Unforeseen consequences.
Black Mesa fans won’t be seeing any Xen levels unless they pay up for the mod’s standalone version on Steam Early Access.
The fact was first brought up in a Reddit Q&A with Black Mesa’s developers, Crowbar Collective, who called it “impossible” to bring these concluding levels to the free version of Black Mesa because of the mod’s inferior engine.
“In order to make Xen look the best it possibly can look, we need to upgrade the engine with new features,” Black Mesa level designer Joe Radak wrote on Reddit. “These new features will make it incompatible with the mod version.”
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We reached out to Crowbar Collective for some additional info.
According to Radak, early Black Mesa mod runs on a version of the Source Engine from 2007, which Radak described to us as a “major bottleneck” when it came to making improvements on features like the rendering system.
“Our vision of Xen requires heavy modifications to the Source engine,” Radak told IGN. “This is only possible with a Source Engine license. There is no way to take the enhancements we made to the paid version of the game and backport them to the free version. We do intend to continue supporting the Earth-based levels released on the mod version.”
Black Mesa’s standalone on Steam, which runs on a licensed 2013 version of Source, will be getting those final few levels set in the multidimensional borderworld of Xen, but there’s still no conclusive release date for those yet.
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Crowbar Collective also revealed that the standalone Steam version of Black Mesa won’t be receiving a price increase, which is good news for fans waiting until it leaves Early Access to buy.
According to Radak, the team had previously come to a decision not to charge extra once Black Mesa leaves Early Access, but only forgot to remove mention of it from its official Steam page.
“After hearing the community’s reaction, we’re confident that we made a good choice at keeping the price at $19.99,” Radak told IGN.
Chloi Rad is a Staff Writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.
More: Black Mesa’s Free Version Won’t Get Xen Levels
Black Mesa's Free Version Won't Get Xen Levels
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