Crowbar Collective has put out a Black Mesa: Xen update today, as well as releasing the Half-Life remake's expansion on Steam, where it was previously only available on the public beta branch. Now you can access it normally and play through every level. Though still technically in Early Access, the full game is available. 

"If you have been holding out for Xen," says the developer, "this is what you have been waiting for." So it seems like it's treating this like a soft launch. And if you've not picked it up, it's also on sale for 20 percent off. 

Black Mesa: Xen is a greatly expanded reimagining of the terrible Xen section of the original Half-Life. After remaking Gordon Freeman's first adventure, Crowbar Collective set itself the ambitious task of making, essentially, entirely new Half-Life levels from scratch. The result seems to be a vast improvement over its predecessor. 

The next update will take Xen out of Early Access, so Crowbar Collective will be keeping an eye on things to see what needs polishing and fixing, as well adding achievements. It also plans to return to Earth, to Black Mesa, improving it using what the team has learned through Xen's development. 

Check out the patch notes for the latest update here.

Normally this is where I'd make some snarky remark about this being the closest thing we'll get to a new Half-Life, but that's no longer true now that Half-Life: Alyx is coming in March. If you're not into VR, though, then you'll need to stick with Xen for the time being.

Black Mesa's ambitious expansion to Half-Life has reached the last stretch. After a technical beta in June, which tested a few maps, Black Mesa: Xen's first two chapters are now available in the public beta branch. Xen and Gonarch's Layer contain nine maps, so it's triple the size. 

The other chapters will be added to the branch later, letting you test all 18 of the expansion's maps. Before you dive in, you can check out the known issues here. Developer Crowbar Collective says things will get quieter on the update front, but only because the team the expansion ready for launch. 

Xen has grown over the years from a rework of the disappointing Half-Life level to a full campaign with lots of different environments and improvements. It was originally slated for a 2017 launch, but it's changed quite a bit from the original plans.

Valve might have shelved Gordon Freeman and his sci-fi misadventures, but Black Mesa developer Crowbar Collective still has one more job for the mute physicist. The studio's Half-Life remake was released in 2015, but since then it's been working on an additional and original campaign that greatly expands Gordon's trip off-world, and you'll be able to play it soon. 

In the original Half-Life, we don't get to see much of the alien world of Xen, but Crowbar Collective has been changing that. The Xen campaign doesn't just make the Xen level full-length—it's closer to a full game, or at least a meaty expansion. Check out the trailer from last year:

You'll have five chapters to work through, and the first two will be entering public beta on August 1. Soon after the beta release of Xen and Gonarch's Lair, Crowbar Collective will launch the rest of the chapters, Interloper, Nihilanth and Endgame. There are no dates for them, but expect them weeks, not months, after the first two. 

That's the last step before launch. Once all the bugs have been squashed, Black Mesa: Xen will leave beta. You'll get access if you have Black Mesa, which is currently on sale, and the betas will be available through the Steam Beta tab in the Properties menu. 

I'm increasingly less frustrated at the prospect of never being able to finish Half-Life officially. With developers working on fan projects to expand the original game and even bring Marc Laidlaw's vision for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 to life, there's still plenty of Half-Life left to play. 

Rise and shine! It's been a long, long wait for Black Mesa's final chapters. When Black Mesa (the modder-made recreation of the original Half-Life in the Source Engine) was released in 2015, it ended with Gordon Freeman's leap into the portal that takes him to Xen. The actual Xen levels themselves weren't yet complete. But today, at long last (we've been hearing the Xen levels were almost ready since 2017) , you can get a healthy taste of Xen as the team behind Black Mesa have made three chapters of the alien dimension available in a technical beta.

"The purpose of this beta is to collect bugs and feedback on a range of different computers," a post on the Black Mesa Steam page reads. "We have made significant improvements and changes to the Source engine, and we want the game to run as smoothly as possible. If you want to be on the bleeding edge of testing, opt into this beta. If you want the polished, complete Xen experience, you should wait. It won’t be long!"

There are some known issues with the Xen beta, such as drastically lower framerates while playing in 4K, issues with ragdolls in water, missing collisions with certain plants and roots in the swamp, and a few other little issues, so don't expect it to be a blemish-free experience. Players are encouraged to report bugs on the Steam forum or the game's Discord.

To take part in the beta, find Black Mesa in your Steam library (you'll need to own it, and if you don't it's currently on sale) and right-click on it. Select Properties from the drop-down menu, then choose the beta tab. Opt-in to the public beta and close the menu. You'll see Black Mesa updating to provide you with the Xen chapters. When you launch the game, you can select New Game and choose chapter 15 to start playing the Xen beta.

Holy headcrabs, Half-Life is 20 years old. This makes me feel even closer to death than all the grey hairs I’ve been accumulating. There are lots of ways you could observe this special day—with crowbars primarily—but you also might want to watch the first Xen footage from the Half-Life remake, Black Mesa. It’s been a long time coming. 

