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I'm quite excited for the final release of Black Mesa, as someone who only completed the original Half-Life in the last few years (after it came to Linux) playing through a heavily improved version is going to be great.

Anyway, the Black Mesa team recently put out another progress report which shows off various work going towards the final release.

It's quite a short post though, giving only a few details on what they're working on like getting the Gonarch chapter fully "arted" with it now in the hands of their animators. On top of that, with the main Xen boss Nihilanth they've "made huge strides" including a full "feature set of attacks, defenses, AI, as well as effects". However, it sounds like they're keeping Nihilanth under wraps to not spoil it.

They also showed off some comparison shots of how it's looking (click for bigger):

You can find Black Mesa on Steam, currently in Early Access.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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6 comments

M@GOid Feb 4, 2019
Black Mesa is very buggy for me, on a RX570 card. Only the beta version works more or less stable, but at a cost of very low performance, even turning down graphic quality settings.

It is a Source engine game, but is nothing like Valve games, or other projects I had tested. Looks like the developers did not have a AMD card or simply didn't care for the quality of the Linux port.

Too bad because the game looks promising, but to play it as is right now is a disappointing experience for me. I tried to get a refund a while ago, before the released a beta that allowed me to start to play it. I regret not getting a refund the day I bought it, naively hopping that the they would make it playable in a short time.
fabertawe Feb 4, 2019
Bought this a while ago but I'll not even install it until release. Looking forward to revisiting Black Mesa ^_^
sub Feb 4, 2019
I'm sure they're aiming for a 25th anniversary release.
rea987 Feb 4, 2019
For those who are looking to play the game with less issues on Linux should opt-in to public-beta branch.
jarhead_h Feb 4, 2019
I can't applaud the Black Mesa team enough for what they've done, but there is one criticism that I have - DOOM(2016) runs considerably better on my 1060 6GB than Black Mesa does. Also, this is not a fan project anymore, it's a purchasable game on Steam. That means the people working on this are professionals first, and there game is a product that should be viewed critically. So, yeas, the fact that the game runs terribly on current medium hardware with an engine that should be in the hundreds of FPS with all settings maxed out is a problem that needs addressing.

I am looking forward to Xen, if only because I'm hoping that the Black Mesa team can improve it over what Valve delivered with the original game. It's definitely much prettier. I'm hoping that it's not going to be the awful slog to the finish that the original game is once you get to Xen.
Zuul Feb 5, 2019
Black Mesa runs fine on Linux...WITH PROTON smh
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