the story we're going to tell today? Well consider this many of the people who shipped black mesa have worked on a commercial half-life game longer than anyone else in the world and yes that includes the people at valve. After the release of half-life 2 valve published a book consisting of everything they learned during the course of that game's development and since then raising the bar has become a sort of a bible of sorts for people who want to make games like half-life. So, it was interesting that when we approached crowbar collective and asked them about doing a documentary on black mesa it was actually this book that they pointed to. This documentary is there raising the bar a dissertation on everything they have learned about making half-life games something they refer to as the valvian game design philosophy. A first-person art form that despite creating some of the most beloved games ever made is as rare as it's ever been. By dissecting levels in both black mesa's earthbound levels their full-on remake of half-life's troubled final chapter on the border world Xen we will explore the philosophy of valvey and game design as they have come to understand it. So, where do we possibly start this journey? How about something that almost all of us love about half-life and half-life 2: story, narrative, world building - perhaps not the first thing you'd expect would need much of a touch-up, but as you're about to find out touching up an old gem can lead to unforeseen consequences. I first started on the project on it was May 4th 2006 that's when I got the, , the email that I was brought in after I had kind of submitted a little writing packet to get on the team. I had pitched myself to them as a writer and a designer. I was at the art institute of pittsburgh and my friends had all kind of gotten onto the black mesa team one-by-one. They knew that I was also just a huge half-life fan and they approached me, they said you know we'd love to have you on the team as like a modeler or something. I wanted to do writing and design and I was not finding any outlet for that so when they came to me and pitched me as a modeler on their team I said 'no, you should hire me as a writer a designer'. Like that's what the team needs that's what this project needs it's just interesting to think about it now because narrative in a video game is now so it's really respected and kind of revered you know it's risen a few steps in terms and but I think really the team just thought like the game is written what do we need a writer for you know what I mean like it's already got we know what happens we know when it happens why would we need a writer? You know and I could see after playing half-life 2 and seeing how their narrative had really matured and their ability to tell a story and that had matured and just kind of you know picking up on all the things that they had done in the first game and the second one I just knew that there was there was a lot of room for interesting expansion. You know creative development things like that ways that we could combine the source engine with the the original half-life narrative i would say that the rules of valve's storytelling at least they're storytelling in half-life games as set up with the first half-life is you want it to be a first-person experience to be uncut with the cutscenes or anything you know you're always in control of your character and then you're also like a silent protagonist which kind of allows the player to inhabit that character you know in like the first person flow state people are talking to you the the lines around your monitor kind of blur you know you're inhabiting gordon freeman's body make it so the player is always in control and that the player always has agency which is such a wild concept when you think about like when it came out you know and even when I think about my own development with video games and what I liked about video games when I was a kid what I was attracted to is I always loved the the cut scenes you know the big cutscenes that was like the reward for playing the game you would get to a point where there'd be a big beautiful fully rendered CG thing that looked different from the other polygons and that was like a big deal and then half-life drops in and pulls off this like trick where like suddenly there aren't any cutscenes and I don't even think that registered to me when I first played the game. You know what I mean I don't think I was aware that I was constantly in control and flying around. And that there you're never, you know, pulled out for a third person perspective to kind of like give me an overview of the level. I think that kind of like on subsequent playthroughs and reading reviews and you know other people talking about it that really started to make sense and then you kind of notice just how incredible of a feat that is narratively to be able to string the player along get them to, you know, experience all these set piece,s these story beats, where they are in kind of like full control of the character and the camera while they're moving around in there and it's just amazing to see all the kind of care and like camera tricks, magic tricks, just the things they do to kind of create those like perfect little you know a cinematic or narrative set pieces that you just like slip right into. It's wild that valve let you commercialize this project. Can you tell us a little bit about like what they've been like to work with over the years? Yeah, so they're fairly hands-off and I kind of see that as as a good thing. I don't know if they they trust us or not I assume they do but way back before we even did steam green light they were like 'hey do you want to send us a beta?' and at that point the game was in very rough shape I think this is like 2010/2011. We sent them the beta they're like oh cool everything's coming along good and I sort of theorized that they were like feeling us out if they they wanted to offer us a license, and at that point it was a definite 'no', because the the game was not ready. We decided to sort of pause on Xen and focus on the earthbound levels and that's what the 2012 mod release was like all the earthbound levels and we were really happy with that. I assume between green light and that release valve took notice and that's why they they reached out to us about um going retail. If we have a specific question, we can message them but other than that they're they're they're just doing their thing. To me, it felt like the level designers approached a lot of this stuff with okay like we are going to be fixing things that don't work my role being someone who's like completely infatuated with the original text and you know like the original script all that kind of stuff. My personal feeling and this may be you know up for debate amongst the community but my feeling was that I did not want to get in there and rewrite anything, right? And with the earthbound stuff it's I would never add NPCs to an area where they were not there like I would not add them to an area where they were not before right? And there are loads of instances in the original half-life where you walk into a room and there was a scientist there you know his fists are balled up and he's just kind of like waiting for you to like show up and you know his mouth like flaps. And like you know so there's like these little like story scenes and it's like that's a perfect opportunity I would look for those moments where it's like here's a scientist in a room devoid of context you know or like detail and those are the things that i'm really going to grab on to I want to be able to plug these guys into their environment in a way that just makes the scene feel more realistic, more grounded. Really takes advantage of what the source engine can offer. [I've got my little corner and I'm sticking to it.] I had so many scenes, so many characters that I need to fill out these levels would come to me and they'd be fully formed and they'd have NPCs in these rooms and so that was just kind of how the marching orders came in it's like okay the level designers have all the say all the control really and their level would arrive to me and O would just kind of work with the stage I was provided with you know and just try to use whatever available assets were there and try to tell stories with the characters how it was already set up. A really good example for me of what I would think of a scene that that I think threads the needle really well in taking an existing scene but enhancing it so that it it works better would be in office complex at the very end of office complex there's - you meet up with a guard and a scientist and the guard has just like one line of dialogue where he just says you know like hey the elevators are out of order but we can still climb. [Elevators are out of order but we can still climb.] and it's that's it right you just come down here and you grab those guards and the scientists you go upstairs and like that's the end of the scene and what I wanted to do with that scene is try to get the guard and the scientists to talk a little more. It's not just one line of dialogue from the guard now. The scientist kind of talks he's more scared and hesitant about oh but the elevators are out of order you know and the guard is the one who's confidently like we can still climb you know like clicks the gun and he's like ready to you know charge forward and to me that's like that's a scene that like hopefully still fits in the world and the feeling of half-life still feels authentic to that that world but then and then also takes an existing scene and rewrites it but hopefully doesn't change like the voice, the perspective, the angle of the scene. Like the objectives of the scene. The stakes of the scene just trying to make sure that every scene embodies what the original scene tried to do and then also in addition takes advantage of all these great things that the source engine can do with the character animations, facial animations, and just all the great storytelling tools that were available. Is there any other sort of like generalist rules that that apply? Yeah, there's a ton of them um the big ones for me that stand out in the half-life series are no cinematics and that sort of goes hand in hand with like the video tutorials there's very small portions of the game where control gets taken away from the player. Off the top my head only, I can only think of apprehension where you get captured by the HECU. So that the the players are always in control and then also no time jumps other than again when you get knocked out in apprehension. Something that I think really invests the player into the half-life games is that you're there throughout the entire experience so you in half-life one you're actually the reason for the entire like you you set up the whole disaster yourself because you push the crystal into the anomalous materials machine so that gives you some stakes in it. You started this so maybe you should probably look into solving it. We sort of look at it as valve has a three-step process for mechanics where they introduce the mechanic in a simple way and then they teach you the mechanic and then they test you on the mechanic. So that you have this evolution and you're learning how to use these things without ever having a tutorial. It's tutorialized but you know there's not text on the screen that says hey you can do this and then it gives you this and so on. We tried to embrace that and understand that and it was a learning process, I mean, we're still learning about it. I don't think anybody in the game industry who's good at what they do ever stops learning but it was it was quite the process for us to fully understand it going into the Xen levels and revitalizing the earthbound levels. Like the red valves that you see in unforeseen consequences what we realized is we weren't properly introducing the red valves to the player so we have one that's in the wall and you go up to it and you do get a little text prompt that says 'Press E' to use and then you can turn I believe it's the refrigerator off so that you can lower the temperature of it and then the second one you see pretty much the same setup but there's no valve and immediately to the right there's a red valve on the floor. So, it teaches the player pick up this valve put it into the slot and then you can turn off the freezer to progress we introduce it simply we give them a really limited not even a test yet of using the red valve and then I think again in the sewer area. We have a valve that's further away so then now we're making sure that the player understands the red valve mechanic and then we keep bringing red valves back throughout the entirety of earthbound. We noticed that one of the things that we'd done and as I said I think this was half things that we hadn't thought about previously and then changed from the original or half things that the original hadn't done itself was that players could solve puzzles without knowing they'd solve the puzzles which doesn't make any sense because it's not a puzzle if you don't understand that you're trying to solve a problem it's just doing things and I think half-life of one actually got away with it a bit more because they're very basic environments they're very simple and strict facts. You can kind of get away with that a bit more because you know things don't details don't get lost as easily whereas in our version of the game it's very detailed dense there's stuff everywhere we try to ascribe purpose to section throughout it's much easier to lose where you are and what you're doing and where the exits are and all those kinds of things. So, I think that it was actually something the original didn't do in a lot of places as well but it got away with it because it was a lot simpler. We also made areas a lot bigger in black mesa in general so that compounds the problem because you can get lost easier and bigger spaces. so as I mentioned when we were talking about my role on the team and things earlier one of the things that I have done historically a lot of is going in and reworking map sections to make them fit together better and sort of what happened as we developed Xen was our design chops improved substantially as we really forced ourselves to try and get into a more valvian mindset. More so it's just a good design mindset really and we learned from some of the mistakes that we've made in Xen. When we were coming to the 1.0 early access release of the game we took a look back at the things that we'd built from the original half-life and we noticed a lot of flaws in it because we didn't have that design mindset at the time you know we were less of a professional team at the time it was a lot more disparate and less cohesive so there were lots of kind of one-off bits as I mentioned the kinds of things that we don't really like anymore. There were lots of sections of mac where you would solve a puzzle without actually seeing what the problem was first and also not actually seeing that you solve the puzzle so the residue processing vat is probably the best example of that the way that the the black mesa version had originally been designed was you come out into the main room there's this ladder that leads up to the top of a vat and then a pipe that leads up to a vent and the pipe that leads into a vent has a fire in front of it you then leave the room and you go into an adjacent room and you turn a valve and that valve turns off the fire that allows you to go into the vent however the way the player enters the room in the old version most players don't actually see the fire or the vent and when you go and turn the valve you don't see anything happen so what happens is you kind of just enter the room leave it turn a valve off somewhere and then you go 'what did I just do?' When we were reviewing the earthbound sections for the 1.0 release I kind of identified a lot of the parts where I thought we need to do something about this because the player we're not doing enough to teach the player what they're supposed to be doing here and I think some of these things were present in half-life one as well