In the original Half-Life, our trip to the alien world of Xen is brief and... well, not all it could have been, so Black Mesa developer Crowbar Collective decided to deviate from Valve’s version and expand Xen into a proper misadventure that’s almost the size of a full game just on its own. Check out the impressive trailer below.

20 years has clearly done Xen the world of good.

Crowbar Collective isn’t quite ready to release Xen into the wild, however. The team is looking to launch Xen during the second quarter of next year. It’s finished for the most part but, the developer explains, there’s still room to make it more polished and stable. 

Unlike the rest of Black Mesa, Xen is almost entirely original work, though obviously Half-Life is still the cornerstone. This re-imagining of the alien world will take players around six hours to complete, judging by playtests, and more if you plan on investigating every nook and cranny. 

While you wait, here’s the story of Black Mesa. 

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before: Half-Life remake Black Mesa's Xen chapters should be out very soon. You may well be sceptical—Xen has been delayed multiple times—but in an update this week the developers said that the five chapters are going through external playtesting, and two of them are pretty much "locked in".

The first chapter, itself called Xen, is mostly done, and the team need to simply "polish one or two rough edges". The third chapter, Interloper, is playable from start to finish, and the final chapter, Endgame, is locked, and just needs some final minor tweaks. "There are some dependency assets and some polish we have to implement once the rest of the game is complete, but other than that, it is ready to go."

Admittedly, the other two chapters still require a little more work. The second chapter, Gonarch’s Lair, still needs some art and design changes, while the fourth chapter, Nihilanth, still needs work on scripting and animation.

You can expect the chapters to be much more rich than the original's Xen sections: currently, the first two chapters clock in at two hours combined, whereas in Half-Life, all five chapters could be completed in an hour.

Xen doesn't have a release date.

The fan-made Half-Life remake Black Mesa took another step toward completion over the weekend with the release of a Xen engine patch that fixes a number of issues including freezing and crashes on Radeon 300, 400, and 500 series video cards. 

"We will probably do one more 'Engine' release just before we drop Xen, in order to make sure that everything is running smoothly on everyone's machines," developer Crowbar Collective wrote. "We want the Xen release to be as close to a simple content release as possible." 

Black Mesa is largely a faithful recreation of the groundbreaking FPS Half-Life, but it makes some changes as well, shortening or otherwise editing some levels while expanding others in ways that the old GoldSrc engine wasn't capable of. The one thing it's lacking, despite being in development since at least 2005 (seriously, Black Mesa: Source, as it was known then, won ModDB's "Mod of 2005" award), is Half-Life's concluding Xen location. 

And that's perfectly fine by me: Gordon Freeman would've been better served with a Poochie-style sendoff than the ugly, tedious slog through Xen he ultimately got stuck with, as far as I'm concerned. But that's how Half-Life ends, and so—eventually—that's how Black Mesa will end, too. 

There's no word on when Xen will actually be added to the game and even if there was I'd strongly suggest taking it with a handful of salt: The rollout has already been delayed twice, most recently in November 2017, just ahead of a "do-or-die deadline" that had been set for December. (Obviously, it did not.) There are, however, patch notes and a list of known issues available for perusal on Steam. 

Crowbar Collective moved another baby step towards the release of the long-awaited Xen portion of its Half-Life remake Black Mesa yesterday. A graphical update makes it look a whole lot fancier, with real-time dynamic lights, lens flares, god rays and more texture detail. 

It also brings the release version more in line with the developer's internal build and means that when Xen is ready it can be added as a "simple map drop, with less potential for engine and code issues affecting players on their first time playing Xen".

The team also updated fans on the progress of the Xen levels—in its current form that section of the game is made up of 14 maps across five chapters, "with each map alone being significantly larger than the originals". The team is still working up the gameplay for three of the five stages, and tweaking the art for the final two.

There's still no definite release date for the Xen levels: in June the team set December as a "do-or-die deadline", but that's now been pushed back (and, thankfully, nobody has died). "We are putting our full effort into completing Xen in a timely manner so that everyone can have the complete Black Mesa experience", it said in the latest update.

The update also fixes a host of bugs, changes the way that long jumping works (you now double tap space) and adds a new crossbow scope. Click here for the full patch notes, and scroll down for some new screens from the update.

If you want to know more about Black Mesa, here's Andy's interview with the project lead from last month. Oh, and the game is available at its biggest ever discount at the moment. It costs $4.99/£3.74 on Steam.

