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Half-Life: Alyx - Valve's full-length flagship VR game set between HL1 and HL2

Dayyālu

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As I've already said, methinks that the only ones who would truly enjoy VR are the milsim enthusiasts, because they massively focus on realism already (thus fumbling reloading and having slow and choppy shooting would help with immersion, same with having the chance to manually launch grenades or flip switches). And let's not even talk about equipment like driving tanks, where speed and flexibility isn't needed because you are doing it for fun, mostly against human opponents (that are slaved to the same limits) and milsim people aren't usually utterly incompentent in gaming.

Point is, we need to see how HL: Alyx is as a game and as a shooter. Discussing VR as a platform is beyond the point, VR has somewhat failed (until now, I guess) both to get a killer app and to get noticed at large. All the videos and the laundry lists posted here are essentially shovelware or walking simulators, but I presume there's still some room to grow.

But will HL: Alyx be a good Half Life game? VR brings limitations both to design, enemy design, weapon design. For every thing you can do in an "immersive manner" with VR you can do stuff faster with keyboard+mouse (typical example, the difference in performance with light gun shooters with real peripherals and mouse aiming). They are different control set-ups, and many shooters have been built with kb+mouse in mind up until now. I do not doubt that if we would ever get to a duel between in Counterstrike between a VR team and a conventional team there would be no hope, mostly because the shooter experience on PC was built for kb+mouse, and even console shooters had to follow a completely different philosophy (what I like to call "theme park shooter", CoD-likes, slow and devoid of particularly challenging encounters and map design, and focused on cinematic setpieces). Controllers shape the kind of shooter you are developing.

The fact that quick-time events or PRESS F NOT TO DIE can be performed with VR controls is interesting, but what about level design? Enemy design? Can I afford difficult fights (and I don't mean damage sponges) with a controller that gives players more limited reaction times? How are you going to deal with scoped weaponry? What about verticality? Do you have to restrict engagement ranges due to players not managing to fight properly?

I do not doubt that Valve can put out great art (also essential for a shooter, ambience is good) but we need to see what are the bones of the game, even before considering VR gimmicks.
 

Metro

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In case you guys haven't figured it out: this is simply Valve leveraging their most anticipated IP to push sales of shitty VR headsets that no one will use outside of this one gimmicky game.
 

warci

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Look, I've got a rift and I can see the possibilities, but the reason all current games are just gimmicky shit is simple: they haven't solved the fundamental issue that's crucial to any game, especially shooters: movement. Games like superhot are crazy good in VR, because they can work around this limitation. A game like HL where free movement is it's core... how will they handle this? Include free threadmills?
 

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In case you guys haven't figured it out: this is simply Valve leveraging their most anticipated IP to push sales of shitty VR headsets that no one will use outside of this one gimmicky game.

Why would they do this only to push sales and then make it work on any SteamVR compatible headset?
 

Haba

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A game like HL where free movement is it's core... how will they handle this? Include free threadmills?

Your character is sitting in a wheelchair. You operate it with a keypad on your your left hand (also known as your keyboard WASD).

On your right hand you have this thing:
Plexus-VR-Glove.jpg
 

Dexter

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Point is, we need to see how HL: Alyx is as a game and as a shooter. Discussing VR as a platform is beyond the point, VR has somewhat failed (until now, I guess) both to get a killer app and to get noticed at large. All the videos and the laundry lists posted here are essentially shovelware or walking simulators, but I presume there's still some room to grow.
:retarded:
This is amazing, now apparently even games like DOOM 3, the Serious Sam series, Resident Evil VII and an upcoming Medal of Honor title are either Shovelware or Walking Simulators, as are all the Sim (Racing/Flight or Space) games because they are in VR. I guess no game is safe and can be retroactively declared such if it gets a VR release. This is what we call being disingenuous.