but some of them were from our own reimaginings of sections or recreation so I think it was a mixture of things the original didn't do very well and things that we didn't do very well. The first thing I did was as I mentioned earlier when I was talking about framing I reframed that room so as you enter the room the vat is off to your far right and so that's one of the reasons why the player didn't see the obstacle originally so I moved the pipe into a corner of the room and then angled it at 45 degrees so that the player is directly facing the back as they enter the room, I then move the fires down to the ladder next to the vat rather than the vent that exits because a fire covering a ladder is a much clearer sign than a fire covering an obstacle later past the ladder because luckily the map had already been designed in this way I just added a window next to the valve where you turn the fire off I kind of had to do a bunch of moving things around to make that actually work and make sense and I think i had to reorganize the pipe and stuff. But basically I just added a window that means when you turn the valve you see the fire go out next to the ladder in front of you as you're turning the valve and then I also kind of we we worked in a bit of visual language where the pipe is red and so that kind of helps you tie into what you're doing because the valve you turn is red and it's kind of all things together so just a few very simple things completely solved a problem in a section where in other playthroughs we noticed loads of players were going and turning the valve wandering off and getting frustrated and there were loads of little bits like that throughout residue processing that contributed to players really hating that chapter because they felt that they were spending a lot of time wandering around not understanding what they were doing and not being able to solve it and there were just lots of parts throughout our earth sections that kind of violated these rules and they were kind of ones that we'd learned to adhere to throughout Xen so we went back and we just reworked them so that we adhere to them it was very confusing residue processing in general we did a lot of work on and it was a perfect example of not showing cause and effect because you'd go into this isolated room turn a valve and it would turn off a fire back to where you had first entered and people don't logically think to backtrack to progress so a huge mantra for us was cause and effect so if you interact with something you you have to see what it does and that was a huge part of our iteration process of like I pushed this button and I have no idea what I just did in in office complex you you navigate around a series of shelves and vents and you have to come and find a valve to plug into something and you move this slab of meat to form a bridge between two vents and then you use that bridge between the two vents to exit. The problem is the way the previous version of the room was structured and i believe this was true in half-life one as well is that you just you can just go and find the valve plug it in and turn it and then you move the meat and then you think what does this accomplish so you're kind of just trial and erroring your way through it and then you will eventually solve the puzzle just by virtue of moving the thing around, traversing the area, and finding that you've now bridged the gap between the two ents but I really again this really kind of went against a lot of what we thought needed to be done to see the design I closed a bunch of doors I rerouted a bunch of sections and closed them off from each other so that now you go through that section you come up to the vent and you see the other vent in front of you and then you drop down into the section with the valve so when the players do move the meat if they see it's moving towards those vents they're more likely to go right i'm bridging that gap So, I originally started out as a fan of black mesa. I was a superfan after it released as a mod in 2012 and when the game released when the mod released sorry i'm so used to calling it a game now when the mod was released in 2012 there were two chapters that were significantly cut from their original half-life 1 versions. So, that was surface tension and on a rail and I sort of dabbled in source level design at that point and I thought for fun why don't I try and recreate those missing sections just as a bit of a challenge because I'd never done single player level design before so I started working on that and I kind of I fed it into the community and they really liked it and so when I finished the honor rail on cup mod in 2013 the black mesa team approached me and said would I like to join the team and work with them on multiplayer and I said 'yes, please'. So. I joined the team and then that was when they told me that the the game was going to be sold as a retail product on steam after the game had been greenlit and then beyond that point we started updating the game on early access multiple times. We actually released surface tension on uncut as a full official update to the game which we rebuilt from scratch based on my old mod version and then as we kind of got really into the thick of Xen development that was when I became the level design lead and sort of tried to help march it over the finish line across the heavy part of Xen development. On a rail got cut specifically because basically the original chapter was extremely ambling very very long and very unpopular, apart from Xen, I would say it was probably the most unpopular part of half-life 1. So, the the mod team at the time decided we're going to do a completely different interpretation of on a rail we're just going to shorten it dramatically and kind of do our own thing with it and that's what they did that was kind of intentionally cut whereas surface tension the specific reason the team had cut that was because the level designer that was working on those maps left very suddenly towards the release and they decided that it was too much work to continue to finish the levels so they just cut those out of the game and did a quick band-aid fix for the mod release the reason why we eventually ended up adding surface tension uncut officially but not on a rail was because the decision to cut surface tension wasn't done intentionally whereas it cuts to on a rail were intentional. so the black mesa version of on a rail is actually mostly sort of I would say original design it's not really got a lot of the half-life 1 DNA in it apart from a couple of sections because the half-life one design was very sprawling, very exploratory, very looping, and players would get quite confused. in the current retail version of black mesa on a rail is pretty much as it was in the mod with a couple of changes that we made for the definitive edition that we released recently and then surface tension has my updates and the surface tension stuff that was cut specifically from the original it was I think two maps towards the end of the chapter which featured very heavily a lot of combat specifically between the soldiers and the aliens and I remember as a fan when I played it i noted the absence of these maps not because the maps were actually any good in the original in fact I would say they're some of the weakest maps in half-life 1 but these kind of story element of the soldiers dramatically losing to the aliens at this point in the story I really felt it was missing from the mod and we just kind of we really went home trying to trying to make it make just a more cinematic interpretation of of the maps which we felt were quite weak in the original. Building the earthbound levels I think was perfect for where we were at at the time because most of us were in college or just recently out of college some of us had just recently graduated high school so having that template was probably about all we could handle with our understanding of game design and game mechanics it was great to be able to have the the blueprint and then just sort of make it pretty looking at the earthbound levels that's what we needed we needed that blueprint, because just where we're at and our our growth and then we decided at the end to to do what we called at the time the fun quest. Where we wanted to inject a bit more of um valvian philosophy of how valve would build the game if they built it in 2012 so that's where the flares came from, where you pick up the flares and throw them at the zombies and light them on fire we set up gas traps so that you can throw flares into the gas traps and catch the zombies on fire something that is a little more interactive we also really wanted to focus in on being able to use allies so that's why in unforeseen consequences you can you don't have a gun right away or a crowbar and you have to ask the the guard for help and then he follows you around so there was a lot of stuff like that that we sort of injected last minute to maybe make it feel a bit more like a modern game and a bit more engaging some of it doesn't work as well as I would like it to but I think the overall spirit of that, sorry, like sort of set us off on the path for what would become Xen and what would become our later revisions on the earthbound levels. [Meatsack flopping around] The final scene in Lambda Core is the supply depot scene you've been told to get to Lambda Core the entire game that's what a scientist you know how to put an end to this the resonance cascade the disaster that that's where they're located it's been the thrust of the whole game up to this point let's get to the Lambda Core so you finally show up there and you meet this group of scientists and guards kind of like the ragtag bunch you know the final survivors here and they usher you into the supply depot and explain to you this is where we have been breaching the membrane between Xen and earth and we've been going back and forth a lot more than you've been led to believe you know you might have gotten your ideas in the questionable ethics that there's more to this than meets the eye this is where the survey team was going and collecting samples before they started being collected themselves you know all those like classic lines of dialogue that's the final staging area for gordon freeman on earth you know when he's gearing up it's like the gear up montage in an action movie you know where he like goes and suits up before he jumps into the portal to defeat the last boss [Unstable energy, the absence of sound, then speeding through time and space] Don't worry we're not done with the earthbound levels quite yet but much like the portals themselves we're going to be doing a lot of jumping back and forth here. For the levels set on earth the team had a fairly good template to work from. But in Xen they were pushing well beyond the source material creating a version of Xen that respected the levels as much as people remembered them and the original intent of the half-life 1 design doc. They'd need to do all this while also reflecting the modernized valvian design from half-life 2 and providing a more natural connection to the narrative of the sequel. Alright, make sure your long jump module is tightly fastened we've a lot of ground to cover. [Light music into confused heavy breathing] I think reasonable people can come down on both sides of if you like Xen or if you don't I it's somewhat subjective but I do agree I think a lot of it's at the very least polarizing we knew we had to do or we wanted to do something with Xen whether it's like just a smooth transition or a a beautification we knew we wanted to do something. Chris Horn was working on these really detailed plans to sort of overhaul it and make it into our own thing there was a brief moment where I did like a quick design break of like here's how we could overhaul the Xen levels and sort of keep in mind what's there in the original like for example the butterflies you release them from their cages and that helps you advance in the puzzle which is it's abstract and it's crazy but it's definitely like OG half-life eventually Chris finished the plans we all really like them, in Mark Foreman first he did some previz art which we sort of saw like if he squint you could see it was very good art but it was just a little bit different than the style we have now and then he sort of delivered these modular kits that we could like strewn about the first couple of Xen levels and that's where things really started clicking and we really started to understand what we wanted to do with the Xen levels. We'd gotten to the point where we realized that we couldn't create Xen and earthbound and get the game out within a reasonable time frame and my position on this pushing for the game to be split was that if we were to split Xen we could then focus entirely on it and possibly go for something a bit grander bigger maybe even, rather than just adding the game on make it a separate game in itself and call it black mesa Xen. In 2012, I sat down with Carlos and a couple of other people to talk about creating a full level design document for the whole of Xen and that would cover every single chapter except end game because endgame we always intended to basically be a one-to-one copy of the original because it's a sort of outro scene if you like and through that period I think about six months I spent writing all of the chapters. so Xen, Gonarch, Interloper, Nihilanth, and obviously some of those chapters have got some very complicated storyline stuff and things that were either not very well explained in the original out of context because areas that were intended to be in were not finished in the original and that does come across in the original that a lot of it was it was Rather than it wasn't rushed as such it was these levels are ready to go out these levels aren't so we'll cut the ones which are and we'll finish the ones that are and some of it works and some of it doesn't work. Xen in the original is a three-minute level that's it's not even a chapter as far along, it's literally you jump down some some floating rocks you go in you chase some butterflies around you open some stuff up and then you jump through a portal and you're already in a different area. We knew there was an opportunity for authorship in the Xen world because like with the black mesa stuff with the earthbound sections we had created we had invented we had made a lot of things but that game that part of the game is by no means like our it's an imitation you know it's there's innovation in there but it's an imitation of of the original half-life or you know it's trying to be a copy of the original half-life and Xen is very much so trying to be its own thing you know and I think it was really interesting for the team to kind of you know go through these like growing pains or at least kind of like pay our dues making the earthbound section and then the that's kind of like the proving ground and the next opportunity is to like put all that we learned and developed we were all very young and you know inexperienced when we started up on black mesa and so just that day by day development and learning process felt like when we were ready to take on Xen we were ready to take on Xen as like a different team as like a different company you know we weren't just trying to recreate what came before us we were trying to actually like make something that would be held in higher regard and that was really exciting. Xen was obviously a troubled chunk of the game it was obviously we knew that it was you know universally reviled seems like an extremely strong way of like placing it but you know compared to like the experience of half-life you know Xen is just kind of leaden and weighs it down towards the end there. I never really felt that way. I became aware of these thoughts by reading you know which is other people's thoughts on those things I could see that Xen was not as strong or as engaging as half-life but I still just enjoyed the the whole experience just the weirdness of it all that the sensation of going into the unknown by yourself like going yeah going into the unknown alone and all that kind of stuff is