Eight years in the making, Black Mesa is finally nearing its full release. Initially developed by a passionate team of hobbyist developers, this remake of the original Half-Life—fully backed by Valve—has bloomed into something more ambitious. With the help of Steam’s Early Access platform, the team has found itself with the resources to remake and overhaul the original’s controversial Xen chapters, bringing them more in line with the quality of the rest of the game. And when it’s done, this will be the best way to relive the Black Mesa incident. I spoke with project leader Adam Engels about the incredible journey so far.

"The world of Half-Life is a detailed painting, where the more you look, the more you see," says Engels, speaking on behalf of the Black Mesa team. "Even though all the events were scripted, it felt like you were affecting the world. You could find hidden paths, make NPCs react to you." It was, he says, the perfect balance of letting the player create their own experiences and "a summer action movie".

"I think a lot of people thought Half-Life: Source was going to be an HD remaster," he says. "In actuality, it was a demonstration of how easily projects could be moved to the new Source engine." As a response to this, two teams—Leakfree and Half-Life: Source Overhaul Project—decided to create their own remakes around 2004. "But once they realised they were working towards the same goal, they merged and started the adventure that is now simply called Black Mesa."

Today, Black Mesa is available to buy on Steam, and I ask Engels if the team ran into any legal troubles with Valve. "Nope," he says. "Valve actually came to us to see if we wanted to sell the game and become an official licensee to get access to the full game engine." It was a big decision, he says, but something the team couldn’t refuse. "It gave us so much more resources to develop the game with."

In November 2015 the team even visited Valve’s HQ in Bellevue, Washington. "A number of past and present developers were able to make it," says Engels. "It’s hard to speak for everyone at Valve, but the company must like us a little if it’s allowing us to do this project." Not many game companies would allow something like Black Mesa to exist, let alone be sold on its own distribution platform. But the quality, polish and passion of Black Mesa obviously won Valve over.

Black Mesa is currently in Early Access as the team works to complete the Xen chapters, a massive overhaul of arguably the worst bit of the original Half-Life. "This enabled us to actually go out and hire people, and acquire talent we otherwise wouldn’t have," says Engels. "We got a huge amount of talent simply by having a project people were excited about, but having a budget let us seek out and hire specific developers."

The Black Mesa team doesn’t work in one office, which can make orchestrating such a huge project difficult. "We use chat programs and online forums," says Engels. "We try and use chat to work out specific problems, then use forums to document what we talked about so we can refer to it later." Time zones are one of the biggest hurdles for such a disconnected team, and it’s basically impossible to get everyone together at once. "We try to schedule a few meetings or playtests where everyone can get involved. We’ve been using Google Docs recently and they’ve been a huge help."

Engels thinks history has been crueller to Xen than it deserves. "I think the dislike of those levels might have grown in our minds as time has gone on," he says. "We see a lot of support for the old Xen on our Steam forums." The consensus in the community, he adds, is that Valve ran out of time and wasn’t able to iterate on the alien levels like they did with the rest of the game. "We can tell you from our own experience that taking your game to a new world is more challenging than it looks on paper."

The Black Mesa team’s main goal for Xen is adding the same level of worldbuilding seen elsewhere in Half-Life, while retaining its alien, otherworldly feel. "Valve does a wonderful job of introducing mechanics, letting you get used to it, then using that mechanic in an unexpected way," says Engels. "We’re not looking to reinvent the game with our take on Xen, but it will be much more than just get key, open door."

In the original game, what most refer to simply as ‘Xen’ is actually five chapters: Xen, Gonarch’s Lair, Interloper, Nihilanth and Endgame. They’re all being remade and expanded, and some sections Valve had to cut out are being reintroduced. "We made the design with these in mind," says Engels. "In the end we hope to have built a world that is bizarre but contiguous. We want the border world to feel like a place that exists, even if we humans don’t have the capacity to understand it."

When Valve created Xen, technical and time limitations had an impact on how it looked. "With the earth-based assets, even if they were super vague due to technical limitations, we at least had an idea of how Valve wanted them to look," says Engels. "But with Xen, we had little to go on. Even if we built a 1:1 replica of the old levels (which we haven’t), we still have to ask ourselves: how was this supposed to look?" It’s unclear whether the planet was supposed to be as barren as it is, or if Valve had intended it to be much more elaborate and detailed.

"Our biggest challenge has been designing the Xenian technology," says Engels. "It’s both mechanical and organic, which is a difficult balance to strike. Our team is talented, but it’s vastly different to modernise hallways than to create an alien world completely from scratch."

As for the Black Mesa facility itself, the team went above and beyond merely remaking the existing levels. "I think you could argue that the main character in Half-Life is Black Mesa itself," says Engels. "We wanted to modernise the game, so we had to really dive into Half-Life 2 and the episodes to look at how they were designed." The team adopted Valve’s philosophy of creating games that are "simple on the surface but complex under the hood".

