The final piece to one of Half-Life's most ambitious mods is almost in place
Since 2004, a small group of gamers have been attempting to recreate, and improve upon, the original Half-Life by transferring it to the Source engine. Their project is called Black Mesa and progress on it has been slow.
Now, however, there may be an end in sight. The Black Mesa development team have updated the mod's Steam page with an announcement that states their intent to release the final part of the Black Mesa mod by next year.
"We wanted to use the holiday and the sale to announce our rough timeline for Xen. We are currently targeting a summer 2017 release," reads the announcement. "We will keep you up to date on our progress and we plan to show off some media as we finish developing Xen to give everyone a glimpse at what we are working on."
Xen is the alien world that players are transported to at the end of the original Half-Life. When the Black Mesa development team released the first part of the mod in 2012, this final portion of the game was not included. While the Black Mesa development team state that part of the reason behind the delay has to do with the difficult process of trying to get their mod on Steam, it also stems from their creative desire to do the game's finale right.
"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."
Some fans will no doubt be happy to hear that the Black Mesa team may be reworking Xen in a significant way as the original incarnation of the level's jump puzzles and combat style conflicted with many of the things that make Half-Life the historic game that it is.