Just in time for Christmas, Black Mesa’s Xen levels are out of beta. This means the game is finally, finally complete and ready to be played in full. Well, the game remains in Early Access mode on Steam, but it is still possible to play a polished, complete run of the game without having to switch to public-beta.
The ambitious fan-made revamping of the entire first Half-Life game can be traced all the way back to 2007. After 12 years of waiting, fans can finally sink their crowbars into the game’s much-anticipated final chapters which take place on the alien world of Xen. The Early Access moniker just means the Crowbar Collective team will still be able to get valuable data and bug-related feedback from “a wider set” of Black Mesa players as they progress through the newly-released and thoroughly-patched Xen chapters.
We will be watching people play the game and listening to how we can further improve the game for the next big update to take us out of Early Access. In addition to polishing the levels, we want to look at the game as a whole before switching out of Early Access.
So, the devs will be using the aforementioned data to mount another big update that will push the game out of Early Access and into “Retail” release status. At this point, the team hasn’t given us a set date for the latter update, but it seems anticipated for release in early 2020.
This all follows a successful beta testing period for the Xen chapters in which a whole bunch of bugs were found and have since been fixed. If you’re interested, you can find the full changelog right here.
It really has been quite a surreal few months for Half-Life fans. First, there was the announcement of Half-Life: Alyx - the series’ next installment (which we had all but totally given up on wishing for) -. Now, we finally have a complete Black Mesa to tide us over until the former’s release.
The cherry on top of the Christmas pudding? You can grab Black Mesa for 20% off of its already-reasonable price on Steam’s annual Winter Sale until 2nd January 2020!
Source: Steam
