bro went from ">:(" to "oh ok"

Oh, okay.

For 8 years, the revolver was in BM's Office Complex - and since BM has different balancing to Half-Life, this worked really well. It supports the "survival horror" atmosphere of the chapter, particularly with its lower ammo cap, and it gives the player a long-range option in WGH and BP that's very useful with BM's larger maps.

Black Mesa 1.0 put the shotgun back in Office Complex - which is fine and more faithful to Half-Life on paper, but in practice, it severely undermines the atmosphere that the chapter is meant to invoke. BM's shotgun is not the close-range, limited powerhouse that HL1's shotgun was - its range, accuracy, and damage rival (if not outperforms) that of HL2's shotgun. It makes the chapter as a whole feel quite different, and not in a good way. The justification for putting the shotgun back, of being more faithful to HL, also doesn't hold up, given all of 1.0's other changes that deviate from the original game far more significantly than a simple weapon swap.

Hold the phone, "putting the revolver back in it's rightful place"?

What the fuck do you mean? The revolver doesn't appear in Half-Life 1 until BLAST PIT.

The Black Mesa devs placed the Shotgun exactly where it has been for the past 25 years. Don't blame the BM devs for placing it there, blame Valve!

@Phantron
2.0 has more interactivity, changes out textures and office designs to look more like a 90s office and HL1, much better balance, much better use of lighting and shadows, brings back various HL1 things, more NPCs you can rescue, more secrets, and is overall a little more challenging.

Playing 1.x and 2.0 back to back is a good way to show how far the project's come.

what are the biggest differences between these 2?

OC 2.0 is over here.
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3032364338&searchtext=

OC 1.03 will remain, however.

Thank you so much.

@jakestritty I just checked and the Office Complex Classic Textures are already seem completely compatible with this mod, as far as I can tell.

@jakestritty
We might do that when we get to OC, among a slew of other improvements, both big and small.The earlier chapters got the least amount of love, and serious changes didn't start happening until WGH.

I know you don't like using other moders work even when given permission but I would prefer the classic style better. And I thought adding the scene with the zombie in the storage room would make this mod hold up with the amount of cool stuf you added in WGH.

I would also like you to do something like this https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1622832373&searchtext=offace+complex

I have a better Idea. You could add the scripted scene with the zombie breaking out of a storage room.

Really think this is a definitive Office Complex for Black Mesa. Would be awesome if you could add more NPC interractions suggested here.

I honestly thought the bullsquid in the final image was a giant rat 10/10

Final thought for now, is it possible at all to have the first Guard ignore the TV watching houndeye, at least until the player alerts him? I always want to leave him alone, but the guard always shoots him first through the window, so you can't. I just want him to live in peace, he's so adorable.

The vortigaunt ambush itself also has some problems. The guards have almost no cover and nowhere to run except directly into the kill ranges of the vortigaunts. Then, they either get killed by being multi-shocked by all the vorts in the room, or they die to a shockwave attack they aren't scripted to dodge. When they aren't doing that, they're hanging back and shooting, but they can hardly see most of the vorts, and firing at the few they CAN see will regularly result in the player getting shot, since the guards have to shoot past Gordon. You basically have to immediately and quickly do the entire encounter yourself without them if you consistently want them to live, and while that's pretty easy to do, it's not very fun. Even if you just make the vortigaunts less likely to aggro onto the guards in favour of the player, that'd help a lot.

I have a few thoughts here. Like with Unforeseen Consequences, this chapter would benefit from more limited lighting in some of the later areas.

Also, the guard and scientist pathing could stand to be improved. If you have more than two guards and really any scientists at all, they tend to step in eachother's way accidentally kill eachother quite often at times. Mostly this happens during the vortigaunt ambush, cafeteria stand, and the final encounter in the chapter. Might be worth making these moments lightly scripted so all the guards move to and between firing positions that don't so often result in them shooting eachother or the scientists.

Perhaps when this is looked over again, there could be some more npc interaction with the environment, to clarify should you have brought extra npc's to the end where the elevator shaft is a guard could lean against a wall, another can lean over the rail overlooking the cafeteria, and another guard could sit on the couch next to the scientist who failed gym. Maybe even when the npc's meet each other they could greet them or ask if they've seen any other survivors. I really feel the opportunity to have more npc interaction possible with these kinds of mods. But definetly hope the interactions at the elevator shaft could be implemented.

One day, maybe there'll be a separate 'shotgun in its rightful place' version of office complex, where the difficulty and enemy encounters are reworked to match the sheer overpowered nature of BM's shotgun in tight quarters that rarely, if ever, trigger the shotgun's brutal damage falloff.

@mainmind Unlikely, given that this was made in protest of those specific weapon placements.

could you make a version of both this and blast pit with the current weapons? so shotgun in office complex, and 357 in blast pit.

The main things I would consider to make this classic is the Fan room making that feel more like the original map with headcrabs jumping into the fan blades (although they won't gib) and the zombie bursting through the door or any other wooden boarded up structure over a doorway behind the very fitting reception desk which is new but welcome. It would be good also to have an shiny sort of "kingspan" insulation texture for the ceiling areas with the other fan blade room. What is it with fan blade rooms?

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by keeping the "flow" from 1.5 here. The only major flow difference 1.0/1.5 makes to OC is closing off the freezer doors, thus rendering it completely linear.

While this mod opens/unlocks the freezer doors again, the 1.0/1.5 path is still pretty obvious, I think. The shelves are still collapsed in favour of it, things are just more open than they were before.

Right, so it keeps the bug fixes and art direction from 1.5

It just reverts the flow back to before 1.5.

Isn't that what this mod does?

I’d like to see a version that keeps the art direction & bug fixes from 1.5, but combines the flow & balance changes from 1.5, 1.0, & 0.91.

I think I may have discovered a way to play the old maps, I think.

In the Games Library, right click on Black Mesa and hit properties, go into betas and it will display the different updates to the game like the Crossfire update, Halloween update & BMS 1.0 update. I rolled back to the Surface Tension update, started the game and tried to start We've Got Hostiles!, but it crashed. I think this may have been because I am subscribed to Citizen's Chapter Overhaul for it. Though I've already updated the game back to 1.5 so I can't confirm.

To test my theory, I would Completely Uninstall the game, even deleting the remaining data in the steamapps\Common folder, just be sure to backup the custom folder. Opt-into one of the old updates in the beta's tab, unsubscribe from map changing workshop addons, and install the game fresh to see if it works.

Check out the full 'classic' mod.

I very much second this.

Mostly just never liked how they changed the freezer...

I'd kind of like though if there was a version that still had the shotgun, to be more true to HL1.

Fantastic work. Excited for Surface Tension and Forget About Freeman

@vissago rain. Dude...development is over now with only bug fixes and optimization improvements to be added. No more major updates! Sick and tired of them!

A vast improvement over the dumbed-down office complex in vanilla. Excellent work.
Updates to the "main branch" when?