just that I like that so I was really excited to kind of reproduce and replicate those kind of things. I was actually surprised to find out that so much of it was going to be scrapped or like thrown out when the original Xen design document came our way. Initially we had a really big problem with sort of the chicken and the egg of like we didn't have art for these levels so it was hard to make the design and we didn't have design for the level so it was hard to make the art that was the really compelling problems to solve like how are we going to do all this on Xen? Like again Xen is an episode, it's a chap, it's like we have to - we don't have a bucket of tricks that we can keep pulling things out if we've got to redo everything we've got to re-teach all of our buttons, our switches, our elevators platforms, centuries breakable materials like the difference between gravity fall damage that was certainly one of the major challenges with sending the player to Xen was that you spend the entirety of you know I don't know a five to ten hour campaign building up these design norms and then you take it all away so what we had to do was we had to try and make sure that the stuff that you do in Xen feels like it still fits in with the kinds of things you've encountered in earth but has a unique alien spin on it without being too different that players don't understand what they're doing which is kind of again how the plug puzzles came into being because they're very intuitive whatever else they may be. You know immediately you've got to plug things in and you're still able to tie that into sufficiently alien systems, while also like having the design language for doors and for power and for things like that so to put it most simply it basically comes down to at least with half-life style design specifically it comes down to putting things directly in front of the player whenever they need to see something and it sounds simple and it's something that you probably that most players would probably take for granted but it's actually really hard especially if you're building a complex level you basically have to make sure that the player's objective and the way the space is built always frames what they want to do. The player needs to see what they're doing when they press this button the player needs to see their exit when they come into this room the player needs to see what's next when they do this step of the puzzle. It was something we really really worked hard at and I think it's kind of one of the unsung heroes of the way that Xen was developed. One of the things that we noticed really early on in development and one of the things we were really scared of was players getting lost and frustrated in half-life style design but actually doubly so for Xen specifically you don't have objective markers you don't have really an npc telling you what to do you? Can't prompt the player in simple ways. It's all done by the environment and so that means you really have to double down on designing the environment smartly. the key way that we did that was just by framing things by moving placements around by adjusting the angle that players come in at by adjusting the lighting around. So there's kind of a combination of art and level design that goes into that. I was really picky about when artists made changes to sections I would say no, you need to you need to move this back a bit because it's obstructing the player's view of this thing slightly in the opening room of interleave but the way the vats flow the the tubes all flow towards the exit and in interloper every single exit is signposted with a giant red energy core and we always make sure the player is facing that energy core when they come into a room and I think this is something that people never noticed consciously when they were playing it but it somehow somehow just guided them towards the solution without them realizing it. Yeah, that was a real great challenge with Xen was that all of these tools that we had in earth and we used liberally the same way that valve did they're all gone and then you have to kind of reteach it to players and again that was that was one of the things i think was very effective about chris's original structure was that when you enter Xen you get a chance to get acquainted with the natural environment first you kind of have that familiarity of the human polytunnels section as just kind of a way of not making it too much too fast and then you get into the alien tech towards the end of the chapter and then you really dig into it in interloper and it's all sort of consistent and cohesive but it was a real challenge because you end up with a very stripped back toolset compared to what you can play with on earthbound and I think the same was true of the actual whole sandbox that we had to work with throughout Xen because I would say that half the fun of the earthbound levels comes from fighting the soldiers - they're a really interesting and dynamic part of the game they're really memorable and there's a lot of fun set pieces that come from their interactions with the aliens and things you do with them and then they're gone and we further made this problem hard for ourselves by then deciding that we weren't going to use the Vorts, the A-grunts, or the Controllers until interloper so you end up having a really stripped back toolset with which you have to try and create something cohesive and fun and that was kind of something that was encompassed in all parts of the game I think not just architecture and level design and guidance it was also to do with the enemy encounters and stuff like that. One of the things that really struck me about the original Xen was it felt like they'd got all these ideas that they wanted to do and their original ideas were comprehensive if you like run through various different environments which later was confirmed by access again to seeing original versions of those half-life maps concepts from valve for areas such as the swamps because in the original there are no swamps but there were concepts and there were beta maps four swamps and various other things. One of the things that I think that we did very strongly in Xen that didn't land in the original whatsoever or wasn't even really attempted in the original was a sense of progression and cohesion throughout the environments throughout the chapter and again this mostly stemmed from chris's plans actually and the kind of way that we ran with those and developed on top of them. But one of the things that we identified that we thought was a problem and it was we we think it was a side effect of how quickly valve had to finish half life 1 Xen then was that every map basically ends with you teleporting to the next map and what that does is it creates a very com it's it's it is disjointed because I think why ended up happening is Valve just linked maps together almost at random just to try and build a finished product but it ends up being that you don't have a sense of progression you don't track your journey you don't really understand where you're going. So, one of the things we tried to do was we really tried to make players aware that they're progressing through Xen and drive home these differences while keeping things familiar and cohesive we kind of came up with the idea of well firstly there's the biome progression so of course you have the kind of more natural environments in the original in the first Xen chapter followed by the basalt columns and the weird sort of giant causeway crystal stuff that we explored and gone up and then the really strange organic stuff there is in interloper we kind of came up with the idea of changing the color scheme as you progress closer to the tower which again I think is something that players might have subconsciously noticed but never actually realized was something that we did. So, we came up with the idea of having very tranquil colors in Xen so you have the purple and the green kind of familiar naturey relaxed colors that feel safe then in gonarch it gets orangy and yellow as you're closer to the tower and then in the interloper it's red which is obviously the universal color for danger we even came up with a sort of nonsense rationalization for it which was supposed to be that the massive portal at the top of the interloper tower was serving as a local sun which is why the environment gets a bit progressively more red as you head towards it but the reality was we wanted to create a sense of progression feeling that you're moving through the environment that you're getting closer to danger closer to the culmination. We also got the artists to we created very soft simple shapes in Xen then the artists went for more angular shapes in in gonarch with the you know the crystals and the basil columns and then in interloper it goes absolutely crazy where there's all kinds of spiky spiky rocks protruding everywhere so it just again it kind of gets this layered progression throughout it that kind of ties in with everything else the gameplay structure Xen is very much focused on the wildlife gonark is kind of you know a little bit more cinematic a little bit more amped up and then interloper is very heavily focused on the combat and the puzzles ranked up to the extreme so we just kind of built all of these different progressions into the chapter, into the whole of Xen really. And then of course you have the interloper tower itself as the mechanism for your long-term goal as I mentioned earlier so I really I felt like that was something that we did quite well with us and i'm quite proud of the way that worked. We tried to think about short-term and long-term goals because a map is only fun and directed if you know what your long-term goal is and what your short-term goal is. So, that kind of tied back into what I was saying where we try to make sure that when you enter a room the player sees the exit because that's that's an immediate establishment of your long-term goal and that was something that I think we did most effectively in the first Xen map for example you come out of that space the interloper tower is right there in front of you you know you're going there at some point and then you also have the big island that you go to at the end of the map next to that so you kind of get a sense that's where i'm heading and then you kind of snake off the path to the left and you just get your short-term goals as you progress establishing immediately the short-term goal and the long-term goal and then repeatedly seeding new short-term goals using that same kind of micro approach as they progress through those spaces the sort of the mantra for Xen was to have good Valve style design philosophies and then also sort of mirror half-life 2 in places that we could and that's sort of where the interloper tower came out of where you have this beacon you have this end point and it's sort of your reference and as you progress through the levels you get closer and closer to it it makes the world feel more grounded but it also gives the the player a sense of progress. So, that they can physically see they're getting closer to their objective and then just building the levels so that we introduce mechanics in a way that the player understands them naturally versus like I said before with with having the like a tutorialized thing with like text or or a cutaway or something like that. The problem with Xen is that we don't have these npcs who are there to articulate concepts and point to things and direct the player. That was a big hurdle to get over right especially when you're doing like an unbroken first person story where you don't have an opportunity to grab a camera and like you know throw it over like here's your objective look over here on the other side of the level and then the camera you know comes back and rests in your skull again and so I knew that there needed to be more story without npcs what we have to think about with Xen is we have like three different kinds of players coming to Xen right off the bat the first kind is the person who has played black mesa two to five years ago previously to playing Xen and so we have an obligation there to kind of bridge that gap and front load all the information and your objectives kind of re-familiarize yourself with who you are what you're doing what's going on here right? The second kind of player is the person who is just jumping into Xen right away right? Like I'm sure there's people who played episode one or episode two before they played half-life two there's people who played half-life two before they played half-life you know so we had to also be mindful of that player, the person who is you know jumping into this this experience without ha without playing black mesa previously maybe they're just interested in Xen. The border world in half-life 1 comprised of four maps Xen, Gonarch's Lair, Interloper, and Nihilanth. Crowbar collective would retain this structure but unlike the earthbound levels here they'd make an abundance of changes and add hours of extra gameplay on top of valve's original piecemeal design. we're going to tackle each of these chapter by chapter so let's start with gordon's first steps on the border world the first of the four chapters appropriately titled Xen for this not only did the team create a more naturalistic and varied playground for the player to learn the mechanics of this world, but they pulled back on combat in favor of connecting this place to the goings-on back at black mesa. So, we have to be mindful of the people who are returning to this after you know two to five years there is the play through players people who have literally just jumped through the portal in lambda core and have arrived in Xen and then there are the the third kind of player that's the unicorn like the the person who's just jumping into play Xen and that's just what they want to do we have to be mindful of all three of those experiences in a way that's going to allow that information to all be there at the front of Xen no matter who you are no matter when you're playing it and that's when the things like the cold open came into play that was an idea I had where it felt kind of cheap felt kind of dirty like trying to do like a cinematic or something like that within half-life we were talking about the rules of half-life but we knew that like what would be even cheaper or even dirtier would have been like previously on black mesa or something like that you know we did not want to do anything like that we came up with the idea of yeah this cold open we wanted to set this thing up that would just refresh everyone with the information that they needed right we needed to point out that there is there is an antagonist there is you know a great and powerful being holding open a portal in some strange world over there and like we needed to make sure that if the player doesn't hear that dialogue from lambda core that they don't know what's going on over there we still need that player to understand what's going on when they arrive in Xen to just deliver the stakes and the objectives of the story to the player directly so that when you wake up on Xen you have an idea of what you're supposed to be doing no matter if you like we said no matter if you played five years ago or if you just jumped through the portal. I'd say Xen was probably the biggest expansion on what the original was and the main thing I really wanted to put in there was a better tie to earth which we did through the polytunnels which would directly link it to both the lambda core laboratories the question of ethics laboratories and to a smaller extent the anomalous material laboratories in the way that the expansions for half-life had tried to put across. They would have had technology on Xen in little camps so I created the idea that the scientists would have had different teams, a different setup but they'd have had a base camp with introducing more of the scientists into it we thought there needed to be a bit more of a footprint in the Xen levels especially if you look at questionable ethics they've been capturing these these aliens they've been doing experiments on them and it's kind