Half-Life: Alyx (93 on Metacritic)

[Ambrose Burnside]

Valve's first full VR game

If this is exclusive to a particular VR headset, it's gonna tank HARD ... But ... HALF-LIFE 3!?!?!?

Official reveal later this week

[Peppermint Lounge]

My load was moving briskly eye-ward until the letters V & R were read consecutively.

Still, a HL release remains big news, if n/a to me.

[guttermouth]

Lost my shit when I heard new Half-Life game. Then heard VR, was like a swift kick to the nuts

[flipswitch]

If it’s available on steam can’t other headset users ( like rift) play it?

[Deef]

Exactly the same sentiments as others. It's not that VR makes it disappointing (which it also will though), it's hearing that the game is just being made as a prop for something else that's disappointing.

[t0mby]

I did have a litte chuckle when I heard it was VR, but only because its been so long since HL2 that fans would lap up anything. It'll still sell well, for a VR game.

[Ambrose Burnside]

I did have a litte chuckle when I heard it was VR, but only because its been so long since HL2 that fans would lap up anything. It'll still sell well, for a VR game.

If I can play it on my Rift it's Day One for me

[Ambrose Burnside]

Valve has already announced plans to support all major VR PC systems for its next VR game ... But we also get the sense that HLA is a serious showcase for Valve Index's "Knuckles" controllers. We hear that most every object in the game's world has been designed to be touched and manipulated by hands, both in terms of realistic physics and how real hands move through virtual objects.

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Will have to dusty off the Rift. DAY ONE

[Candy Arse]

From a business sense it's totally understandable why they're doing this.

From a personal sense I own a Rift so Valve gets my money.

[F for Fake]

Now you can pick up that can with your own hands!!!!111!

[flipswitch]

Now you can pick up that can with your own hands!!!!111!

[Ambrose Burnside]

Valve has officially revealed Half-Life: Alyx, a full-length Half-Life game that's played completely in VR. The title is set to be released for all PC-based VR headsets in March 2020. You can watch the new trailer above.

Half-Life: Alyx is Valve’s first Half-Life game since 2007’s Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The game takes place between the events of the first and second Half-Life games, the new VR title stars the eponymous Alyx Vance and her father Eli as they work to organize a resistance against The Combine.

Players will take control of Alyx just as it was revealed in a report following the leak for Half-Life: Alyx earlier this week. Like previous games in the series, Half-Life: Alyx's core gameplay will feature a combination of world exploration, puzzles, and combat.

“Everyone at Valve is excited to be returning to the world of Half-Life,” says Valve founder Gabe Newell in a press release. “VR has energized us. We’ve invested a lot of ourselves in the technology. But we’re also game developers at heart, and to be devoting ourselves to a VR game this ambitious is just as exciting.”

Half-Life: Alyx runs on the Source 2 engine, and will be playable on Steam via all PC-based VR headsets. This includes Valve’s Index VR headset and HTC Vive, but also Oculus Quest with a PC link cable and Microsoft’s Mixed Reality headset.
Half-Life: Alyx Will Support Mods
Valve also revealed on its official website that Half-Life: Alyx will support community-built environments. The Source 2 tools for level-building will be available at launch. That means players can build their own levels to share with the community. Hammer, Valve's level authoring tool, has also been updated for VR.
Half-Life: Alyx Minimum PC Specs
Valve also revealed the minimum PC specs necessary to run Half-Life: Alyx. While the baseline specs are a little beefy, these are fairly standard for VR games, which requires more processing power, to begin with. Valve has not released the specs to run the game on maximum settings.

OS: Windows 10
Processor: Core i5-7500 / Ryzen 5 1600
Memory: 12 GB RAM
Graphics: GTX 1060 / RX 580 - 6GB VRAM

Half-Life: Alyx is available for pre-purchase now for $59.99. It will also be free anyone who owns a Valve Index.

Was that an Aussie accent I heard?

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[lestat]

Yeah it sounded like Rhys Darby to me.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1055302/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

His voice is very distinct and he's quite funny and quirky imo.

Trailer looked amazing, legit thinking about picking up a headset now.

[Ambrose Burnside]

For whatever reason I've never actually played the Half-Life 2 episodes, so I've gone back to play them in anticipation of Alyx. More than halfway through Episode 1.

I know Alyx is being promoted as set between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, but part of me hopes that it starts out that way as some sort of flashback, but then halfway through we have a twist where it time jumps to become essentially Episode 3 to wrap everything up.

One can dream!

[Ambrose Burnside]

Release date confirmed as the 23rd March 2020.

[Ambrose Burnside]

One of the comments sums it up for me:

Teleporting: You had my curiosity.
Free movement: Now you have my attention.

Game looks a lot better once they switch from teleport movement to free movement (they switch it up at about 6:15).