Leave aside that there's already a bunch of titles developed by established developers. The late Asgard's Wrath for instance is a 40-50 hour game developed by Sanzaru Games that did a Sly Cooper title and worked on the recent Spyro Trilogy. Stormland, Edge of Nowhere, The Unspoken and Feral Rites were developed by Insomniac Games that did the Original Spyro and Ratchet & Clank games and the Resistance and Spider-Man series on PlayStation. CryTek did Robinson: The Journey and The Climb. Epic Games did Robo Recall. 4A Games (of Metro fame) did Arktika.1. Bethesda released Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, DOOM VFR and Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot. UbiSoft did Star Trek Bridge Crew, Transference and Eagle Flight among others and are apparently working on Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed VR titles. Ready at Dawn that did The Order 1886 developed Lone Echo (which is the closest thing to a Narrative-based "Walking Simulator" with a really high budget out of this list), also did the Multiplayer title Echo Arena and are developing Lone Echo II. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice that was recently ported was developed by Ninja Theory. Chronos, Dead and Buried and From Other Suns were made by Gunfire Games (of the Darksiders series). Respawn Entertainment (of Titanfall/Nu-Star Wars Game) are developing Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. We also have studios like Cyan (of Myst/Uru/Riven fame) who ported Obduction to VR and are developing Firmament with it in mind. And there are also a few VR-only Studios that came out of this like Vertigo Games or Survios.

But will HL: Alyx be a good Half Life game? VR brings limitations both to design, enemy design, weapon design. For every thing you can do in an "immersive manner" with VR you can do stuff faster with keyboard+mouse (typical example, the difference in performance with light gun shooters with real peripherals and mouse aiming). They are different control set-ups, and many shooters have been built with kb+mouse in mind up until now. I do not doubt that if we would ever get to a duel between in Counterstrike between a VR team and a conventional team there would be no hope, mostly because the shooter experience on PC was built for kb+mouse, and even console shooters had to follow a completely different philosophy (what I like to call "theme park shooter", CoD-likes, slow and devoid of particularly challenging encounters and map design, and focused on cinematic setpieces). Controllers shape the kind of shooter you are developing.
My concern is whether such moments would occur naturally during gameplay, or only during very scripted moments. Also I'd be interested in seeing some longer combats to see if enemies react naturally or take long pauses to give players time to react/move around.
This is a really stupid point that I haven't even heard until you came up with it like a few pages ago. But as I've already pointed out you can play shooters like DOOM 3: BFG, Quake, Quake 2, Doom, Doom 2, Brutal Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and at some point you could even play games like Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 in VR and I can assure you that none of the Mods include any "slow down the enemies" properties. I don't think it's common practice in most FPS games already that enemies instantly headshot you from across the map (unless we are talking about Early Crysis where even an entire forest and buildings between you and them didn't matter) and chances are that when you're moving around with your gun held up and directly aiming you will be more accurate than with Mouse&Keyboard.

If you want a point "against" VR that actually makes sense I'll even give it to you, it's not about "bad aiming" or "reaction times" but walking speed. It's unlikely we'll see many games where you run through the levels at 50MPH+ like Tribes, Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament since some people would hurl: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/vr-finally-worth-it.123026/page-2#post-5722063 but then again you don't see those very often whether VR existed or not anymore, because consoles.

But in a VR game you can do a lot of stuff that you can't do in a normal game naturally since head/hands (and the weapons/items they hold) and body are decoupled, can move separately from one another and aren't glued to the middle of the screen and your actions aren't limited to key presses, like you can peek around a corner naturally to see if there are enemies there and stretch your arm out around the corner to shoot at them and don't need to either move your entire body around the corner like in Counter Strike or have a shittily implemented "lean" mechanic on the Q/E keys. You can half-open a door to peek through it or stick a gun through and shoot at whatever is on the other side, or you can open it a bit, cock a grenade, throw it through and then quickly close the door or just throw a flashbang or similar around the corner or even behind you while you look in the other direction. You can bring your head down to the keyhole of a door or to a hole in the wall and peek through it, maybe stick a weapon through it etc. You also don't really need shitty sticky cover mechanics anymore, since you can just walk behind objects yourself and peek out/shoot from behind them. You can basically interact with the game world in almost every way you can in reality if it provides for it as a gameplay mechanic.

