Black Mesa mod won't get Xen levels

Crowbar Collective, the creators of Half-Life remake Black Mesa, spent a few hours last night letting the internet shout questions at them until they broke down into a series of carefully crafted answers. Aka, a Reddit AMA.

As part of it, the team confirmed that the Xen levels coming to Black Mesa's early access release will not be making it to the free mod version.

"It's impossible," wrote level designer Joe R. "In order to make Xen look the best it possibly can look, we need to upgrade the engine with new features. These new features will make it incompatible with the mod version."

Elsewhere, level designer Jordan F explains what exactly makes the versions incompatible. "Organic environments are not something the Source engine does particularly well," Jordan writes. "Making Xen look as good as we want it to requires lots of improvements to the way the engine handles rendering and lighting. We can't port these changes back to the mod because we don't have source code access to that engine version."

This isn't the end of mod support, however. According to Joe, the team are looking at porting bug fixes from the early access version to the mod version.

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.