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Black Mesa >  Workshop > H.E.C.U soldier's Workshop > Black Mesa: Military > Discussions
Black Mesa: Military
Description Discussions55 Comments1313 Change Notes
Outcast 8 Jul @ 2:42pm
This game needs alot more time in the oven (Feedback thread)
Okay, i get it, this mod is inspired by opposing force with the limitation the game has.

The biggest glaring issue is the hgrunts not reacting to use commands, which i understand can be hard or impossible to change due to how the game is built.

But here comes a list of ♥♥♥♥ that makes this mod hard to play.

  • Intro cinematic are so stiff and boring, almost no animation and hgrunts sit pretty tight in the helicopter making the whole intro boring to go through.
  • Game starts you of with Glock and MP5, in Opfor things go sideways fast and you still need to progress finding the wrench first and so on.
  • The PCV suit (when picking up battery packs) sounds like a muffled Russian dude.
  • Maps are built with a lot of noob-ish mistakes, areas are way bigger then they need to and lack details, coming from the masterful created maps of black mesa and played this mod made it even more apparent, which made it even harder to enjoy the mod.
  • Outside maps lacks almost any verticallity, no hills, no nothing, just flat land.
  • The mod rely HEAVILY on invisible walls, which in turn should never be noticed at all by the player yet i noticed them atleast 5-6 times durning gameplay.
  • Maps have wierd design choice, in the first level there is this lab with a hugh corridor that leads to a u-turn and back again, where in real life is a building constructed like this???
  • Difficulty varies alot, Areas where you have hgrunts as teammates you can often lure them to do all the fighting for you, saving you alot of ammunation.
  • Maps are to dark to enjoy and are not apparent where to go, which makes using the night vision almost necessary at all times.
  • The maps that take place in the original game such as office complex and we got hostiles are drastically better (probably because they are ripped from the game) and surprise, no need to use NVG there.
  • Maps make no sense, like corridors and stairways that have weird designs, making it feel like your not in a building but more like the backrooms or something similar.
  • On that, all the vents are built stupidly too, and feels like their design make no sense, and some vents are far to long breaking up the speed of progression.
  • Fights are boring, done in areas that are square sized with little variations.
  • Having the security guards pack 357. revolvers are seriously a gambling mode because it shoots the difficulty up the roof in section where it happens.
  • Alot of mapping bugs, such as creates and items hovering above shelves.
  • Later on in the mod, we are encounted by a large military encampment (Again in a huge boxy area that is to large for its own good, there was a radio playing some lines from the original Black Mesa and some marines talking but it's still hard to focus on one thing when the area is so large and you don't really know where to stand and focus your attention. Something better would have been to put the marines with you in a elevator or something similar and have their voice lines there, where your focus will 100% be on them.
  • I had a friendly turret (that i picked up and re positioned) target my own friendly hgrunts in combat. Penatilize the player for trying to be cleaver.
  • The LAV-25 in one area is positioned on the ground where vorti spawned one some containers, the LAV-25 could not target them, after i killed most of them some vorti was just standing there doing nothing.
  • Marines talking about taking a train and hunt down Freeman, Going all "Let's go!" just to stay in place and never board the train or have any intentions to do so.
  • The Military intercom speaks like someone who needs to find the words in a dictionary first, having like 3 to 5 seconds breaks in between words. a single sentence could easily take over 10-15 seconds for this guy.
  • The train part is just.... my man the mod by that part has just nose dived, the tunnel is boring, the security room (first one, is just empty and misleading) the second one is again, a *BIG* box with one squid in it, thats it. After taking the painfully slow elevator the train stops working, and you are welcomed with another long box room, when taking right to get to the level change the way you are supposed to go to in the next level is covered up with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ stone texture. After loading is done you cant return and also, that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ stone texture is now behind you.
  • The fight with the Gargantua *yawns*. It's the BIGGEST box yet in the game, TOW launchers are a bad choice for this as they A) are hard to aim, cant aim in all angles. B) Missiles are slow as ♥♥♥♥.
  • After fight, See sign "End of road, danger 60ft cliff", Be me: "Where?" all i can see is a ladder leading up to a roof in an enclosed courtyard.
  • Again coming back to the logic of making maps, there are two vehicles here, a tanker truck and a pickup truck, and a big garage door. Why are there here? how did they get here? why park them outside if the garage door leads elsewhere, it makes no sense.
  • Up on the roof, we have even more invisible walls. Yay.
  • Fire Door going through the wall clipping on the other side.
  • Also another invisible wall, great map design tho. Oh wait. It's the rail part of Blast Pits.
  • Also another thing that makes no sense, Last time we saw freeman was just outside the door leading to blast pits in we got hostiles, next time it is in blast pits but the marine the player controls literally plays out his own little story, did Freeman fall asleep and take a nap before boarding the train because if i am not mistaken those two parts take place pretty close after each other.