They're even spoon-feeding some of this stuff to you in the video where they talk about the game, but ultimately you'll have to experience it yourself and have to play something like Pavlov/Onward/Zero Caliber or similar to be convinced:


A game like HL where free movement is it's core... how will they handle this? Include free threadmills?
You use the Analogue Stick to move? They got a lot of criticism for the "Teleportation" retardation and luckily all major Controllers (Oculus Touch, Valve Knuckles and the WMR ones) have a stick so you can walk around now?
 
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warci

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wow.... missed this in the trailer. So they 'fixed' the issue by making you play as as a disabled woman of all things... exactly what I want to be in my fantasy world outside of my mediocre life
 

some funny shit

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As far as I see on the trailer, you cant move on your own in this game.

You are locked in a location where you: shoot bad guys or solve simple puzzles to move forward.
 
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Jenkem

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As far as I see on the trailer, you cant move on your own in this game.

You are locked in a location where you: shoot bad guys or solve simple puzzles to move forward.

they said you can choose between teleporting, walking w/ an analog stick and gliding w/ an analog stick, you can choose whichever you want. I also assume you could just walk in some instances if you have a room scale capable setup and enough space
 

Egosphere

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Point is, we need to see how HL: Alyx is as a game and as a shooter. Discussing VR as a platform is beyond the point, VR has somewhat failed (until now, I guess) both to get a killer app and to get noticed at large. All the videos and the laundry lists posted here are essentially shovelware or walking simulators, but I presume there's still some room to grow.
:retarded:
This is amazing, now apparently even games like DOOM 3, the Serious Sam series .. are either Shovelware or Walking Simulators


I've watched Serious Sam VR on normal difficulty, and was not impressed. It was the antithesis of SS.

Here's the VR:



and here's the same level without it, same difficulty:



The differences are stark. Normal difficulty in SS is piss easy, yet the VR is forced to make it even easier.
 

cvv

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In case you guys haven't figured it out: this is simply Valve leveraging their most anticipated IP to push sales of shitty VR headsets that no one will use outside of this one gimmicky game.

Why would they do this only to push sales and then make it work on any SteamVR compatible headset?
Why would they make a VR-only game? The percentage of SteamVR compatible owners is teeeeny, in low millions at best. As huge as this game is brand-wise it'll be lucky to ship a few 100k units.

This is the problem with fucking Valve - they're sitting on a mountain of gold, employing hundreds of top designers and people have been begging them for years to get off their fat asses and finally USE all that money and talent. And they say "sure buds, we got you covered" and then give us a cheap mobile card game and a VR shooter. Valve must be the most batshit bizarre developer out there, by a country mile.
 

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Why would they make a VR-only game?
Because they really believe in VR

As I said, they're bizarre.

I guess someone has to try it at some point. It does have the potential to pay off for Valve if they can make VR more mainstream.

Worst case, Gabe's mountain of gold and fatty food takes a slight hit and they try again down the line.
 

ZVERMIX

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Can Valve even make good games anymore?
CS:GO and Dota 2 aren't bad games. They might not be the Codex's thing, but they are the best competitive shooter and MOBA respectively.
These are quality products, competently made.

Now if you mean single-player story games, that's a different question, we will have to see.
But Portal 2 wasn't that long ago, and it's good.
 

cvv

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Can Valve even make good games anymore?
Inb4 "Valve was never good"......Valve was never good.

Or more precisely Valve is a one-hit star. HL1 is one of the best games ever made but everything else is mediocre at best. Sure, shit like CS or Dota have millions of fans but so does Fortnite or Crossfire. Popularity doesn't mean shit. None of Valve's games after HL1 would ever win any respectable awards or be in any "TOP" list of anyone ever. They have grown fat, lazy and all their competence has long since atrophied.
 

ZVERMIX

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None of Valve's games after HL1 would ever win any respectable awards or be in any "TOP" list of anyone ever.
Except HL2 has won much more GOTY awards than the original.
Not only that, but HL2 regularly tops Game of the decade/century/millenium/whatever lists and is generally considered the best (or one the select best) game of all time.
I subscribe to that as well, even though RPGs are my preferred genre. From a generalist point of view, Half-Life 2 is the GOAT.
Rise and fucking shine, Mr. Freeman.
 
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Dayyālu

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This is what we call being disingenuous.

