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Black Mesa: Blue Shift, the fan-made retelling of Barney Calhoun’s pre-Half Life 2 adventures within the Black Mesa analysis facility (and past!), is ready to launch its subsequent chapter on November 17.
Initially developed by Gearbox because the second enlargement launched for the unique Half Life (following Opposing Pressure), Half Life: Blue Shift turned the “Barneys” of the Black Mesa Safety Pressure right into a single, steadfast playable character, Barney Calhoun, who finds himself caught up within the central occasions of the Seven Hour Struggle. Black Mesa: Blue Shift, introduced in 2021 by a crew known as HECU Collective, retells that story in a mod for Black Mesa—which is itself a retelling of Half Life.
Like Black Mesa, Blue Shift is being launched in chapters corresponding with the storyline of the unique. The primary 4 chapters arrived in comparatively brief order, nevertheless it’s been two years because the launch of the latest chapter, Captive Freight, which got here out on the finish of 2022. Blue Shift developer CitizenFive informed PC Gamer that the anticipate this chapter has been longer for a easy cause: “Creating a chapter set in Xen is much extra sophisticated than the standard ranges.”
“The chapters set on Earth are primarily corridors whereas Xen is loads of extremely detailed pure environments that require a far completely different pipeline,” CitizenFive defined. “Constructing the detailed belongings that go into every setting, creating collisions for them and optimizing them to make sure good efficiency throughout the limitations of Supply engine, and dealing round a lot of gameplay concerns (corresponding to hacking in new Xenian enemies with out correct code entry) is usually very taxing.”
Crowbar Collective confronted the identical challenges when creating the Xen chapters for Black Mesa, the rep stated. “We have had the advantage of determining how one can create degree particulars with the assistance of VR which has sped issues up considerably, nevertheless it’s nonetheless a fancy course of.”
This new addition, Focal Level—the fifth of eight chapters—sees Barney despatched to the alien world of Xen to assist calibrate some teleportation tools. Naturally, the method doesn’t go solely easily. It does look fairly cool, although.
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Focal Level will even embrace “loads of nice enhancements and content material” for the earlier chapters in Blue Shift, together with:
- New and improved scenes for Residing Quarters Outbound and Insecurity chapters;
- Improved skybox textures, lighting and Put up Processing in all earthbound floor maps;
- Added responsive floor sounds to some environments that can be performed with close by explosions;
- Improved all explosions SFX and added distance attenuation to them;
- Added fully new floor properties for sure props with distinctive physics sounds. (E.g. barrels, tarps, displays, crates);
- Up to date many BM and BM:BS textures/supplies;
- Numerous different visible enhancements.
Black: Mesa: Blue Shift is on the market on Steam Workshop and from ModDB.