Looks incredible actually. This and Doom Eternal this month. Holy Shit.

*dusts off Oculus Rift*

[Ambrose Burnside]

Also:

"Half-Life means a lot to us, and it's been incredibly rewarding to refamiliarise ourselves with its characters, setting, and mechanics. There are Half-Life: Alyx team members who have been at Valve since Half-Life 2, and quite a few who go back to the original Half-Life. There are also people on the team for whom Half-Life: Alyx is their first time working on this series at all - and many of them certainly hope it's not the last. We absolutely see Half-Life: Alyx as our return to this world, not the end of it."

And:

Meanwhile, Walker confirmed Half-Life: Alyx will carry the Half-Life story forward despite being a prequel:

"Half-Life: Alyx is a full-fledged entry in the Half-Life series, both in terms of the sheer amount of content as well as the importance and substance of its narrative relative to the rest of the series. It's a critical part of the larger story, and it does push that story forward."

But will it give some closure on the end of Episode 2, which came out before the dawn of time?

"It's not a bad idea for players to have refreshed themselves on the events of Episode 2 before starting Half-Life: Alyx," Walker said, cryptically.

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[Ambrose Burnside]

Eurogamer:

All of this stuff comes together with wonderful set-pieces. Due to the exhausting nature of VR combat, massive pile-ons like Nova Propsekt are out of the question, ditto the open-world ram-raiding of the White Forest. Instead, troops are dropped in surgically - their strangled tannoy barking giving you a moment to panic and hunt for ammo and hopefully come up with a plan. As for the bestiary there's a shocking new enemy who I won't spoil, but even the old guard return and bring a vivid kind of enhanced fear with them. I had dreaded VR headcrabs, and then the game not only introduces them but immediately loses the first one in some pipework. That was a nice two minutes. (I regret to inform you that there's a new kind of headcrab now too, even if its design can't quite match the queasy supermarket horror of the original.) Elsewhere it feels like a testament to the brilliance of the original creature design on this series that you feel dread rather than nostalgia whenever one of the classics turns up again. Or maybe it's another sign of the sheer weight of immersion Alyx can conjure: there's a real sense of apprehension when the game leads you out of the light and back underground for a spell. You live in these spaces while you move through them.

There are ingenious set-pieces, increasingly piling up towards the end of the campaign, but I'm so struck through by the sheer thrift of a lot of it. It's that restraint again: make the VR work, get a handful of killer things out of it, and then repeat and remix without breaking the spell. There are Hollywood moments that will stick with me, but I also remember being in a room filled with oil drums while a tank of explosive gas was being winched up towards the mouth of one of those horrible limpet things that sit on the ceiling. That's the kind of clock Valve likes to put in a scene to add suspense. Hitchcock would be proud: you can see all the moving parts and yet the magic is still there.

IGN:

Back when VR first became a real thing and we all started spitballing which game worlds we’d most like to be fully immersed in, Half-Life topped my list (tied with BioShock). It took a few years, but Half-Life: Alyx has more than realized that potential. With it, Valve has set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design, showing what can happen when a world-class developer goes all-in on the new frontier of technology. In a lot of ways, it feels like a game from the future, and one that the rest of VR gaming will likely take a good long while to match, much less surpass.

Half-Life: Alyx has set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design, showing what can happen when a world-class developer goes all-in on the new frontier of technology.

10/10

Kotaku:

In a lot of ways, the end result feels in line with the Half-Life series’ legacy. Messiness has always been part of the package. Half-Life was a masterpiece, but nobody would call it perfect, as evidenced by the gargantuan fan remake project that spent more than a decade attempting to fix its flaws. In truth, Half-Life 2's story was not a narrative revolution—at least, not in terms of the content of the story it told. It leaned on mystery to fill in gaps where substance faltered and had many other issues besides. But its setting’s sense of place and the techniques it pioneered to help players fully soak up that world’s details informed countless future games. And that’s to say nothing of all the game’s physics-focused mechanical innovations.

Half-Life: Alyx reaches some astoundingly high heights while also managing to be both too ambitious and too conservative for its own good.

Half-Life: Alyx, similarly, is a game of quiet revolutions that make it more than the sum of its parts, of pioneering ideas that we someday may not be able to imagine VR games without. Its locations feel like well-worn territory until a little too late in its arc.

Its story has one wild twist, but otherwise it goes pretty much where you’d expect. It lacks the emotional gravitas needed to make its main beats really sing—Alyx’s relationship with resistance member Russel, who chatters in her ear throughout her journey, is more quippy than heartfelt, and most other characters make brief appearances rather than getting time to be actual, you know, characters. It is, in so many ways, Another Half-Life Game in the mould of Half-Life 2 and its episodes when it could have been more.