of hard to do that without some sort of forward operating base and so it started as a oh wouldn't it be cool if there was like a base there I think it gives more storytelling that you kind of stumble into because if I remember correctly they don't ever say oh we got a huge base since then it's just something you sort of discover which I think is fun originally there were no polytunnels it was a cave with some crates and various different things what we wanted to do was to really expand on the idea that they were established that they got all these facilities in lambda core for teleporting you there but they needed the opportunity if they were going to bring samples back they needed a location they can create as a base but because it's inside caverns we figured that they wouldn't be able to just randomly teleport in there because how do you know where the cabin is so I started concepting various different technologies that would be portable and that's why the labs in earthbound areas look similar but they're different is because a lot of the technology in the polytunnel labs in Xen are portable and the story we're trying to get across is that really even with all this technology all the money and backing they've only managed to make it as far as the swaps with that particular base the lambda core labs don't really have a laboratory there because their investigations are purely on Xenian technology and it would be very difficult to move one of the Xen teleporters the sort of strange art shape things with the little bubble at the end that wouldn't work because they're positional based that's the way they work is different teleporter technology to the way the ones they've got on earth work exactly human technology as is explained in half-life 2 is based on a different model from xenian technology and is based on a different model from combine technology so combine technology uses a dark matter format of teleporter which only allows you to basically create a hole between dimensions xenian technology allows you to effectively go between dimensions but anywhere on those dimensions and human technology they found a way to use Xen as a slingshot and they can then do localized technology and obviously aperture science which is not part of anything there created technology to get you through shower curtains without getting wet basically which I thought was fantastic you know the idea that they came up with the technology for something as mundane as that but actually it's a lot better than any of the technology that black mesa or the combine even came up with and that's why the combiner interested in finding the borealis in the half-life series is basically to get hold of this portal technology that you can basically fire a portal at the moon and just travel there instantaneously most of the area there is designed for the anomalous materials research in the polytunnels because that's primarily the kind of samples that they would take back temporarily to store so the sample that you slot into the ams would have been studied in another format they would have had those those orange crystals and then the I forget I think it's eight three three eight it's the sample number was given to one of the scientists by the g-man and somehow it's corrupt so it creates a major portal storm that is what triggers the whole series of games off I did note on one of the whiteboards in the polytunnel that there are in fact other sites that you don't get to visit in the game which kind of reflect the idea that was put across in the the expansions by gearbox where there are other locations other portals the focal points it was kind of trying to create this expansive field to Xen without actually making the maps for it the important thing that I wanted to put into that structure of Xen was that the very first area that you get into would be an training spot for your long jump when you first get the long jump you can bounce around a chamber with a portal whilst you're waiting for him to warm it up that doesn't really give you much of an opportunity to see how it works. I wanted to create almost like an obstacle course to start off with not really combat or anything like that so the original first area was basically a long jump training area with some exposition, some environmental storytelling, so we added bridges we added various different things into that for the player to do, we've got a very easy chasm jump where you can jump across it if you fail you don't die you don't fall into the void you fall into and you can walk back up and try again. Because it's never a good idea to punish people for the first time they try something that then carried over to well why would those bridges have been put there what if they were trying to get to a scientist camp and then Craig Murphy, one of the other level designers, he basically took this idea and he just said why not make them polytunnels? That was probably the level of Xen that saw the most polish and development over time because we knew we had to nail the opening to hook players in and to get them once I want to experience what we designed it actually changed a lot over the course of its development and it was kind of the test bed for the the art that we used throughout all of Xen so it was it was that's one of the reasons it was worked on a lot so originally some of the early versions had controller and vault fights in them for example as we kind of played more and more with it it just didn't quite feel right so we knew that what we wanted to do with this was something that valve didn't do well in the original version of Xen where you need to basically shock the player with fantastic visuals this whole new world that they have to come and understand and then you also have to ease them into the mechanics and understanding of this new world so that they kind of get used to it so that was kind of why we ended up going with a relatively slow paced level and that was an intentional design choice after we'd experimented with having combat and felt that it just didn't really fit whatsoever it was a huge discussion of do we keep the old style controls we did a ton of tests with we had different test levels with what's the the proper range for the long jump and do we want to have it where it does the like more doom 2016 style double jump or like the team fortress double jump where you you go more vertical keeping it in in terms of half half-life one we decided to go with more of like the the rocket strapped to your back where it pushes you more horizontal and then once we we nailed the distance we said all right we can't change this distance because that means we got to change every level that we've built for this length and the thing I really like about the long jump is it I think it it perfectly exemplifies like how we embraced the the valve design mechanics because we introduce it in the the Xen cave where it's a really safe jump if you fall you fall into water you don't take any damage and then you can go up and you can try it again and then there's the second jump which is also safe but there is a small gap but it's really hard to mess up and it actually drops you into the healing pool and teaches you oh this blue water heals you the next one is dangerous where there's there's a really large gap and you have to to use the the long jump properly to progress and then the final one in in Xen a is you pull a lever on a pulley system it pulls a floating island closer to you you hop up into that and you don't have those indicators anymore you just have to sort of guess and hope that you can make this super long jump over onto this next rock and and hopefully by that point we've given the the player enough reps that they can use the long jump effectively going forward because it's really important in the Xen levels for a while we just kind of naturally went right into like right from Xen or right from lambda core right to Xen and it was just like the same enemies and the kind of like same squadrons and the same kind of like fighting and the combat was getting just like increasingly like grueling and dull and was not providing anything like special or interesting so in Xen we would have vortigaunts and things like that in Xen and then it quickly became apparent that like okay we we have a lot of stuff planned for the vortigaunts which we'll get into later right like we need to sell this idea of them being passive and in order to create this moment where the player will actually pay attention enough to the vortigaunt to see that their behavior is different I don't think we can have six or seven levels prior where the player is fighting vortigaunts just killing them on site every step of the way right so our plan is gonna be we're gonna drop the vortigaunts out of focus for a long time and then when they come back in and you see that their behavior is different you're immediately going to recognize that there's something off that there's something different with it but so what we had to do then is we have to we have to figure out a way now to fill up Xen a and so we we moved out all the controllers all the a grunts all the vortigaunts and that's where the conversations and discussions about new xenian npcs and monsters came to be that's where we had the idea for the the HEZ the the hazardous environment zombie that's where we had the ideas for the underwater barnacles for the the alpha hound eyes the suicide hound dies enemies that have variations on a theme will still be like recognizable player will still understand how to react and respond when these things show up think about combat and think about combat spaces differently when you're in the earthbound levels you have the hecu and you have the the female assassins and you have vortigans and bull squids and all you have the whole gamut of bad guys and when you get to Xen you lose more than half of those we needed more variety in our combat anyway and that that was just a cool way to do it [Breaking Glass, Gunfire, Flatline] What would happen if an HEV scientist was attacked by a head crab without their helmet on or something the armor is is pretty much impenetrable you can't kill them by shooting them in the body so you have to aim for the head so it's a harder skill test for the player because you actually have to aim and have those accurate shots to take them out you know you'd be hearing this monster coming around you know with like a minor major fracture de-de-de-de-detected you know like those kind of things the blood loss detected. [Garbled text-to-speech system] if I remember correctly Kevin Sisk who's the voice actor for the garden g-man he was like oh we have to have this actually be freaking out and bugging out and like the team definitely agreed we knew we needed to vary up the combat with our limited npc set so we we started adding variants of the enemies even simple ones too like there's a class of the bull squid that will only melee you so he doesn't use his spit attack and and little things like that gave our designers some options to set up different combat scenarios but the main driver was just how our limited time and the fact that we were behind and we needed variations quick there's a lot more to it but for all intents and purposes there's um they're basically skin swaps and then we gave them different attributes to try and vary up the gameplay and introduce new things to the player and also maybe hint at like how a species might evolve or different versions of the of a similar species than the Xen alien life forms it took us a while to kind of nail down the exact gravity that we wanted to use and how the kind of parameters of the long jump and that kind of came about mostly from gun arc actually where we found that we kind of were trying to refine how how the long jump felt when you were fighting Gonarch and kind of how the player can behave with it so that was when we came up for example with the idea of long jumping backwards and sideways being possible I think one of the things that sort of was one of the huge problems with the original Xen is there's not really much to it it's mostly just platforming and i think the example you gave of the spinny platforms that's actually the opening map of half-life one Xen and it is really frustrating you're just arbitrarily jumping between some platforms and hoping you have enough health to survive it and it's just not fun at all so we kind of knew that that was really frustrating and we weren't going to be doing that because at the same time while we thought it wasn't very good we also understood why valve did it that way because they wanted to teach the player the long jump they wanted to teach the players the parameters of the long jump it was just they hadn't really developed that very much so we knew that when we did our version of that map we were going to kind of take the spiritual idea of hopping between the islands and remake it but follow an actual structure and kind of strip away any of the parts that made it frustrating in trial and error so that was kind of the whole thing that we tried to do with our Xen was we tried to spiritually capture a lot of what the original did but not actually mechanically capture any of it because there pretty much wasn't anything, the the butterflies thing you mentioned that's the closest example I can think of of a new mechanic that then introduced really apart from the long jumping and the platforming and again because we were focused very heavily on trying to build this large experience with a cohesive gameplay progression one-off mechanics just don't really feel very good I think and again that kind of ties back to what i was saying earlier about where we may have over-expanded on some of the mechanics and seeped them into each other a bit too much as a kind of form of over-compensation for trying to deal with the fact that we cut out some cool one-off mechanics if that makes any sense and that was kind of why we ended up not really carrying over much of what was in half-life once Xen because as far as i can think we pretty much did everything that they did mechanically we just expanded on them a lot kind of drew them out over multiple maps and then spiritually tried to capture a lot of what those sections represented such as the kind of multi-tier boss fight of Gonarch's Lair island hopping in Xen a the progression through the factory in interloper and then some of the platforming aspects of that as well everything on paper looked pretty manageable and we're like yeah we can break this up into maybe three levels like Xen for example I think is five it's five or six and we thought we could do it in three and due to budgets and resource limits we kept having to break these maps into smaller and smaller chunks so that the game wouldn't absolutely die but yeah and the the length I don't think if if you told us back in 2015 like yeah you're gonna have a four hour Xen experience or whatever it works out to I think we would have laughed at you there were sections that actually evolved into other things there's a giant Xen hub tree that originally was supposed to be what we call the puffball maze where there was these plants that would put out a toxic gas similar to the the poison head crabs in half-life 2. so you would go near it and it would release a cloud of toxins that poison you and bring your health down to one and then the maze itself would be filled with head crabs so these kind of ineffective head crabs that normally you wouldn't care about now become lethal threats when you're under the effects of this poison, you find three power pylons you break them and that deactivates a force field that lets you get out of the puffball maze I really like the puffball maze as an example because it's kind of emblematic of some of the struggles that we had on black mesa and some maybe some of the areas where we may have misstepped potentially and things that we can learn moving forwards from that we built out this map Xen b which was the Xenian swamp level early in Xen and it was originally supposed to be just one map it was originally supposed to include the puffball maze which was really just meant to be this small