Black Mesa: Source Interview with RPS

Hectic Glenn · May 10, 2012

You may have heard of it, a mod called Black Mesa: Source, a recreation of Half-life 1 on the Source engine. Oh yes you do remember it, well it has been a long time and you can be forgiven for perhaps forgetting it's still in the pipeline since it was announced in 2005.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently caught up with Carlos Montero the mod team's project lead to ask what's happening with BM:S and why it's taken so long.

One of the bigger difficulties that we face all the time that people don’t really think about are the gray areas of decision-making. It can be very difficult to balance between staying true to the original and making it somewhat palatable to modern gamers. We are constantly trying to find ways to maintain challenge while simultaneously lowering frustration and confusion. We don’t want to be hand-holding, but at the same time we are very cognizant of the much lower threshold of patience people have with games now a days.

Our team has a great mix of purists and modernists, and we constantly argue about these types of issues. Ultimately, we all agree on the balance we want to hit, and it’s great to have people on the team representing various points of view and helping us maintain that balance.

The biggest issues have always been related to meeting the very lofty goal we initially set for ourselves. We have always wanted Black Mesa to be Valve-quality. Turns out that is very tough to do from every angle of development. Imagine that!

Unfortunately if you're hoping for a solid release date for this mod the best I can tell you is a 'soon-ish timeframe' which if we run through our ValveTime.net computer should be in 27,340. I don't have units unfortunately so that could be minutes, days, weeks or jellyfish. Part 1 | Part 2

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Black Mesa: Source Interview with RPS

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