First off – Black Mesa is a not a port. It is literally illegal for us to port anything. Black Mesa is mostly made from scratch, excepting a few assets from the SDK. Pretty much every sound effect, every texture, every voice-over – all of it. We didn’t have the luxury of porting a single thing from HL1. Not AI, not level design, none of it. So let’s talk about some of Black Mesa’s big bullet-point features:
[*=left]Play for free. You need not own anything!
[*=left]Feast your eyes on over 2,000 custom Models and 5,000 custom textures – more than HL2.
[*=left]Experience over 2,000 choreographed scenes and over 6,500 lines of dialogue from all new voice acting.
[*=left]Immerse yourself in an all new soundtrack and over 2,300 custom sound effects.
[*=left]Feel the impact of custom systems such as the Face Creation System, Custom Gib System, Deathcam and more.
These features are just the tip of the iceberg, really. We’ve put a lot of love into making this game an amazing experience. When it comes to systems, levels, and weapons, we’ve touched everything, because we made it all from scratch. We tried to keep what we felt was evocative of the original Half-life, but when recreating these things we have inherently re-designed them. The combat, the puzzles, the mechanics and pacing of every level have been re-designed. The weapon strengths, animations, balance aspects – all re-designed. The systems, aside from being completely coded from scratch, have all been re-designed to some degree. There is nothing we haven’t touched, honestly.