Stop list dumping shovelware. No one is doing to get impressed by the developers of The Order 1866. Or console shit. As Egosphere proved, the differences between proper games and contemporary VR games are stark and undeniable. Screaming LOOK AT ALL THIS SHOVELWARE isn't going to change it.

Numbers, if even you had some, do not mean quality, and VR games now lack both. Maybe it will change with HL: VR.

This is a really stupid point that I haven't even heard until you came up with it like a few pages ago. But as I've already pointed out you can play shooters like DOOM 3: BFG, Quake, Quake 2, Doom, Doom 2, Brutal Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and at some point you could even play games like Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 in VR and I can assure you that none of the Mods include any "slow down the enemies" properties.

Keep denying reality, I guess.

and chances are that when you're moving around with your gun held up and directly aiming you will be more accurate than with Mouse&Keyboard.

Imagine, like, that kb+mouse merely have to press a button to engage scopes. Maybe VR controls will get a solution, but aiming with a mouse is immensely more efficient. If In real life I could send projectiles with a mouse-like interface, the thing would improve aiming quite a lot. Trust me, I shoot gats in real life.

If you want a point "against" VR that actually makes sense I'll even give it to you, it's not about "bad aiming" or "reaction times" but walking speed. It's unlikely we'll see many games where you run through the levels at 50MPH+ like Tribes, Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament since some people would hurl: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/vr-finally-worth-it.123026/page-2#post-5722063 but then again you don't see those very often whether VR existed or not anymore, because consoles.

VR will slow movement and reaction times even more. That's why I'm seriously curious to see HL: VR, because level design and enemy design already took a nosedive with consoles, one only has to wonder what will happen when they have to dumb it down even more. But who knows, maybe Valve will play it better. Tell me if that Viking game looks like good level design, in your opinion. Or maybe you will say YES because for some weird reason honest critique of VR makes you very, very upset.

You can basically interact with the game world in almost every way you can in reality if it provides for it as a gameplay mechanic.

All gimmicks compared to someone being simply faster and more efficient than you. Slow gimmicks even. Shooters perform best with kb+mouse, because the best examples have been developed for it. I don't even think I need to be impressed by gimmicks, and they are mostly useful, as I said, for the milsim crowd. That's a completely legit market and I fully believe that the Arma crowd will appreciate it a lot.

You are defending tooth and nail something that up until now is mediocre. Again, we'll need to see how Valve or others, after Valve opens the floodgate, will manage.

Inb4 "Valve was never good"......Valve was never good.

HL1 is a very good shooter for its age. I can see the problems in HL2, but for me, for a fair amount of reasons, manages to be the better shooter of its specific era (early 2000ies) managing even to beat for a smidgen F.E.A.R., and FEAR is magnificent as a shooter.

Everything else Valve has bought from modders or young devs. Buying talent is a skill, after all.
 

cvv

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I don't know bros, I never even finished HL2 and I was a rabid HL1 fan. The sequel was a crushing disappointment for me, it felt like a gamefied tech demo, like the first sign of Valve being much more interested in technology instead of actual videogames. Was bored to tears halfway through, never understood the high praise. Whatever.
 

Egosphere

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I don't know bros, I never even finished HL2 and I was a rabid HL1 fan. The sequel was a crushing disappointment for me, it felt like a gamefied tech demo, like the first sign of Valve being much more interested in technology instead of actual videogames. Was bored to tears halfway through, never understood the high praise. Whatever.
I really like HL2, but it does have a lot of faults that have become more pronounced over the years. The vehicle sections eat up a huge portion of the game whilst not being nearly as fun as the run and gun sections. The story is strange, since everyone worships you and expects you to lead this great crusade against the citadel, which does not sync with the events of hl1. Looking back at at it, they should have stuck to their guns and made the 2001 leaked Beta version into the final game, rather than throwing it out of the window to make the one we actually got.
 

Dexter

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The differences are stark. Normal difficulty in SS is piss easy, yet the VR is forced to make it even easier.
I've just played through both "Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter" and "Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter" up to the Valley of Kings on Normal for you and aside from the Pause Menu that apparently engages when you want to Quicksave or switch weapons I didn't see any big differences in either Level design, enemy spawn rate or amount or how much shots it seems to take for them to kill.

