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Half-Life Remake Black Mesa's Revamped Xen Delayed Again

You'll have to wait a bit longer to play the new area in the beautiful Half-Life remake.

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Developer Crowbar Collective has been working on the final sections of Black Mesa, a Half-Life remake, since 2015. Today, however, the studio announced that those sections--set on the alien world Xen--have been delayed to December.

The studio released an update on its Steam forums that detailed the delay to Xen, alongside the first in-game screenshots of the external world, one of which you can see below. Crowbar Collective explained that it realized that it couldn't ensure the quality it hoped for by this summer, when the area was originally scheduled to be released.

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"We know that this is not what anyone would want to hear, but after taking a long and hard look at what we want to achieve, we have decided that this is for the best," the post reads. "We do not want to compromise on Xen's quality in any way. That said, we consider December to be a do-or-die deadline."

The developer also provided some updates regarding its progress on the game. The studio has revamped the game's lighting system to support "fully dynamic lights." In addition, Black Mesa has received color correction to soften some of the more saturated colors. Finally, Crowbar Collective fixed broken weapon holding animations. You can read more about the development progress here.

Black Mesa has been in development and even playable for quite some time. The first portions of the game were released for free back in 2012, and a more complete, paid version entered early access on Steam in 2015. Since then, the game has been almost finished--except for the Xen levels. You can see other images of Xen below, and you can currently try out the unfinished version of the game for $20 over on Steam.

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