section of the map it didn't really fit into the flow of the rest of the chapter so we found that when players were encountering the section they weren't really understanding that they needed to go and deactivate these force fields we just found that it was really frustrating and people when we got external testers to play it they were going down to one health and dying and just getting angry that was when in the previous parts of the Xen swamp one of our other level designers craig he came up with the idea for the gate plant at its core it's just basically a door and you just you shoot a little cyst and it opens the door we kind of came up with some of what we thought were quite interesting ways to use these and then we kind of thought okay well you've got this gameplay element that we introduced and we build up through the chapter we need to give it some kind of ending so we kind of thought well the puffball seems like a good place to come up with an ending for this bit of design, it was a really unique and interesting gameplay space but this kind of was emblematic of the problem that we had as we were developing Xen was that these things were kind of coming together in isolation almost and while we were thinking about the the total sum of the parts because as I mentioned you know it was supposed to be the culmination of a mechanic introduced in the previous map typically the way valve layer mechanics and their layer gameplay is they introduce something in a really simple form they then have a second step where it's then the more complicated form of the same puzzle so in the example of Xen we then do the same thing but the cyst this time is around a corner and you have to follow the route to find it and that's kind of you're then learning the mechanic and showing you understand it and then valve normally change it up for the third time they introduce it the puffball maze itself is supposed to be that third step you've learned the mechanic you've mastered it and now we're making sure that you really know what you're doing and we we kind of twist it by introducing other layers to it it kind of got away from us a little bit we then realized a bit later in development this map is massive and it's taking a relatively simple mechanic a bit too far now I stripped it down a bit I massively simplified the space and it ended up becoming the space that you see in the actual version of Xen that we shipped now. I guess the conclusion was just that we just ended up trying to build on these mechanics that we'd come up with make them fit into the overall structure but I think we took it a little bit too far. I think that kind of contributed to some of the overall criticism that people would have of Xen where it was maybe a little bit too long in places some of the gameplay mechanics I think people thought they were a bit too simple to warrant how much we've done with them and it was mostly because we had to come up with these ideas and then try and make them fit into an overall structure and as we did so we ballooned those ideas out a bit much and so it ended up being a series of inflated balloons one after the other that on their own were quite fun to play and worked quite well. it just ended up being perhaps a bit too much in places we actually tried some versions of the game in Xen and in gonarch where there were different paths and it would give you a slightly different experience if you went back and replayed it and it just sort of fought our core mechanics of having a linear game showing our inexperience when we we built the mod we wanted we let all you open all the doors um inside of the facility and the goal was to to ground the facility and make it feel like a real space but it ended up just confusing people because they could go back into these areas that they had nothing there was no objective in there but they could still go in there and they would get lost and confused but we tried to vary it up with examples like the treehub where it's point a to b like you start the level or drop into the level at point a and you can see where you have to go and now you're gonna adventure around this hub and sort of reusing space traversing the same space at different altitudes or going underneath things that's very half-life to us. The original, sorry, the original Gonarch's Lair was a bit of an oddity while half-life had large beasts that you had to defeat this was the game's first bonafide boss fight and it happened almost at the end of the game. The original fight followed common boss fight conventions in that it all took place over three stages. In attempting to fix this the team at crowbar collective decided to broaden these three stages into much larger levels, a cat and mouse chase that takes place over the course of multiple arenas and culminates in a final climactic battle. Chris had these really well laid plans we actually pared them down because we were running out of time we didn't want to have to art you know six levels and we were able to compress that chapter into three what I think really well laid out maps we sort of switch who's in control throughout the map so it starts off and you're in a battle arena and it's more of a standard boss fight you have a bunch of rockets then you you fight it out there the runs away and you're chasing and then in map b we try and flip it so that first she's kind of like pot shotting at you and then eventually out on the ledge she's like chasing you full out and then you get to the crystal cave and she's like smashing through crystals and you're like oh I really have to go now and then it's still even more of a chase set piece in the c map the final map of gonark and then you have your final knockdown drag out battles it was really challenging to have that script flip that design sort of fights itself but i'm really happy with how that turned out we were very aware of the the rose-colored glasses we were sort of up against but we really wanted to do our own take on it especially like once we got into the trenches with it so with Gonarch specifically probably a bit of what the friction you were having and others were having was that role reversal where do I just shoot rockets at her now and then that's what's gonna win or do I just run away I think the the gonarch fight in half-life 1 was was not super well regarded so we we wanted to go in and try and make it something that was our own and we're really happy with some of the set pieces and the way the stuff comes together we think overall the the fight gives her a bit more of a place in the overall story in terms of scale we we definitely wanted it bigger so that the player could long jump around we use the the long jump a lot more as a defensive dodge mechanic than than I think the original half-life. The original game it's basically just three arena fights you fight him and fight the Gonarch in arena one you fight him in arena two you fight him in arena three for me it's a weird experience. Because gordon freeman is really the like the aggro antagonist of that scene like landing in this creature's territory attacking it and like chasing it down and just like killing it and well I feel like in terms of the narrative of like who gordon is and what other kind of experiences you've had I mean it just to me it never i don't know just going after gonarch just seems like very aggressive and like out of character the idea was always to combine the original gun arc and then also to borrow heavily from the episode 2 antlion guardian chase right and now that's an interesting one because the episode 2 antlion guardian chase is that monster is chasing after the player the player has a very specific goal they know where they're they know why they're here they know what they're there to get you know they're trying to get the antlion extract to save alex vance because we've got a very clear objective, very clear stakes there's pressure there's like a ticking time bomb you know you don't want to take too long it all makes sense right? And we didn't have any of those elements in the original Gonarch encounter and so it just felt like this very linear, unengaging kind of it just it never like popped you know nothing ever like the version of Gonarch that we were building in no way reflected what we all had in our minds it just like wasn't there when we would playtest it so my idea was that we needed to create, the way that I approached this was like we needed to create then an antagonistic relationship with the monster if we wanted the player to feel like they need to chase down and kill this creature we want to spend some time here building an antagonistic relationship between the player and the Gon. what we try to do is we try to introduce a strong obvious objective like right up front which is like the tower right and that's how we eventually came up with you know having to touch the crystals to power up the teleporter in order to get to the tower and then ganark appears and you know destroys your teleportation you've kind of accidentally incidentally provoked the creature's rage once we've got the creature defeated we want you to start moving forward again towards that obvious objective like you're still moving towards what you need to be doing and now after a while maybe it feels like something is out there watching you paying attention you know kind of watching you from far maybe you see something you know skittering by some stalactites on the side or something like that right we want this feeling that you're being watched and then suddenly gonark ambushes you and it's a targeted attack it's a personal attack the monster is like after you now as a result of you you know attacking and hurting it in the previous encounter you understand now that the creature is like a threat and should probably be disposed of that gets you to then chase after the creature but then the twist there is that the creature is only pulling you further and further into its layer into its kind of like feeding grounds you know in your excitement to chase down this creature and destroy it then you figure out oh wait you know it's got me just where it wants me and now you're playing the the third level where it is just chasing after you the entire time it's like right on right on your heels trying to kill you you're still trying to get out and we wanted to build that experience up from we wanted it all to culminate in a feeling that was like a knife fight in the closet you know we wanted you to just be like like at the end of this battle you know just you and this huge monster just out of breath like you've got no resources just like trying to destroy this thing while it's also just been beat to shit. it's like trying to kill you. Gonarch in itself, it's sentient in its own way getting a character across in effectively what appears non-sentient is basically a giant crab with a testicle so it's not really anything you can associate or get a character but I wanted to have an antagonistic relationship between the player and the gonark a cat and mouse game as such originally you were going to chase it and then it would chase you and then you chase it and then it would chase you we would have this section where you'd run into the onto the ledge first time you saw it and you get to the ledge and now you have the opportunity to view the arena that you're about to fighting to build up a kind of anticipation that something's gonna happen though so when you're fighting something as tough as basically a boss fight you rarely have the chance to look around your environment which is why there's now a teleporter puzzle one because it's an environmental way of telling the story this is a portal device set up by the vortigans so then they need to power the the teleporter on which gives you the opportunity to force the player to view the entire arena to find spots that they might you know use in the future oh look there's a healing pool that's handy and there's all these pods which have appeared this is the non-verbal way that I set the level up to basically say this feels too easy there's a teleporter it goes straight to the end of the game there's all this ammunition and stuff and health on this is great something's going to happen there's going to be a big fight here isn't there and you go through this whole thing and you hear occasionally the ground shakes and you hear a sort of rumbling sound now we've got two different areas of environmental storytelling which needs to be done which is you want to show that humans had made it to this location but they couldn't get past this location so it's kind of the golden arch there is basically the extent that humans have managed to get to and there was only one team that actually went there originally when the teleporter was used it sent people to various random places um those devices that you see with the spinny lights around it kind of focus points for those teleporters they're not local teleporters they're dimensional anchors if you like because Xen is technically it's a border world it's not within our dimension it's on a different plane of existence and these anchor points allow different teams to travel from the lambda core labs to those locations in this particular one go knox there is where the questionable ethics team win because they are the primary ones for the fauna i've said the whole of that lab is focused on solving well how do we get past this huge crab thing that we can't be none of our weapons affect it we've fired rocket launchers at it we've done this we've done that nothing kills it as you find out as you play it it's very difficult to actually kill in normal gameplay you have to use basically an entire army's worth of weapons to take it down so being scientists you find a better way of doing it which was they found a poison that would work the idea was that I would create an archaeology for the player to dig up the remains if you like of that early team and if you look in the polytunnels you'll notice a whiteboard with various different research teams listed on it and one team has gone missing and one team has been sent to find them at site B and site B is Gonarch map. B - that's the questionable ethics team and if you match the names on the whiteboard you'll find their name plates and lockers in the questionable ethics laboratories So, that was that was my direct tie to the CES chamber to the Gonarch chapter. Through the cyanogen chloride tank which you can carry from the polytunnels all the way to the end and use as a basically a way to kill the gonad without actually firing any shots at it in its final layer which is a it's it's my absolute dream to make a Deus Ex boss from the original Deus Ex. The whole gameplay idea of Deus Ex was you can basically fight the bosses any way you want including not fighting them and not killing them and yes you can in fact get through the whole of the Gonarch's Lair chapter and not kill the Gonarch at the end you don't have to plug the cyanogen canister in you can bypass it leave it and you get an achievement for doing either thing. [Danny asks] And it's your own little 'gnome chomsky' as well Yes yeah our own 'gnome chomsky' which I'm sure is an achievement that nobody likes me for now. Now, we move on to the third chapter: Interloper. The biggest challenge for the team yet because this is the part of black mesa where the narrative connections between half-life 1 and half-life 2 begin. The storytelling wasn't much of a strong suit in Xen because of how disconnected the levels were but this part of the game contains two important areas: the vortigaunt slave village and the alien factory. In half-life 2 the role of the vortigaunts had changed and while some of them weren't non-violent in the original games factory their role within the broader universe of half-life ended up being more complex the same could be said for the interloper tower and the portal technology we see in half-life 2. So, to connect the two games black mesa would have to do a lot of narrative leg work in this chapter and to keep the pace of the game from dipping they'd have to add much more varied combat encounters. Originally, the factory that you visit in interloper