Now it's not like it's only an engine change, for this to work they added PBR layers (metalness, emission, normal, yada yada) to all textures here, and that's a big artistic work.
That said… gimme gimme gimme Half Life 1, plssssssss :D !
As someone passionate about hl1, I dont like Black mesa. Yes it looks nice, but gameplay wise it seems lacking to me. It feels very slow to move, bhopping has been nerfed to death.
From what I remember of Black Mesa, it felt more like Half-Life 2, control wise, than Half-Life. So for people who played Half-Life 2 first, Black Mesa probably feels more natural.
Maybe teams could use tools like AI Gigapixel (discussed on here yesterday) to upsample older textures?
I agree with you that there is asset work to be done, but I bet there are tools out there that can simplify and automate this process quite a bit today.
I couldn’t find the tool you mentioned but I found a thread on another site about a GAN that can upscale images, and using that one to generate highres textures.
That said… gimme gimme gimme Half Life 1, plssssssss :D !