  • We wake up again in a boring, box like outside area with no elevation, without weapons and almost no hp, the game is to short to have a mid-game restart without any weapons, imo.
  • Can someone explain to my why i found a desert eagle randomly by crawling under an electric fence??? Also it loses all meaning to get this weapon, like in HL/Black Mesa you kill the tentacle monster and is AWARDED the 357. Magnum, that makes the enounter special, just getting the Desert Eagle by crawling under a electric fence is not it.
  • Deagle has the revolver icon.
  • The big door started open but closed during the firefight, no apparent way to open it up again, which blocked progress.
  • We end up in the lab (the one before Lambda complex) and are again treated to a ripped map, however Freeman has supposedly been here already, but all pick ups are reset (or not simply taken by Freeman)
  • The cryonics labs was opened, when entering the door closed behind me, needing to use noclip to get out again (used noclip for the third time)
  • There is a *boss* fight with Freeman.... I should not have to explain why this is a bad idea right? right?
  • We are treated with another map from Blackmesa, Sadly we can see exactly where that ends and this mod only addition start.
  • Again with the immersion breaking ♥♥♥♥♥♥ mapping. From the tunnel we go down a stair, take a right (we are under the tunnel that leads from the parking lot. And when the loading ends, we take another right (Should still be under the tunnel, or atleast under the parking lot. BUT WHAT DO WE SEE? A full blown outdoor enviroment, how did it fit under the parking lot? this makes *NO* sense at all. (Start of demilitration)
  • More boring outdoors. I was so bored i just legged it. First time meeting the abrams and had a hgrunt just spawn infront of me from thin air. Runned passed it (I assume there was supposed to be a giant fire fight here but there was literally nothing blocking me from just running past it so.
  • From this point there are just alot of "Lets put a ♥♥♥♥ ton of hgrunts against the aliens" kind of arenas that are not balanced for ♥♥♥♥. Kind of what i did when i first learned how to do maps for HL1 (Big box room, Hgrunts on one side and aliens on the other side).
  • Got sniper, killed enemies without scope because that is so much easier. Enters what appears to be a 2-3 floor building, roof gets airstriked, now suddenly a 1 floor building.
  • We fight another Gargantua, in another large box outdoor room. This time with a mortar so it dies in less then 10 seconds, no challenge.
  • Also the Hgrunts has since long time stopped following and are now acting even more like brainless zombies, having only one purpose and that is soaking up bullets.
  • Another Gargantua fight, this time its actually semi-bad and not pure ♥♥♥♥. i actually had to fight with the rpg to kill it.
  • Fight inside the hangar area (the one where you sneak in black mesa), has invisible walls, and having controllers that mind control vortis that then become friendly just to be gunned down by hgrunts, maybe use another type of enemy? The Abrams has to little space to navigate in, and clips into enemies.
  • Oh my god kill me already, another large outside box area with hgrunts, Abrams tank vs alien grunts and ♥♥♥♥ on the other side. How original. Running to the right (By the crashed osprey) And suprise, more invisible walls.
  • The radio tower crashes onto a wall, on the other side a big garage door, with a road... again where does it lead?
  • "Quick, we need to evac." "which VTOL are we taking?" "The first one we see, duh!". Proceed to stand still and wait for the nuke.
  • Past the snark infested ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ we are meet by... another large outside boxy room, whats that, a straight road is going through the room? With a helipad right smack dab in the middle, damn son. I did not know we built helipads in the middle of roads in real life.
  • You remember that moment with the osprey and everything going in slow motion and the dude says "come on, get in" and you can see the manta ray for a mile away... i wish i died there.
  • Another road tunnel ending with a double door made for humans and not vehicles.
  • Where the ♥♥♥♥ am i going-simulator 2025. No seriously, if i could have a dollar for everytime i had to say "Where the ♥♥♥♥ am i going" i would have had enough money to buy Black Mesa to a friend or two.
  • A garage door that no vehicle cant enter because of a wierd as roof structure infront of the door, leading down a tunnel to wierd room with a ladder on it, that leads to an elevator and now i am in a radioactive hell hole? what. OH! i see you forgot to put in a parkour part into your game, that makes sense.
  • And here comes the unique XEN part, now in a random warehouse near you!
  • Big area. Big whoop. Fighting Black Ops. Inside a room is a health back and a non textured black wall. Mah immersion. we also use indestructable wooden crates(tm) to climb up a building instead of i dont know, metal crates?
  • Inside the next area (Where 2 black ops are interrogating the two hgrunts) we kill them and go forward to the HEMTT truck and turn around to see THE BIGGEST EMERGENCY EXIT SIGN EVER SEEN BY ANY HUMAN ALIVE. It¨s the (ninth?) wonder of the world!
  • I also love security cameras that are aimed into walls.
  • We enter the Black Mesa Transit system, or is this Purgatory?
  • A room with two glass walls and (servers?) behind them, but how do one enter and do maintenance?
  • Did Chat GPT write this story or plans for the enviroments, nothing feel like.... i dunno, something a human could have thought up of, its like a fever dream. It makes literally no sense.
  • The ending is a bullet time out the door (Like a call-of-duty breach and clear type of thing), yeah.. we are still doing those.
  • The outro is even more boring then the intro.

