That said, it's remarkable how well much of it fits the format. The vehicle sections are almost unplayably nauseating. Half Life 2 obviously wasn't designed with VR in mind, so it can be a bumpy ride. You walk up to a combine patrol guard and he looms over you, his hand pushing into your chest as he shoves you away. You have to look up to watch Doctor Breen waffle on about how safe City 17 is. Suddenly, you feel the cavernous space of Half Life 2's train station.
VR's ability to provide scale and depth to virtual worlds is a much-discussed phenomenon, but the effect is doubly striking when it's a place you already know. Being placed inside City 17, having it wrapped around me like a dystopian comfort blanket, was utterly thrilling. Half-Life 2 was the game that made me fall in love with VR. Also, because Half-Life 2's movement speed was so fast, half-an-hour's play would give you the kind of motion sickness that could floor a Navy Admiral.Īt the time, though, it was transcendent. The DK1's resolution was tiny compared to the Valve Index or the Rift S, and bespoke VR controllers didn't exist at all, which means you played sat down with traditional KB + Mouse controls. By 2020 standards, playing Half-Life 2 in VR was dreadful, like playing football with one of those old leather and lace affairs where every header risked a concussion. If I sound like I'm talking about 2014 like it was Victorian Times, that's because VR has come a long way in six years. Half-Life: Alyx isn't the first time Half-Life has been playable in VR. But a few already- developed games offered hacky VR support, and one of those was Half Life 2.
GARRYS MOD VR FREE
At that time, the available dedicated VR experiences were limited to a handful of free tech-demos (because, you know, they were developer kits). I've been interested in VR since the beginning, eagerly picking up an Oculus Rift development kit when they were made commercially available in 2014. Half-Life: Alyx isn't so much a first step as something Valve has been building toward for a long time.
Not because I have doubts about Alyx, or that another game should be in its place, but because Half-Life's influence on VR gaming is already notable. Assuming Valve don't fluff it (which, let's face it, is unlikely) Alyx will be the point the industry looks back on as when VR became more than an expensive curiosity.īut it would be a shame if the history books ended up written that way. There's a sense Half-Life Alyx will be VR's moment in the sun, the "killer-app" that Halo was to Xbox or that Shenmue should have been for the Dreamcast.
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