The Valley of Kings encounter seems to have the same amount of enemies two Werebulls, five Minor Bio-Mechanoids, a big one and then the bigger boss.

But you are right that the VR version is easier to play and I tended to lose less health and armor while going through the levels. They apparently redid some of the early guns, remade the weapon models in 3D for VR and they removed the reload animations for some. The Shotgun for instance feels more like a Auto-Shotgun with its increased firing rate. Wouldn't have really been necessary at all, since I did a lot better in VR even with two pistols alone, apparently they did this back in 2016: https://steamcommunity.com/app/552450/discussions/0/152391995424599712/
That was actually done on purpose. It felt very weird when you had to wait for the weapon to recoil before firing again. And longer animations, like DS reload don't make sense for tracked controllers.(*) Since playing in VR is somewhat harder (or at least it will be until we all re-learn how to play FPS games ;)) we felt that it balances quite nicely, difficulty-wise. And since you still burn a lot of ammo if you do that, it's not _that_ OPed.

(*) It would make sense if you had to manually reload, like e.g. in Hover Junkers or H3. But we felt that it would be too complicating and distracting for this kind of game.

This isn't a thing in all the Mods for much older games though, so you have to ask CroTeam why they did it.

That wasn't the only thing that made it a bit easier to play though. It seems much easier to aim at and kill enemies at a distance or kill some Bomb guy running towards you while you shoot at another group of enemies with the Shotgun. The two guns you're holding are entirely decoupled from one another and you can do stuff like use a Colt in your left and a Shotgun in your right hand and shoot at two enemies or enemy groups simultaneously or turn around and look over your left shoulder and shoot a Gnaar or a Kleer charging or a Werebull that was charging at you and just went past and shoot it in the ass with the shotgun while strafing in an entirely different direction and look back forwards and shoot the ones in front a lot easier than you can on the screen with that big Green fucking cross-hair in the middle where all weapons shoot on PC, even if you're dual-wielding.

It also seemed much easier to see enemies coming at you from above or standing on some ledge somewhere above you and you could take care of em a lot earlier and easier than just noticing that you're still being shot at from somewhere and having to look around. Traps like boulders and secrets seemed to also be easier to spot, since you naturally tend to look up and around you with your head while you don't necessarily do that all the time in the pancake version.

Why would they make a VR-only game? The percentage of SteamVR compatible owners is teeeeny, in low millions at best. As huge as this game is brand-wise it'll be lucky to ship a few 100k units.
Bruh, Fucking Beat Saber sold over a million copies in its first year, and that's before it was even officially released on Steam and PSVR in May: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/beat-saber-one-million-copies-sold-1203163174/

Superhot VR sold like 800k copies across platforms in two years as an obscure Polish Indie game and even outsold its pancake/flatscreen version: https://www.roadtovr.com/superhot-vr-outsells-superhot-pc/
“We saw a huge uptick in our sales,” Kaczmarczyk said, referring to the 2018 holiday season. “There’s just more people that have headsets, and a lot of them will buy Superhot VR. It’s not anywhere near the patterns you see for regular [non-VR] games, where you see your sales decline over time and people start getting bored and they buy new stuff. For VR, if you’re in this “best-selling” list, your sales pattern is just about people buying headsets, and people buying your game.”

Half Life: Alyx will easily sell 2-3 million copies in its first year or so, will help sell Headsets including the Valve Index and will likely be one of the go-to titles for people to buy as they get a VR HMD.

It's fucking amazing and hilarious what kind of misconceptions some of you people have and are willing to push about VR and how large it is or what it can or cannot do.

Stop list dumping shovelware. No one is doing to get impressed by the developers of The Order 1866. Or console shit. As Egosphere proved, the differences between proper games and contemporary VR games are stark and undeniable. Screaming LOOK AT ALL THIS SHOVELWARE isn't going to change it.
NO GAMES! NO GAMES! SHOVELWARE! SHOVELWARE! Yeah I think I'm done here. :lol:
:butthurt:
 

cvv

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