Barney Calhoun visits Xen in Black Mesa, the latest chapter of Blue Shift, due later this month

Black Mesa: Blue Shift is a fan-made retelling about Barney Calhoun’s adventures at the Black Mesa Research Facility (and beyond!) before Half Life 2. The next chapter of Black Mesa: Blue Shift will be released on November 17th.

Half Life: Blue Shift was originally developed by Gearbox for the original Half Life as the second expansion (following Opposing Force), and turned the "Barneys", of the Black Mesa Security Force, into a single playable character. Barney Calhoun finds himself caught in the central events surrounding the Seven Hour War. Black Mesa: Blue Shift is a mod that was announced in 2021 by a team called HECU collective. It retells the story in a mod of Black Mesa, which itself is a retelling Half Life.

Blue Shift, like Black Mesa is released in chapters that correspond to the storyline of original. Captive Freight was released at the end 2022, two years after the first four chapters. CitizenFive, the Blue Shift developer, told PC Gamer the delay was due to the fact that "developing a chapter in Xen is much more complex than the usual levels."

CitizenFive explained that "the Earth chapters are essentially corridors, whereas Xen has a lot of natural environments with high detail which require a different pipeline." "Building detailed assets for each environment, creating collisions and optimizing them for good performance within the Source engine limitations, and working around a variety of gameplay considerations (such a hacking in of new Xenian enemy without proper code access), is generally very demanding."

The rep stated that Crowbar Collective had to face the same challenges in creating the Xen Chapters for Black Mesa. "We've been able to speed up the process a bit by using VR, but the process is still complex."

In this new chapter, Focal Point (the fifth of eight), Barney is sent to the alien planet of Xen in order to calibrate some teleportation gear. Naturally, things don't go as smoothly as they should. The process is not entirely smooth, but it does look cool.

Focal Point also includes "a lot of improvements and content" from the previous chapters of Blue Shift.

• Living Quarters Outbound and Insecurity Chapters have been improved.
• All earthbound surface maps have improved skybox textures, lighting, and Post Processing.
• Addition of responsive surface sounds in some environments, which will be played when nearby explosions are detected;
• All explosions SFX have been improved and distance attenuation added.
• Addition of completely new surface properties to certain props, with unique physics sound. (E.g. barrels, tarps, monitors, crates);
• Updated BM and BM-BS textures/materials.
• Other visual improvements

Black: Mesa Blue Shift can be downloaded from Steam Workshop or ModDB.