you never get to see what it looks like on the outside it's it could be a underground it could be a flat factory it could be a set of cakes it is very difficult to tell what it is because again because the visual side of half-life one it doesn't really show you that in the structure the tower in Xen is actually not a building it's a creature it's a symbiotic creature that's creating a terraforming effect which is why the interloper chapters differ visually from the Xen chapters Xen is effectively pure Xen it's what Xen would look like without any interaction or interference from any kind of outside influence that was another theme that I wanted to get across in the overall plan was that the vortigans and the Nihilanth are terraforming it to be a more an area that they can they can live in comfortably in Chris's original plans it was intended to be four maps and each map is sort of a separate biome of sorts and then the idea was supposed to be that the tower is obviously the alien manufacturer while also housing the nihilanth underneath the island and then kind of powering and keeping him alive as a form of life support system. A lot of the concepts that Chris came up with for Xen were around symbiosis and so the tower is supposed to be kind of a half organic half mechanical creature that is alive by itself and then you so you have the outdoor sections which kind of represent the island that's been corrupted by the influence of the tower the waste and respiratory systems which are the first opening maps of inteloper and then you get to the sort of digestive system which is the conveyors moving things around and you come up to the nervous system later on which is sort of the top level of the tower and so we kind of built it out that way originally and we found firstly it didn't feel very climatic mostly it was a bit too exploration based especially because with Xen we'd leaned quite heavily into the exploration area so we kind of set about expanding on the ideas that we thought worked and could be built into a gameplay structure and that was kind of how interloper ended up getting a bit dragged out a bit longer than perhaps we'd originally intended and by the time we'd reached that point in development where we were expanding on these we didn't have the resources or the time or the luxury of being able to have all this kind of variety that we wanted so we ended up kind of going with what we thought worked building out what we thought worked and that was kind of how interloper ended up being the way it was and these were all really interesting things to reflect on and think about when we heard what people had to say about it so it was a really interesting learning experience for us to sort of teach us in the future how to focus on gameplay in the right ways how to build something better going forwards if that makes sense so interloper a1 what we call the guard chase it started off in a bunch of different versions I can't remember who had the original concept for it but we knew we wanted more gargantuas in the game because they're they're fairly underutilized they're like a a big bad enemy and I think you only see them in power up and surface tension so we we wanted them to have some sort of indigenous area in interloper and originally we were gonna do a chase sequence where um kind of like the lion king where there's just like this fleet of pound eyes and bull squids and they're all running away from you and you're like intermixed in in this chase with guards behind you and from there it sort of um evolved into more of this like scooby-doo every door you open the bad guys behind as you run down it it just kind of gets more crazy and crazy and we wanted to to put more and more pressure on the player as the the chase evolved we're super aware of the highs and lows and we knew we couldn't go to two high points in a row and it was something we really tried to refine down and it's even as simple as having um after the controller fight in interloper a you go down an elevator and originally that was going to go into another combat section what we call the the mining area and that ended up being cut and it worked out well because it gives you that low now of now you can sort of chilly walk through this valley there's a couple of jumping sections you wind your way up some roots and then it drops you into the gargantua chase. Yeah, if you if you do too many of the combat stuff it burns the player out and they they don't get any respite, they can't take anything in because they're constantly under duress and I think that's a big part of the half-life series is being able to take into your surroundings and it helps add to the grounding of even though you have these crazy fantastical sci-fi stories the fact that you have a moment to breathe and like look around and see these structures and everything that was built helps it feel more real what ended up happening was we, as I mentioned we found a lot of the exploration just wasn't really that necessary at this point or that interesting because we'd already done a lot of it so we ended up cutting out all of the exploration we then found well it's not fun it's not exciting it's not interesting it's no different from again to a chasing surface tension it doesn't raise the stakes at all. So, I started thinking about ways to make it a bit more interesting the first solution was narratively driven which didn't really help much it was the instead of you just jumping across the gap and evading him you jump across the gap you turn around and then he fights another gargantuar and so they kind of have a bit of a territory fight and they both fall off the cliff and it was supposed to be a fun little set piece to cap off your chase with that gargantuar but of course we then realized well this doesn't actually make the chase any more interesting with another one of our level designers jordan me and him kind of did a whole bunch of back and forth to try and build in these other mechanics into the chase such as what ended up being in the chase where you kind of climb up little bits you dodge through little obstacles you duck underneath things you break things and so we ended up building a version of the chase which was one gargantuar and you kind of have a whole obstacle course as you're running away from him at the same time this was when gonark was being worked on and developed we found that these mechanics were quite fun and quite interesting and we pulled a lot of those mechanics into gonarch and so I worked on the final map of gonart's layer as well I kind of plagiarized my own ideas I did a lot of the interesting stuff in the chase there where you have to like break webs where you have to dodge left and right around things where you have to long jump down gaps and stuff like that because I just we just felt it made Gonarch more interesting and we kind of thought that was where we should focus the bulk of the interesting and unique ideas because there's a whole chapter structured around Gonarch but then of course you run into the problem of the gargantuar is effectively just Gonarch there isn't really much of a difference between them they're just these two big monsters that chase you effectively and around that point we started thinking well maybe we should just get rid of it entirely it doesn't really add anything unique and interesting it's not that much fun it's using elements that we've now ported back into Gonarch that work well there. What can we bring to the table with it? We ended up just talking about what the hell can we do to make this fun if the stampede doesn't work and we then realized well we've got two gargs at the end who are fighting each other that's how we cap off the chase why don't we just have multiple gargs throughout the chase rather than having one garg chase you around multiple obstacles we could have it so that you get away from one garg and then you find there's another one. you get away from one and then there's another you get away from him but then there's two more I know you get away from him and there's three more and then you come back and meet with the one that was chasing you earlier and that was kind of how the gargantua chase ended up being this entire crazy romp through a whole map where Joel built an amazing track for it and then we thought right at the end why don't you just turn around and you see there's eight gargantuas standing there looking at you roaring and kind of being angry at you and we thought that would be the really nice cap off to it so it kind of ended up being this really big set piece that we thought worked really well and helped pace the chapter out a bit more that still separated itself from Gonarch while using a lot of the mechanics that you'd learned in Gonarch. So, that kind of just got built into this this big thing as a sort of a way of trying to to fill the pacing of the chapter overall but also kind of fit in for some of the mechanics that we cut out and some of the ideas we hadn't explored that we felt did add to the game. Interloper, like I said I think interactivity is a huge thing with the the half-life series even going back to half-life 1 and to feel like you're in the world and affecting the world you're the the reason that this whole disaster kicked off so we wanted to continue that of you're changing the world you're having an impact in the world you're having an impact on the story because a lot of stories told these days it feels like the main character is just along for the ride you get told where to go you get told what to do so we we wanted the the player to have some stake in it in the earlier Xen levels it's it's about engaging the player and then as you get into the interloper levels um we wanted it to be like you're going into this alien factory and just breaking everything like you're you're messing up all their stuff to to make it feel like you're weaving through these machines and that like you're the alien now in someone else's world like just breaking everything let me back up too first ben wanted to introduce the idea of the passive vortigaunts because it's actually in half-life one when you're in the factory the vortigaunts won't attack you and i think most people myself included didn't pick up on that so ben and others wanted to introduce a story beat that we have we show these vortigaunts as slaves as they're being taken over and forced into these labor camps more or less so we have this reveal of this large structure on a cliff side so the player knows they have to eventually go over there and they long jump over to it and then there's this short tunnel sequence where you can actually hear the vortigaunts above you in distress and getting attacked more less and then we wind you around around to this framed window where you can see an A-grunt beating up of ortagon the whole goal is to to make you feel bad for these warts and I think most people get it they take out the A-grunts but they they try and leave the vortigaunts alone and then we reinforce it by after you go up the elevator you push a button and there's this large reveal of the interior of the village you're blocked there's nothing you can do to progress and there's a vortigaunt he kind of shakes his head at you and walks away and then another one comes up and it pushes the button and lets you through so they they're they're sort of helping you along your your path and it makes you empathize a little bit more with the vortigaunts there is a vortigaunt village in the original half-life it's not a village though it's kind of like there are these weird little caves that I think are like carved out of these walls that might have like like a light fixture or something like you know kind of yeah something that looks like a candle or something hanging on a wall which makes it feel like it's a residence and I believe that's the only kind of like smattering of backstory or like context for like you know the vortigaunts existing in Xen. I don't know what your experience was playing the first half-life but I did not understand that the vortigaunts were pacifist my first couple of run-throughs right. And that's I think that's exactly what i was saying earlier is that because i've been kind of shooting them on sight in every level previously and so that when I see one who doesn't immediately go to attack me I don't my brain doesn't you know take the few seconds necessary to to actually process that this thing is not a threat. So we, wanted to take our time and really make a moment where the player is going to be absorbing this story beat especially because I think thematically half-life is so good in these kind of like story reversals chapter by chapter where just one other little thing is revealed and suddenly that turns you know your expectations or your thoughts on on what had been happening like on its head and it just half life is so amazing because it does that so consistently you know every chapter reveals a bigger part of this mystery and you the player you're the single entity moving through the story who's kind of piecing it all together as you go the big turn in interloper is obviously the reveal of these the vortigaunts are not a inherently angry evil species you know in fact they are pitiable and kind of like pathetic and being you know oppressed by something bigger and crueler you know they're being made to act against their will. So, yeah with all these kind of things in mind about like how important the vortigaunts are in the story and how their role changes from half-life one to half-life two there's a very important connective tissue that we need to acknowledge about how they go from enemies and half-life one to these kind of like downtrodden fellow members of the resistance in half-life 2. The Vortagaunt village it had multiple roles and the first one like I talked about is just introducing them as helping you along your your journey and sort of teeing things up for half-life 2. you get to see a little bit of of where they live in in a little bit about their their culture details on the wall of like really crude drawings of gordon freeman reading into like their their ability to be telepaths and then at the top in the control room you're again blocked and we show you the controllers taking over the vortigaunts so it's a set piece specifically designed to show that mechanic you can see the lines going from their heads into the vortigaunts and then their their eyes change color from just the the regular texture to like a really glowing red which you see through all of earthbound we wanted people to feel bad for them and we wanted people to to target the controllers that that are controlling the vortigaunts first sort of create that that priority target list to hopefully have more interesting combat what I called the Akira treatment is that we needed glowing red eyes that left light trails behind them when you encountered an enemy vortigaunt that would very quickly to me kind of you know glowing, a glowing red eye usually means enemy in video game talk, right? So, that would help make the vortigaunts seem aggro and evil whenever you encountered them on earth so like the big first step was like we have to retroactively change all of our earth vortigaunts into these new red-eyed glowing vortigaunts right the second thing is looking at vortigaunt lore in terms of what do they look like right our vortigaunt resistance members and half-life 2 they don't wear the green shackles the that very familiar thing about the vortigaunts when you'd be going through like the hammer editor and they were called the alien slaves right in the original game that's because they're wearing these like weird kind of like green glowing shackles all over their bodies to retroactively fit that into the game we looked at the only instance of those shackles in half-life 2 which is when there is a vortigaunt push broom at the very beginning in point insertion he's just he's a slave right he's like a slave to the combine and he's still wearing his shackles obviously those shackles are part of what makes them slaves part of what controls them okay what do you want to control about a vortigaunt why what is it about a