At the same time, I could go on for days about the item-yanking mechanic alone. Once you get it down, it feels so good to hold out your hand like Iron Man, pull a distant object toward you, and squeeze your controller (or just a trigger, if you prefer) to catch it. Every single time I did it, I felt like a cool genius. My partner told me that I looked cool in real life while I was doing it.

Nobody ever looks cool in real life when they’re doing things in VR! And it solves so many issues inherent to navigating virtual spaces. You don’t have to reach out at odd angles to grab things and risk confusing or otherwise harming your VR setup. You can just flick your wrist, and there you have it: that thing you wanted. I am not joking when I say that my brain still thinks I should have this power in real life. In the past five days, I have absentmindedly tried on three separate occasions to pull small objects toward me by flicking my wrist. So far, it has not worked, but I continue to hold out hope.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

Half-Life: Alyx is the Half-Life game you’ve been waiting for, even if it’s not the one you were expecting – and even if you’ll never play it. Valve’s first full virtual reality game is a masterclass of first-person shooter design that makes clear the company haven’t forgotten anything about making these kinds of games in the nine years since Portal 2, or the 13 years since Half-Life 2: Episode 2.

Yet it’s also not without its flaws, both in how it designs around the limitations of current VR tech, and in the more mundane challenges of crafting single player adventures.

It's my birthday in just over a month. I expect we'll be in full lockdown by then, but at least Alyx will have had a month's worth of patches.

City 17 seems like a fitting place to wait out the coronavirus pandemic, and I cannot wait

[Rorschach]

Would love to play this game but no VR headset. Tempted to make the jump but it looks like a periphery I'd use a handful of time before it starts collecting dusk.

[unfnknblvbl]

yeah same, plus I feel like VR still isn't quite there yet.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Valve reckon modders will allow peeps to play it without VR soon enough, and they're OK with that.

I have a lot of issues with Valve, but one thing I love is their attitude towards mods. Helps that Team Fortress and Counter-Strike have been such cash cows, but still.

It reminds me of the good old days of PC gaming, when mods were encouraged. I miss old pre-Bethesda id for that too.

[Peppermint Lounge]

I'd love to try it but like others can't justify adding VR to my inventory. Angry Joe has a good piece on it. Motion sickness afflicted the Angry Joe guys when using the Valve headset where they've never experienced motion sickness in VR before. The Oculus set had reduced visuals but was better for motion sickness. Would be a massive shame to shell out for all the Valve gear then find you can't enjoy it due to motion sickness.

[t0mby]

Fuck yeah, I got motion sickness with the PSVR and thought it would ruin my experience but I discovered that eating crystallised ginger half hour before works wonders.

[Ambrose Burnside]

Digital Foundry's Tech Analysis is up:

I played on Oculus Rift S and found it to be a comfortable, clean experience but I'd imagine the Index is a further a step up owing to individual finger tracking (three fingers are grouped together on one button with Oculus Touch). The classic Vive is one which is perhaps less well suited if you want to utilise continuous movement, as the touch discs on the Vive wands aren't optimal for free movement. The point is though that the game supports a wide range of HMDs.

In terms of PC specs, a Core i5 7600 paired with either an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580 is Valve's minimum spec requirement. We tested both of these GPUs with a more powerful Core i5 8400 and can confirm a largely decent experience on both cards at medium settings with the higher quality hologram options disabled. Gameplay runs at 70-90fps for the most part, but the asynchronous timewarp frame blending technology does a reasonable job of hiding dropped frames. What we did find is that the RX 580 is significantly faster overall, but exhibits more frame-time inconsistency than the GTX 1060, meaning that the async timewarp blending is not as effective in some scenarios. Also curious is that we seemed to be CPU-bound in many cutscenes where frame-rate could drop significantly regardless of which of the graphics cards we were using.

In tuning the game, we didn't see a huge amount of visual difference between low and ultra settings, principally because nearly all lighting and most of the shadows are pre-calculated and 'baked' into the game, while geometry level of detail cannot be altered. We'll have a more detailed look at the settings in due course but fundamentally, the most dramatic improvement to performance comes from the volumetric lighting setting, where dropping from ultra to low gives you an extra 20 per cent of performance. Ultimately, the minimum spec for Half-Life: Alyx can still deliver a decent gameplay experience - but we'd likely recommend GTX 1070 rather than GTX 1060 as the more ideal entry point from the Nvidia GPU perspective. From a CPU perspective, if the Core i5 8400 isn't totally consistent, the i5 7400 will have even more issues in running the cutscenes, so that's worth factoring in too.

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[MiNiStRy]

Thinking of buying the oculos quest as from what I've read this would be a cheap way of getting into pc vr without the $1000 plus price tag.