Yesterday Valve unveiled Half-Life: Alyx, a new installment in the Half-Life series, which of course will be a VR-only game, meaning that you’ll need a VR headset to enjoy the game. The game will actually be free to those who own Valve’e own Index VR headset, but it will also support Rift, Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality.
Half-Life: Alyx is neither a sequel nor a prequel, but takes place in the 20-year time gap between the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Alyx, who is the scientist, with the help of her father begins her campaign against the Combine and also leads the human resistance. Take a look at the official trailer below, it definitely gives us the Half-Life feels for sure!
Valve has built the game using the Source 2 engine and will be released with Source 2 tools for world-building, which will allow players to design and distribute the own worlds set in this universe. The game is single player and will be a FPS affair, which is definitely story driven and will make heavy use of Half-Life’s physics interactions. It has been built from the ground up for VR.
Valve’s David Speyrer, Robin Walker and Dario Casali sat down with Geoff Keighley to share some details on how exactly Half-Life: Alyx because what it is today.
Keighley asked a very important question many people have been wondering, will there be a more traditional mouse and keyboard version of Half-Life: Alyx and here is what Dario Casali had to say about that…
“We would love to be delivering a version of [Half-Life: Alyx] that you could play with a mouse and a keyboard, but as we said, it began as an exploration of VR. The more we used the controllers and the headset, the amount of possibilities these things give us, the more we realized that there’s so much opportunity that we can’t really translate back to the keyboard.
When you can track your hands separately from your head, they’re all 3D space, all simultaneously tracking and moving, you just can’t get that with a mouse and keyboard. And when you put that into game mechanics, the kinds of interactions that we can do, we couldn’t possibly do with a mouse and keyboard.”
So it does not look like we’ll be seeing a normal version of the game. Half-Life: Alyx will be available on VR headsets in March 2020.
