Half-Life took the world by storm in 1998, but Gearbox Software’s lesser-known expansions are often left out of the conversation. They allowed us to peer through the Black Mesa Incident through a new lens, taking Valve’s revolutionary grounded approach to the FPS genre that much further, making its world feel even more lived in.
Opposing Force put us into the boots of a HECU grunt out of their depth, Blue Shift saw fan favourite Barney Calhoun save a handful of scientists, and Decay allowed us to team up with a friend to weaken the Resonance Cascade, helping everyone still trapped in the facility. We saw the incident from so many unique vantage points, but the Black Ops specialists were, unfortunately, never given the same spotlight.
These assassins were sent into the facility to clean up the cleanup, detonating a nuclear bomb to wipe out all traces of Black Mesa, while also picking off any remaining military grunts and scientists. Added fairly late into Half-Life’s development, Gearbox picked up the torch and fleshed them out in Opposing Force, repurposing many of Valve’s scrapped ideas. But even then, they’re still the most underdeveloped of all the groups in the original games.
Thankfully, one fan is amending that after 24 years. Cue D3ads, who, with his fan-led studio Pipeline Softworks, is giving the Black Ops squad the expansion they always deserved in the form of Dark Matter.
How Half-Life: Dark Matter Came To Be
In over 20 years, the only other notable mod to focus on this group is the fittingly-titled ‘Black Ops’. It’s a great fan-made game in its own right, but isn’t set entirely within Black Mesa like the official expansions. Instead, you play as a CIA operative sent to find and kill a former Black Mesa scientist, before bringing the nuclear bomb to the facility. Dark Matter is much more in keeping with the Gearbox games, opening with the player on a helicopter before being dropped into Black Mesa as part of the clean-up mission, just as we see in Apprehension.
In 2018, D3ads toyed around with a few ideas, like Opposing Force with a red heads-up display, but quickly decided that he wanted to “do a proper job of it”. And so, Dark Matter was born, an ambitious declaration from a dedicated fan to make an entire expansion on par with Gearbox’s own.
The mod went viral among the community almost immediately, finally scratching an itch that so many never realised they had. The excitement could be felt, and the old blog posts on ModDB now serve as a time capsule for that burst of support, but before long, D3ads had to put the project on the back burner to focus on studying. Dark Matter slowly faded from focus, and then came the pandemic while D3ads dealt with some pretty major health issues, which understandably slowed development to a crawl.
The funny thing is, Dark Matter was supposed to be my final project in GoldSRC after many years, me bowing out from the community pretty much, and it ended up going on a lot longer than I wanted. It’s those Unforeseen Consequences, unfortunately.
However, at the very end of 2024, he came back swinging with a re-reveal, and not only has excitement among the community been reinvigorated, but so too has the project’s momentum.
Meet Kovac
Early on in the original Half-Life, the HECU storms into Black Mesa and mercilessly guns down scientists and security officers under the guise of a ‘rescue mission’ But in Opposing Force, Gearbox opted to make Shepard a hero, even fighting back a second alien invasion after Gordon made his way to Xen. Dark Matter, however, stays true to the cutthroat nature of the Black Ops team, meaning that our protagonist Kovac is more of a “bad guy”.
“You could say he’s a fascist to some degree,” D3ads tells me. “He’s a statist, so he believes in whatever needs to be done to complete the mission. However, in the game, he will have shades of grey in the same way that, in Entropy: Zero (where you play as a Metrocop), Agent Walker is kind of a psychopath, to begin with.”
Another core part of Kovac’s character that’s an interesting shift from other protagonists in the series is his age. Gordon Freeman just started at Balck Mesa (even if he has an employee of the month plaque already), Barney Calhoun is also new to being a security guard, and Adrian Shephard is a 22-year-old fresh out of boot camp. Kovac, however, is a “senior agent” with far more experience.
“The idea was that, in the CIA, a lot of them have taken people from prior experience, especially from Navy Seals, Seal Team Six — that’s on document — so I decided that would be the case with Kovac,” D3ads explains. “And then I came up with the idea of them being Slavic because I’ve done stuff to do with Russia and Serbia in previous projects. He’s sort of undisclosed Eastern European heritage, but he was born in the United States, in Michigan.”
Kovac is part of the intelligence agency, unnamed in Opposing Force, but basically the CIA, because in the old Quiver concept of Half-Life, the CIA were a faction and they were supposed to blow up the facility.
Fitting to the Black Ops theme, D3ads even has an extensive dossier on Kovac that details how he began in the military as a “bog-standard” army man, before conducting various missions during the Cold War and even joining Seal Team Six. Gordon, Shephard, and Barney rose to the occasion when the Nihilanth launched his invasion against Black Mesa, but Kovac had been preparing his entire life for such a moment.