There you have it, It might seem like a negative post but trust me its not. This are what i thought about the mod and to be honest. TL:DR it started of sub-par like 4 out of 10 and by the ending i was so bored, not worth the time sorry. And not recommended to play after Black Mesa, that did not do this mod any favors, like... at all.
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Showing 1-12 of 12 comments
H.E.C.U soldier  [developer] 9 Jul @ 12:58pm 
Ok
#1
Behlul 18 Jul @ 3:46pm 
chill bro damn
#2
neophus 24 Jul @ 10:38am 
There are many mapping bugs (black wall, brushes not aligned, null textures etc...) so it could have been avoided. The Mod should have been tested more times.
#3
H.E.C.U soldier  [developer] 24 Jul @ 10:54am 
Originally posted by neophus:
There are many mapping bugs (black wall, brushes not aligned, null textures etc...) so it could have been avoided. The Mod should have been tested more times.
It was tested, some bugs were intentionaly left unfixed, so I could release it faster, and I never tried to lie to anyone that it was otherwise, because I wanted to release the mod in early access, and I did so multiple times, first version was released in early 2019, completely unpolished, with totally amateur level design solely by me, at that time. But I'm trying my best to always be honest with people playing the mod, and one more version is coming, with multiple fixes and improvements.

And there are many positives of such tactic, instead of releasing it after many years, until it's complete. I've gotten tons of feedback over the years, and thanks to the fact that the mod existed in playable state for other players, they could take interest in it and join ship.
Last edited by H.E.C.U soldier; 24 Jul @ 10:59am
#4
Painevan 31 Jul @ 2:01am 
A lot of this is true in my experience, but fr this isn't constructive and also neglects to mention a lot of the good parts of the mod.
#5
anghangah 2.0 2 Aug @ 11:03pm 
yes.
#6
Thwomp 7 Sep @ 3:14pm 
little harsh this is a pretty small project and yet still on level with black mesa blueshift
#7
Outcast 7 Sep @ 11:40pm 
Originally posted by Thwomp:
little harsh this is a pretty small project and yet still on level with black mesa blueshift

... what?

If you for a second believe this is on par with Black Mesa Blueshift you sir/madam, Is delusional.
#8
H.E.C.U soldier  [developer] 8 Sep @ 5:37am 
Originally posted by Outcast:
Originally posted by Thwomp:
little harsh this is a pretty small project and yet still on level with black mesa blueshift

... what?

If you for a second believe this is on par with Black Mesa Blueshift you sir/madam, Is delusional.
It was never meant to be on par wtih Black Mesa: Blue Shift. I replied multiple times about it, they have more mappers, more designers, a lot more people in the team. We are very small team, only two mappers, me from beginning and the other one just recently joined the project. If it reaches Black Mesa aesthetic level then it will be a huge success anyway. And that's also because Black Mesa: Blue Shift has even more complex levels than Black Mesa itself.
Last edited by H.E.C.U soldier; 8 Sep @ 5:38am
#9
Outcast 8 Sep @ 12:59pm 
I never said it was either, the other person claimed to be, i can agree that i might have been harsh about it but i will not back down from the feedback, the mod has alot of factor that it can (and should improve on). And some factors is not so much a question about can or should, but closer to a near must to keep it to a decent standard.

The biggest problem is that to my understanding there is another mapper that did the first couple of map but you can clearly see a drastic change of quality at the later stages of the game. And the newer maps still have some smaller issues.
#10
H.E.C.U soldier  [developer] 8 Sep @ 1:36pm 
Originally posted by Outcast:
I never said it was either, the other person claimed to be, i can agree that i might have been harsh about it but i will not back down from the feedback, the mod has alot of factor that it can (and should improve on). And some factors is not so much a question about can or should, but closer to a near must to keep it to a decent standard.

The biggest problem is that to my understanding there is another mapper that did the first couple of map but you can clearly see a drastic change of quality at the later stages of the game. And the newer maps still have some smaller issues.
True, that's because I developed the later maps myself years ago, and they were only improved, not reworked. A lot of them will be reworked now.
#11
WHERE THE ♥♥♥♥ IS CACHE 16 Sep @ 6:13pm 
I agree w most these points, but enjoyed the mod over all id say 5.5/10 was def a cool little mod, but feels hollow due to many of these points.
#12
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