Some areas, particularly the dam in Surface Tension, have been hugely expanded, feeling a lot more dramatic than in the original. "We used real-world reference to get things looking as realistic as possible, then built the game on top of that," says Engels. "When you make your way through Half-Life, what made it feel real was how the facility existed beyond what you could see. A simple closet or the hint of a sprawling complex through a window was enough to create that illusion. And the Source engine really helped us capitalise on that in Black Mesa."

But while Black Mesa largely remains loyal to the source material in spirit, the team did change quite a few things. "The biggest example of what we changed was the chapter On a Rail," says Engels. "We made the player path much clearer at the expense of having it feel a lot more linear." They also updated the game’s archaic crouch-jump function. "The player automatically crouches when they jump now, which makes it feel a bit more modern. Crouch-jumping was cool back in 1998, but these days it feels overly complicated."

When you play Black Mesa it’s remarkable to think that it’s a passion project developed by, at least initially, a small team of volunteers. I ask Engels about the challenges of working on a project like this. "Communication has historically been a big challenge for us," he says. "Developers can feel pretty isolated. If the whole team has their heads down, working away on their tasks, despite the fact a large amount of work is being done, you have no idea unless they make a post about it or discuss it in the chat." Sharing work takes time, he says, but is ultimately worth it to keep the team motivated.

"And let’s be honest," he adds. "Deadlines are a huge challenge for the team, too. Transitioning from a team of volunteers to a team working on an Early Access project, with a responsibility to the customers who spent money on it, is a really big commitment." Engels also mentions that, because people with skills specific to the Source engine are getting rare these days, it’s becoming more of a struggle to recruit people. But the team gets by. "Sometimes we’ll go out and find developers we like or post a job opening, but often they’ll contact us and their resumes will be so good we can’t say no."

Audio is another area Black Mesa excels in, with professional sound, music and acting. The voices, particularly that of the scientists and ‘Barney’ are impressively close to the original game. "We had some auditions in 2006 where we found Mike Hillard for the scientists and Kevin Sisk for the security guards," says Engels. "Audio is often undervalued in projects and we were super thankful to find people who not only sounded like the originals, but really took the audio portion of the project onto their shoulders." Engels singles out composer Joel Nielsen for his music and work on the game’s audio. "He deserves a lot of credit for all the work he did on the music and sound effects."

Over the years, Black Mesa has attracted a lot of attention, and a large, vocal community has grown around it. Xen has been delayed a few times as the team strives to make it the best it can be, and while some have reacted badly to this, most people have been surprisingly encouraging. "Our community continues to astound me," says Engels. "Through releases and updates we get great feedback. It’s a large-scale testing effort that we just wouldn’t be able to do otherwise and it is insanely valuable."

Engels has been working on Black Mesa for close to 11 years now, and it’s been a large part of his life. "It’s easy to get isolated in development and it can be hard to stay motivated. But comments that say something like, ‘I love your work, keep going!’ are life-savers. The online world can seem like it wants everyone to fail, and to have a community that wants us to succeed… well, we never take it for granted."

For someone so invested in Half-Life, I wonder what Engels feels about the third game. "Personally, I’m not eager for Half-Life 3, but nor do I want it to fade away," he says. "So much anticipation has been built up that it couldn’t come close to living up to it. I’d love to see more games in the Half-Life universe, even if the title doesn’t contain the number three. I’d love to see Valve, or another developer, take it on." Black Mesa is due to leave Early Access, complete with the overhauled Xen levels, in December this year. It’s been a long road for the team, but the quality of the finished product will hopefully make all that effort worth it.

Late last year, Crowbar Collective released the first screenshot of the Xen area of its Half-Life remake Black Mesa, which was not included with its original release. The team said that it was focused on "crafting a fun and cohesive experience from start to finish," and that it wanted to "push the boundaries and explore this unique and varied setting." The plan at the time was to have Xen out this summer; unfortunately, getting it right is taking longer than expected. 

"As some of you may have already predicted, we are going to need to push back our planned release of Xen to later this year, in December. We know that this is not what anyone would want to hear, but after taking a long and hard look at what we want to achieve, we have decided that this is for the best. We do not want to compromise on Xen’s quality in any way," the studio wrote on Steam. "That said, we consider December to be a do-or-die deadline." 

To soften the blow, Crowbar posted the first two public images of a Xen exterior, and also provided more information about what exactly it's doing with the level. A new dynamic lighting system for use in situations "where we want the lights to be particularly gorgeous" has been implemented, a "color correction pass" on the entire game is underway, and enemy soldiers will now hold their weapons properly, without their hands clipping through their guns.

Crowbar didn't get into the specifics of the delay, but if I had to (or just wanted to) hazard a guess, I'd say it's probably at least in part because the original Xen level was awful: A dull, utterly un-fun area that was completely out of sync with the rest of the game. A fresh coat of paint is enough for most of Half Life, but making Xen itself "fun and cohesive" is a whole different ballgame.