Black Ops Zombies, Thermal Vision, And Agency Files
One of the standout introductions in the Gearbox expansions was the new zombie types. Finally, the security and HECU were given their own variants, while Gonomes paved the way for unique, mutated variants as we see in Half-Life 2. D3ads is keeping with that creative spirit in Dark Matter by finally introducing the Black Ops zombies.
CIA agents are more agile, and can even turn invisible on hard mode, so the zombies fittingly move faster. However, they won’t have access to the government’s futuristic cloaking technology. “I played around with vision and stuff. I thought we could have a cloaking ability. But I thought it might be taking it a little bit too far into Alien vs. Predator territory,” D3ads says.
There will be stealth elements in general, but as this is a Half-Life game at its core, being able to turn invisible would take away from the more traditional FPS experience somewhat. However, D3ads is introducing a few unique features befitting the assassins, such as Metal Gear Solid-inspired thermal vision and optional agency files that you can find across the expansion.
D3ads isn’t planning to introduce flashbangs, a cut Opposing Force concept, but he does have ideas for a cluster grenade instead.
“I assume that the military is still cooperating with the Black Ops after they’ve withdrawn for the most part, and the ones left in the base are just those who are unfortunate enough to be in the crosshairs of Black Ops,” D3ads explains, adding that he believes their mission, “apart from putting the nuke in place and blowing the facility up” is to “collect intelligence to preserve important resource technologies.”
Returning To Xen
Xen is pivotal to the story of Half-Life. Black Mesa sent survey teams into this strange border world between dimensions to retrieve living alien specimens to experiment on, along with strange orange crystals. After using one such crystal, provided by the G-Man no less, the Nihilanth was able to launch an invasion into Earth, dubbed the Black Mesa Incident. Even though he was ultimately defeated by Gordon Freeman, the raging portal storm allowed the Combine empire to reach Earth, leading into the events of Half-Life 2 where Dr Kliener and Eli Vance still experiment with Xen for their slingshot teleportation.
The original Half-Life and its expansions all took us to Xen, so D3ads is taking a swing at it too, sending Kovac hurling into the polygonal void. But Xen was incredibly controversial back in 1998. Half-Life snapped from a tightly designed shooter to an awkward, clunky, and often frustrating platformer right at the end of the game, making for a fairly disappointing conclusion. 24 years later, trying to remain faithful while addressing over two decades worth of concern is a difficult tightrope to walk.
Even Valve didn’t like Xen, which is why Black Mesa completely overhauled the endgame.
However, there are a few key differences in Dark Matter. Since we’ll be venturing to Xen after Gordon defeats the Nihilanth, the Controllers’ grip has lessened over the vortigaunts, meaning that they “are free to a certain degree”.
The Controllers are a controversial point, though. It’s debated whether they simply disappeared along with the Alien Grunts after the Nihilanth died, or remained to try and corral the vortigaunts back under their control. D3ads is trying to strike a middle ground with Dark Matter.
“The Alien Grunts and Controllers will exist for a short time and will soon disappear,” D3ads says. “[In] some emails [lead writer] Marc Laidlaw said the Controllers died with the Nihilanth, perhaps. He’s not sure, because he never really thought about it until fans were like, ‘Hey, we need to know this right now!’ My idea, basically, is that they stuck around for a bit. The vortigaunts are fighting back against their oppressors.”
Dark Matter will also expand on Race X, the aliens who Shephard fought back in Opposing Force.
It’ll be a different feel, even if there are still some platforming elements, and an interesting insight into what the border world looked like after Gordon Freeman’s excursion.
When Will Dark Matter Launch?
D3ads plans to roll out Dark Matter in three phases, similar to how the fan-made Blue Shift remake is being handled. This approach will allow the community to try out the expansion in an almost episodic cadence, a great way to maintain interest given how long projects like this can take to develop, especially as Dark Matter aims to be as long as Opposing Force, Gearbox’s biggest expansion.
The first phase will consist of five chapters, including the prologue — Drop Zone, New Orders, Escalating Circumstances, Broken Arrow, and Paradigm Shift. D3ads tells me that he hopes to get phase one out sometime next year (though that could always change).
As for the next two phases, “We’ll tackle the other parts as we come along, we’ve already started to do bits and pieces of the other phases, more phase two — especially Xen, because that’s an important part.”
A lot of people really do want the Black Ops expansion more than I probably realised.
When the project is complete, he plans to launch it on Steam. But if he runs into any obstacles along the way, you can always find it on ModDB, where another update is expected “probably around March”.