vortigaunt that you would need the shackles to control they have their vortigaunt like vortescence powers which we see where they can you know kind of go in between realms they can kind of teleport around they've got the they seem to have some kind of hive mind where they all like you can communicate or something like that and then they've got these electricity powers they've got this natural electric power and to me that seems like if you're the slave master if you're the controllers to in order to make sure that your slaves do not you know instigate a rebellion or something like that you're going to need to control their natural weapons right so those shackles must in some way act as like an off switch to their electric powers and also their kind of like you know psychic connection that you know connects them to other ports. Now that we know what those look like we also have to figure out what that what that state change is going to look like right like how are we going to represent a vortigaunt going from a passive state to the aggro state and that's how we we came up you know like the controller flies down and you know you know shoots out these beams and then you see the vortigaunts like reacting in fear that was all very important in terms of like selling the idea that the vortigaunts do not like the experience of being controlled that was also very important there is like in order to kind of like make the player feel sympathy right like in order to make them feel anything it's it's very important to kind of see what the vortigaunt thinks about the situation you know if you see that creature in peril hopefully that's tugging on your empathy empathy bone a little you know like hopefully that's like it just does that kind of half-life turn it allows you to see this character this story from the other side all of a sudden and that's like those are those magic moments in half-life when suddenly it's all different like the whole story has changed everything that that turn is again it kind of echoes these turns that half-life does continually the entire time and the one that I gravitate towards this this kind of light bulb experience for me was and this is I did not realize this until years after playing the game and I might be completely wrong but this is my interpretation of it I believe that in the the scene we've got at the very beginning of we've got 'hostiles' which is the chapter where you discover that a blood thirsty - you know that a military cleanup crew is coming to eliminate everyone associated with the project or the disaster right? [For god's sake, open the silo door! They're coming for us it's our only way out! Oh my God! they're coming for us it's our only way out oh my god you know we're doomed] And yeah like I said I always thought that meant is the aliens that are coming after these characters right it's like he's trying to like they're coming for us it's our only way out like get us out of here but then I realized that the silo door he's trying to open up is to blast pit and when at the end of the level you are told to go into through those silo doors into blast pit and that's to like worm your way through the facility to avoid this military cleanup crew so that scientist who's pounding on the wall on that window he's not saying they're coming for us it's our only way out like he's not saying the aliens are coming for us like we have to get up to the surface to safety I believe he's saying like the military is coming for us we're we are going to be killed by them we have to get out of here oh my god we're doomed and then he runs off and he hits like a trip mine right which I believe is the designer trying to compensate for this character not being able to turn around and give you a more you know more information on the story to tell you like it's a bloodthirsty military cleanup crew you know like I think that's very specific. I believe it's the same thing with the vorts where it's like oh these vorts they're evil they're monsters they're terrible but then you actually get to see them and you understand that oh they are doing this against their will this is not just the cut and dry story that you that you believed it was you know that was being served to you what I get the most gratification from is when the vort stuff works when people see it when they recognize it immediately like what's going on and when they like feel bad for them and don't want to you know when they when they then don't kill every single vort they see afterwards just because they can without consequence it's like amazing that that it works so effectively that you know it tugs on the empathy enough that people understand the creatures understand the character's plight I couldn't imagine a better you know just like a better scenario for that that's what we wanted so it I think the the Xen levels for what I pulled away personally is how the narrative connects to the design like I said we have the the interloper a set piece where we introduce the vorts as sympathetic I think that's a really important beat for that sets up the rest of the chapter and a lot of people try not to harm the vorts because of it which I think is is interesting in inside of a video game and then just the the really the reinforcement of how to build your mechanics and how to introduce things and not have the one-off mechanics that people walk into blind that and how to properly scope because everything on paper looks doable you have to find ways to actually get things tangible so that you can scope it and have an idea of how long it's going to take so that you you can get it done in a reasonable amount of time it evolved a lot as as we built it out and as we sort of started to see it in its whole and then what we really wanted to do and it's something that we didn't quite accomplish I don't think is we wanted to show the process of the A-grunts getting manufactured so at the very start of I believe it's Interloper C you see an empty pod and it's not lit up it's just a gray pod and then it goes into a machine and then on the other side of that machine it's now it's lit up in green and originally we were going to have that where you could see like green ooze like coming into a machine and then if you shot a a pod before it was baked just a rag doll egg run would would flop out of it it would go and get baked and then as it progressed now you would shoot it and there would actually be live A-grunts and then there was a whole section where you're supposed to see their armor getting attached and pretty much we wanted to tell the story of how this army was made it's one of our regrets that we didn't we weren't able to really nail that but you can see elements of it throughout where the the A-grunts are on the wall and the control room's interloper C1 and you can see like the early bits of that factory of how these pods are getting made the room just before what we call the brain it has those vertical blue columns and then there's some scientists and i believe some hecu that are captured there and that's a call back to Lambda Core where the guy says until the team started being collected themselves before the survey members started being collected themselves that is so we wanted to show where these these people ended up and also the sort of the flip side of questionable ethics like what the the the alien version of it so it's a small hint to that and the main goal of that though is just as re-armorment so that you get all all your your gadgets back before starting in the hill and fight and then there's a small what we call suck events that pulls you through to the next room where there's just a giant galaxy hologram and then you wind your way up onto the teleporter we were definitely mimicking the citadel and not only just as a callback but like i said earlier just so that that could be your your waypoint your guide point for the entire adventure and we wanted it to to pay off in the end where you actually get to you first get to Xen and you see this tower miles in the distance and now you're actually on top of it and we have some story points where you can hear like echoes of voices from the earthbound chapters. As always with half-life you're the one that decides to jump into the portal you're in control of your progression one of the big takeaways I have from making this project is I'm also the one that has to like look at the budgets and stuff and sort of evaluate if we do this thing is it going to make its money back is it going to be worth the time we spend on it and what we saw a lot of it because you have this long drawn out interloper fight and then you get to the the top of the brain room and there's this the smaller teleporter and people like this has to be it this has to be the jump that takes me into the hill lamp to do the final boss and it's a little bit of a fake out because it's a small jump that takes you just outside the tower to look at the super big red teleporter and we saw a couple of people welling up there and and sort of getting some sort of emotional impact there and and sort of my big takeaway was like had I only looked at it in terms of funding and counting beans like I don't think you get that payoff if you just look at it in a spreadsheet I think that's where you have to trust your designers Like hey you know this is going to take time and effort it's going to be a struggle and it's going to come down to last minute but this is going to be worth it and this is what's going to give you that big payoff. Okay, we're almost at the finish line. With the bones of Xen complete all that was left was the final climactic boss fight the encounter with the huge floating baby itself Nihilanth or Nihilanth i'm still not quite sure how it's pronounced. The original game's boss fight was tricky the only way to kill the floating bugger was with a trick shot you had to figure out meanwhile he was capable of throwing portals at you that teleported you to levels that resembled counter-strike 1.6 jump maps filled with alien controllers the end result was a boss fight that left you feeling with a sense of relief rather than accomplishment but again it wasn't exactly something the team could cut this was the final boss of half-life after all regardless of how people felt about it. Our mantra for building the Nihilanth Chris built out these elaborate plans and we started with like sort of the simple stuff and and built up to what it eventually ended up being we knew we didn't want to take the player out of the room we wanted to simplify it we wanted to have a combat space that the player could understand and like stay in and fight one of the things you don't you try not to do in game design is if you introduce something to the player you don't change it people aren't going to pick up on that and one of the things they do there is now suddenly it's low gravity which is the rest of Xen if I remember it doesn't have low gravity so that that feels weird to have that sudden change and then the teleports were frustrating because you'd have this slow moving thing it would build up tension but not in a good way where you're just like no no no no no and then you get teleported to another room now you gotta do first person platforming to get back to the fight where you really want to be so we tested bringing in other npcs like hound eyes and stuff that didn't test very well and what we ended up doing was having the nahilanth pull in parts of earth a as a resupply so that you could get some more resources throughout the fight and be sort of as a nod to the previous teleport section of like okay he's not teleporting you places but he's bringing these other things in and then he ends up throwing like security jeeps and tanks at you and stuff so like a call back to earth a call back to half-life 1 the whole thing was built to be a spectacle the real challenging boss fight I think if we're being honest is gonarch and then we wanted this to just be like a a crazy spectacle challenging but like we wanted the player to sort of feel satisfied not challenged that was probably like the pinnacle of us working cohesively as a team everybody was frustrated and that it wasn't coming together but we weren't frustrated at each other we were we were trying to take bite off a little bit at a time um and it was always the idea of oh we're gonna try this thing it may not stay this way we can always try other things later but first let's do this see how it goes then we'll try the more elaborate ideas then we'll try the more elaborate ideas and then we'll remix it if we need to um and it worked really well in delivering us to where we needed to be with that fight I think actually the the crystal the head opening up and the crystal was came in later in the boss because we we sort of realized that we had to do a nod to to how you actually defeated him in half-life 1 we built out again rule of threes we had phase one where you break the shield charger phase two where he's healing himself with orange crystals that come out of the ground and then phase three he just gets super mad and blows away all your cover and then now you're hurting him he can't re-heal he doesn't have a shield anymore you damage him enough to it actually goes into a phase four where he's he's basically defeated but he's more or less short-circuiting so like everything's going off at once and that's why you have that crazy overbearing effects going on his head opens up and then he tilts it back so that you can get a shot on it and take out the crystal to finish him off in the original game and obviously with the law master idea the downside is we didn't have mark laidlaw on hand to ask every question you don't really want to to bug the person that wrote half-life um every five minutes on twitter or email i sent him a few emails about various things that I really wanted I can't remember if we responded no that's a long time ago but so there was a lot of writing involved with the Nihilanth a lot of thought into what is the Nihilanth? who is Nihilanth? and why is he there? it's probably the only place in the entire game we actually have combine technology on view although it's very subtly placed it's basically the life support chair that he's sitting on is combine technology this is because it's not specifically explained and i'd have to look it up now so I won't do that but it's in the back of my head I remember reading a few in a few places that the Nihilanth was escaping the combine and that they were slaves to the combine so obviously the combine which is sort of this kardashev i think level three species they built dyson spheres they're way beyond the technology of anything that earth has even encountered which is why it took them seven hours to you know defeat the earth forces the Nihilanth is obviously a very powerful psychic creature as you keep hearing him in your head as you go through the chapter so that's part of the storytelling that we try and do that's in the original as well you go into chapters you hear him speaking in your head we start the nile and fight right at the start of Xen. So, right at the very start of Xen as you portal in you're traveling through a wormhole portal technology is directly tied to the Nihilanth in the original game there was a game mechanic where he would fire teleporter balls at you now in the 90s I am quite old so I do remember all of the 90s games like in quake 1 they have teleporter boss basically the way you you beat the end boss of quake 1 shobna gurath is you wait for this little ball to fly through him and then you telephrack him and it was a it was a thing that you found in those 90s games that developers loved making puzzle boss fights the idea that you have to solve a puzzle whilst you're fighting an end boss which worked brilliantly back then because the pace was a bit slower graphics were not potentially as impressive there wasn't as much going on the idea being that if you have these breaks in the combat with the teleportables you can dodge them in the in the original by standing behind columns but if you get teleported well the boss fight stops all of a sudden you're in a jumping puzzle I remember from the original being