Black Mesa's Xen Level Targeting Summer 2017
The community developed mod-turned-full-release Black Mesa is on schedule to receive its Xen level by mid-2017, according to the Crowbar Collective team.
Black Mesa is a recreation of Valve's original shooter Half-Life with everything either tweaked or overhauled to get it working smoothly on modern systems. It isn't just a spit-polish as the dedicated troupe have recorded all-new audio from sounds and music to dialogue. They've also spruced up the gameplay to iron out some of the original's flaws.
Currently Black Mesa resides in Early Access on Steam and while you can play the single-player game it isn't actually complete. The Xen level is holding up a full run of the story but now the studio are locking down summer 2017 as the date for its debut. The reason it is taking so long is because they're not reusing the original Half-Life level but pushing it way beyond anything Valve could have accomplished at the time.
"We want to do Xen the justice it deserves, and have it be the definitive climax to the Half-Life 1 story. To do this we have completely redesigned and expanded the Xen levels to what we think Valve would have done without the limitations of the time," read Crowbar's Halloween update.
Black Mesa is currently available on PC through Steam Early Access, with a full release likely to follow in summer 2017.
