[Updated on July 27, 2024, to improve readability and remove excess writing]
This isn’t the article I was supposed to be writing today. I was supposed to be writing a review of Black Mesa, which was supposed to come out of Early Access today. To say I have been looking forward to today would be an understatement. So why am I not writing the game’s review?
First, there was a delay in the update being rolled out for players living in time zones that are ahead of America. However, the main reason is that the nearly 2GB update that was supposed to bring Black Mesa out of Early Access ended up breaking it instead. So, what has gone wrong with it? Judging by the Steam forums, lots of players are having various problems, some minor and some major, such as CTDs in various places.
However, the biggest problem, and the one that has stopped my review dead in its tracks, is that Black Mesa has decided it doesn’t like specific keys on a keyboard. Being old, semi-ambidextrous, and cross dominant, I still use the somewhat archaic arrow key controls. Right, Ctrl is my duck button, Right Shift is for jumping, Return for interaction, Delete for reloading, and the numbers on the keypad for changing weapons – I call it my hand-span setup.
Unfortunately, most of these are the keys Black Mesa has stopped recognizing. At the time of writing, I can look around, move, shoot, and reload. That’s it. I don’t think I will be tackling Xen with that. This is affecting many players, although those using WASD may not have noticed. To be fair, Crowbar Collective has released several updates since the big one this morning, so they are probably working on it. Fingers crossed, they can sort it out soon.