massively disappointed oh it's another short Negorath boss fight where you've got to do a jumping puzzle yes it gives us an opportunity to pick some ammunition up but it breaks the game flow because you've broken the the fight if you like it's no longer a frenetic action scene it's now a frenetic action scene followed by menial task followed by phonetic action scene and the idea was that in the original game you had to blow up crystals that would heal it otherwise the boss fight would just go on for ages and ages so we've got that mechanic from the original in there it's got shields as an added mechanic simply to make it slightly more complicated where you can take out panels of the shield and then shoot through those or you can disable the shields entirely which makes the boss fight a lot easier and that again brings in the idea that if you think about the fight as you're fighting it it makes the fight easier one person one of our testers worked out that if you were to drop three satchel charges at them one each you could detonate them at exactly the same time as the crystals come up which just intent that phase instantly and you were instantly into the final phase of the fight and you could basically finish the thing in about two minutes the teleporting side of it I thought in the terminator films when they portal in the time sphere if you like it sort of cuts a chunk out of it so what would that chunk look like if you were on the other side of it so basically those sections of facility are areas of of the facility that the island has tried to rip out of reality and drop on your head in a sort of panicked i'm just going to throw everything at you which is why you get cars and rocks thrown at you this is sort of okay i'll try something bigger so he tries to rip up entire buildings to throw at you which just so happened to have very handily place ammunition and health and you have to suspend disbelief on that one just a little bit but basically it's our way of you know recouping your ammunition providing the gameplay mechanic of the teleporting from the original and also it kind of works with the flow of the fight rather than detaching the player from it so I felt that if you had any gaps in the fight it wouldn't be the same thing you really need to have the fight as one big final moment with the Nihilanth portal technology is really important because he basically creates a focal point for Xen in himself he controls all of the creatures he also controls in the same way that the controllers have a psychic connection to the slaves the vortigaunts with the slave collars are basically connected to the controllers controllers are basically a lesser form of the Nihilanth and he has control over the controllers who control the vortigaunts and everything else is kind of connected to that he sits not at the top of the interloper tower he sits below it in the roots of the tower which you can see above him um you'll see these sort of curling roots which are actually the the base of the tower and the Nihilanth is the brain he's the overall thing he controls all the portal technology all the the areas so his psychic prowess if you like transcends dimensional barriers it's not a matter of or he can make you teleport from a to b or from a room he can basically create a portal the same way in half-life 2 they open a dark energy portal and you can start seeing combine on their home world and it's the idea that they're going to open that through the Nihilanth can do the same thing which is why you get all these creatures teleporting into earth they're not using a device they're literally sent there by the night because he feels you're invading his world and enough is enough i don't know the full story of the g-man because it's not half-life 3 isn't out yet I have read Mark Laidlaw's Epistle 3. it kind of explains it in a way but it it's very vague for obvious reasons and i didn't feel that it would be a good idea if we kind of create a conclusion to the G-man the Nihilanth the combine anything like that we left it as vague as possible it's not our place to write the law of half-life that's valves the Nihilanth isn't really a fighting boss it's a it's a kind of a boss that tells the end story which then continues into the endgame chapter where you see the final explosion of the island and the player if they're sort of really engrossed in the story suddenly realize they've just killed possibly the last of its species and just the power of the creature that you've killed is shown as he basically his psychic powers create a mini black hole which then implodes and the whole island explodes in this vast explosion that would easily have wiped you out if the g-man hadn't popped in and just gone actually no I think we're going to keep you on for the next game and then off you go and you go through this whole thing where the g-man is now controlling what you're seeing and you kind of get the feeling that you're not actually there in endgame neither does the g-man what you're seeing is a projection which is actually completely true the g-man is a projection from a technical perspective he is in a box room that's got black texture everywhere and all the lighting is just switched and then the camera moves through each different part of the level and the tram that you see at the end is kind of that little vessel before he moves you into stasis or storage or whatever it is that he did I won't spoil the half-life alex game as to what it is that you get put into rather an anti-climax after what you've just survived the niles is very important from the perspective that you have basically removed a barrier from the combine the invasions you see on earth are caused by the Nihilanth not by the combine the combine fill the void that you create when you kill the Nihilanth and then they take over the world in seven minutes or seven hours or whatever it was something in the war you you have quite an impact on wrecking the planet as a as a player you don't really win like this you kind of end the world by beating the Nihilanth you think you're winning you're not so I think we we stayed pretty faithful to actually what G-man says we wanted to have more spectacle like if with the the island blowing up and we wanted to do a callback to the citadel and half-life 2 where time freezes in in the G-man emerges out of a doorway and then other than that for the rest of the lines of the delivery we tried to find assets we weren't really using like the black hole for example is in the background of one of the shots that was originally gonna be in Xenei as part of the the sky box but it didn't quite fit in so we decided to reuse it there and then I think it was actually nate that had the idea to break apart the tram sort of for the a it comes together around you and then if you do the bad ending it like gets ripped apart and then you go through a bad portal and get the the bad ending so that was just sort of like everybody having their input and little parts adding up to more than it was [Static Electricity & Aliens Roaring] Xen is a remarkable achievement the final act of a team that had earned its black belt in valvian and game design over the course of a decade-long refurbishment. Black mesa Xen was a sprawling richly designed often beautiful single player experience which also did a lot of work to tie together much of the narrative baggage between the two original games. When the credits roll on black mesa it features the names of hundreds of people who touched the project over the years many of whom have gone on to have their own careers in games. But for the folks at crowbar collective who shipped 1.0 and rebuilt Xen what comes next? because if there's one thing i'm sure of being a fan of this series as long as I have and someone who loved playing black mesa we need more games like this more games that follow the valvian design principles. It was crazy that we released almost the the same month as alex as it was the same month as alex so it was it was great to have that that just line up and then for us going forward we we really want to internalize all the things we've learned especially on the scope and on on being able to to do this as a full production studio and not just a bunch of volunteers or part-timers who can contribute when they're available but like actually making games on a consistent basis with more regular schedules and one of the unsung parts I think of the the whole project is just how we're able to communicate we're super fortunate that COVID hitting and everything really didn't impact us because we're a remote studio to begin with as hard as it's been to deal with with covid and and just life in general like we're really fortunate to that we were able to work within those constraints going forward it's just improving our craft and and yeah and we're going to be doing our own thing going forward. Valve threw us the keys to the kingdom and let us do whatever the heck we wanted to that it's a life - it's incredible you know what I mean? Like the idea that they did this I don't know if the the decision to let us make this game in the first place to let us put it on steam to let us sell it like I don't know if these things were like the whole valve crew is assembled around the table and they're deliberating over whether or not they're gonna let little black mesa you know do this stuff or if it's literally just like a handwave like 'yea, fuck it' you know like an email I don't know what that decision was like but they let us do it and that's been the coolest thing ever it's it's an opportunity to to just nerd out on my favorite piece of like pop culture ever you know to just like tear it open and dig into it and study every little thing you know like it's just been an amazing experience the team actually met with valve in 2015 they went to do a um a meet up at valve and did the valve tour and stuff like that to my knowledge most of the valve team said they hadn't played it but the ones that did play it said they'd liked it and then we've also got Dario Casali one of the original level designers said that he in an interview somewhere I think that he would play black mesa instead of half-life to get reacquainted with the series when he was working on half-life alex which to us like mesa level designers is pretty much the ultimate honor because that man is a fantastic level designer and then of course half-life 1 is a masterpiece a generational masterpiece of the game so to hear that from someone that worked on it and had quite a meaningful role in it, was absolutely incredible what I think about what I would want to do in the future is I mean listen if an opportunity comes down the line to work on another half-life anything in any context - like of course I would take that of course my concern for for now is like what my interests are is I just want to make games that still to me, encapsulate all the things that half-life does well you know I want to continue like i've just been working on puzzles and stories and structure in the half-life genres you know I just I feel like I really understand that stuff and I would love more opportunities to do that so any any opportunity that would provide a game where you can mix story puzzles combat and platforming you know in a fun and engaging way like i would be completely happy to do that it's story platforming puzzles and combat and it's just like that's that's it man those are the four quadrants that's like all I need to you know feel warm and tingly and I love the process of of hammering those things out I love collaborating with this team like i've worked with this team for 15 years we have a shorthand you know I mean we understand each other you know we can talk to each other where we can immediately kind of pick up what we're what we're trying to convey in ways that would be easier talking to these people than it would be to talk to anybody else what this I think I can only really talk about what it means like in my personal context I don't want to like speak for what it what it means for people in the industry because I don't know and I don't want to put us on like - i don't want to say that we're more than we are because it started as a volunteer project and I think that spirit really carried through even while we were grinding on it to release it in retail but for me it's it's sort of the evolution of of really understanding how to make games and and learning process never stops but i'm starting to understand I think how we can tie all these elements together and make things even better in the future for me it started as i'm going to do this project as a portfolio piece and it's going to give me a job in the industry and it did and then I ended up getting laid off and then it became my career so like it's been a really interesting like up and down journey um i I think this this coming march will be 15 years on black mesa for me so it's it's almost half my life of of working on a project with people who really care about that project and who wanted to see it through and and have it be enjoyable for for everybody that plays it. [gordon freeman you finally found us] [so this is the guy h I thought you'd] [never make it oh nonsense hunter nothing] [stands in the way of our errant knight] [in shining high impact reactive armor] all right let's see if I have any scientist phrases I could remember, okay. Why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties with my brains and your brawn we'll make an excellent team hello gordon freeman it's good to see you they're waiting for you gordon in the test chamber you got any more i'm trying to remember oh man Hello!! I feel like this one's like that it's just weird little barks they do Yeah if you talk to them enough they
that it's just weird little barks they do Yeah if you talk to them enough they say can't you see can't you see i'm busy Hello Gordon. I feel like there's one of those. oh yeah I should do all the sounds when i get hit 'BAAAAH' 'DUUUR' 'UUUGHH' hello gordon why do we all have to wear these ridiculous ties just give some quick feedback I think it's the overhaul helped a lot I just kind of want to see us start to simplify and really smooth out the rough parts like these animations for example they they take way too long um they're trying to emulate the burning barrel i get that but they they still take too long we need more games like this more games that follow the valvian design principles cool all right i think we're good these moths are like swarming it's wild isn't it no idea why they're over here there's no light over here ah look it was hiding a white claw the whole fuckin' time wew oh that shot looks so fuckin' good dude about that beer I owed you i'm dressed as the wrong fucker oh boy look at that sky look at this shit we have a really weird job
I remember being hyped for this in high school. Now I'm a college graduate and 8 years into the working world. This game that started out as a mod has existed half of my life. It's pretty amazing that Valve allowed them to sell this and make a profit. I can only imagine the reaction of another company like Nintendo.
Black Mesa is so incredible.
Reminded me of a time when everything was not open world and level design was key. One of the best games of all time imo.
Now I know what I'm playing. It's been about 2-3 years since my last playthrough of the Half-lifes. They had so many great old mods/games.
I miss Deathmatch Classic (HL version of quake).
Nothing beats OG Counter Strike WC3 Frozen Throne servers though.
I'm playing this right now for the first time and my expectations were exceeded greatly. The rush I felt when I first cracked open that CD case years ago as Gordon stared back at me and I rode that tram into the facility was even more intense this go round. Everyone needs to play this. Everyone.
Awesome game
Playing Black Mesa in VR was super cool! Played Alyx right after that, and honestly enjoyed them both equally.
Edit: I messed up and thought I played Black Mesa, but really it was HL1 in VR. Sorry for the confusion.
Now I have "Still Alive" from Portal stuck in my head...
That’s crazy this popped up, I literally just completed it today