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Black Mesa’s Crossfire Update Goes Live, Here’s What’s New

News & Rumors Half-Life

Earlier in the week, we gave an exclusive sneak peek at Black Mesa’s new ‘Crossfire Update‘, which rolled out officially on Steam today, just in time for the Steam Winter Sales.

In this article we give a more detailed comparison and go over what’s new.

Black Mesa’s Crossfire Update Goes Live, Here’s What’s New

What Are the Main New Features?

So apart from the big and obvious addition of the classic Half-Life Deathmatch map Crossfire, the new update to Black Mesa contains a ton of new features, improvements and bug fixes.

The update changelog, available on the official Black Mesa Forums, gives a full rundown.

Here’s a little snippet of the main new features:
- Added Crossfire!
- Added 'God Rays'
- Multiplayer animation system has been overhauled and rebuilt.
- New multiplayer animations.
- Weapon Bob and Weapon Drag Added
- Score Persist on Leaving and Rejoining a Multiplayer Match
- Steam controller configuration
- Servers now track stats for players and rank them on that server
- New Gluon Gun model
- New Crossbow model
- New RPG model
- New Shotgun model
- Shogun will now gibb characters if damage is high enough
- Added third person shell ejects from NPCs
- Added Tau Wallshotting in Multiplayer
- All workshop submissions have no filesize limit anymore.

Half-Life vs Black Mesa: Crossfire Comparison

Black Mesa’s version re-imagines the original Crossfire map in Source, adding a ton of new visuals and details, complete with the same infamous nuclear bunker.

The map architecture stays pretty much the same, there’s the big courtyard space full of balconies and weapons, and the open helipad space in-front of the bunker, with the iconic mounted guard towers backing it.

What we liked was the fact that Black Mesa’s version gives an entirely new context and feel to the map by adding an abandoned/decaying facility theme, it’s a lot darker too.

Images

Here’s some images, from our previous exclusive first look article. (Click for full-size)

LambdaGeneration.com Exclusive - Black Mesa's Crossfire Update

LambdaGeneration.com Exclusive - Black Mesa's Crossfire Update

LambdaGeneration.com Exclusive - Black Mesa's Crossfire Update

LambdaGeneration.com Exclusive - Black Mesa's Crossfire Update


Half-Life vs Black Mesa: Weapons Comparison

As you can see, there’s a bunch of new weapon models, giving the Gluon Gun, RPGCrossbow and Shotgun a new look and feel.

Images

Some screenshots of the new weapon models. (Click for full-size)

crossbow

gluon

shotgun

rpg


Other New Features

The Tau Cannon can also do ‘wallshotting’, which allows you to overcharge and fire the beam through walls in the map.  For anyone who remembers the original Half-Life Deathmatch, a match of Crossfire wouldn’t be complete without seeing someone get totally zapped out of the blue by it.

2015-12-22_00016

There’s also been a overhaul of the multiplayer player animations and certain characters like the G-Man have proper view models.

Improvements are not just visual. Multiplayer server features got upgraded too. Score is now saved for when a player leaves and then rejoins a match. Teams can also be locked for competitive sessions.

The Black Mesa Steam Workshop got upgraded too, so community content creators will no longer have a mod size limit, opening up a ton of new possibilities.

Screen Shot 2015-12-23 at 01.45.34

The update also adds three previously released mapsChopperRail, and Power to the official map list. Stalkyard got a minor facelift too, with more detailing added.


Surface Tension Uncut?

Shortly after the update going live, it was reported on r/HalfLife that a few maps from the yet-to-be finished Surface Tension chapter can be found in the game files.

We have some more exclusive content to share about the future of Surface Tension in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

lambdageneration-surfacetension-teaser


LambdaGeneration Black Mesa Giveaway!

Also, we have 10 copies of Black Mesa to giveaway. We’ll be doing a livestream with the developers at the end of next week.

Follow Follow @LambdaGen on Twitter and Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for info.

LambdaGeneration.com Black Mesa Giveaway

Watch the Stream Recording Below:


What are your thought’s on the update? Let us know in the comments below or on our social media.

4 Comments

  1. You guys are awesome, loving the comparison videos too. Subbed.

  2. Played the original mod. Love the new models and everything. Just have one concern.
    I have played so much crossfire in my life, i know the map by heart. This does not look like the same map. There are so many changes. Why haven’t they named it Crossfire 2.0 or something similar?

    • It’s fair to say Black Mesa have had a little ‘artistic license’ when it comes to their level remakes, such the iconic Anomalous Materials lobby (in the giveaway picture above), which is different from Half-Life’s.

      Also Black Mesa’s remake of the dm_bounce map has a monorail track running it through it, where as HL1s didn’t (although it used the same canyon map from the tram intro). Pictures: http://www.morloc.co.uk/Folio.html

    • It’s already a different game. It doesn’t need to be called Crossfire 2.0 because it’s already a new version, the Black Mesa version. I honestly don’t get why everyone needs BMDM to be exactly like HLDM. You already HAVE HLDM. Let BMDM be something new.

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