yeah, I haven’t read the spoilers that are now floating around but I get the strong impression they’re intending to use this as a springboard to start making sequels tying everything together after all this time
I want everyone with one round left in the gun, to fire, reload then fire one shot, record it and post their best times
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Someone post that gif of the multiplayer VR shootmangame I’ve never seen in any other context with the hilarious troll moves of reloading enemies’ guns for them just before killing them
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very important question: was the person in that alyx video with the gnome holding their gun tea cup style just exposing their terrible grip or does the game make you hold the gun that way
vr games should improve the guns actual stats if you hold it good
you can absolutely rack the slide and waste perfectly good glowing blue bullets
none of this stuff is new to VR but they’ve done a very, very good job of cutting out fiddly pits by dropping fidelity in smart ways to assume what you want to do:
- They have gripping to hold but you don’t need to keep gripping your gun, they know you have no reason to drop it
- Your hand automatically enters a grip or manipulate function when it gets close to interactable objects so you don’t need to open and close fingers to grab
- They use the same hand-over-hand ladder climb technique as everyone in VR but when you get to the nasty top and transition back to walk they just snap you to standing
- Objects are set with a ridiculous amount of friction compared to most games because they want you to be able to set things down and have them remain stable and to stack them more than you want simulated sliding
Compare these interactions with something like Boneworks, which technically supports many of the same features but always goes for jittery simulation over smoothed-out design, and it results in something that plays like a game rather than a tech demo, albeit a fascinating one. I’m extremely happy they’ve been able to take forward steps here because the Index launch demos they shipped were years behind on interface and interaction design.
So far they’re struggling to reconcile a more colorful art style with the extremely unified palette imported from Half-Life 2; it’s obvious their current staff is trained on gimmicky easter eggs that don’t really count as jokes to anyone but streamers (TF2 Scout bobblehead, Dota Invitational book on sleeping mat). They aren’t hewing to Viktor Antonov’s proportions and materials any more (the transport cars are especially goofy, maybe they were constrained because they need to be tall enough for players to stand up in?). They’re not laying down an iconic sound palette like the earlier games except through direct quotes.
It probably wouldn’t be a problem if it was far enough from Half-Life 2 to strike its own style but it hews so closely that it’s the same disconcerting tug I felt with Force Awakens - a different sensibility trying to trick me into thinking it’s the same texture.
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oh and Valve Guy threatens to turn around and look at you in the splash screen and it’s horrifying
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Rat-Life: Alyx run attempt starts at 14:27
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They should let you find and hold a living rat and you get an achievement for bringing the rat with you all the way to the end, alive.
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It’s been really interesting coming straight off of playing Black Mesa and jumping on to Alyx, which are both fan works to different extents!
In the sense that this feels like a derivative work without embodying the soul of the thing it’s derived from, I think you make good points of things I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I’m in Chapter 5, and the most damning thing I feel like you can say on the subject is that it talks constantly, and when it does it’s striving to sound like an MCU film. Oh, and the 3D hacking bits have officially outstayed their welcome.
(To its credit, as much as the game talks, it never gets impatient or nudges you towards any puzzle solutions when you don’t intuit them right away. I was really expecting to be pestered to the point of enragement!).
Every other aspect that is being bolted on seems to works well in this context (the upgrade loop works surprisingly well since it ties into the tactile aspects of VR and how satisfying it is to lasso resources). Like Felix said this is a very successful adaptation of the Valve house style. At the end of the day it’s been exactly what I was hoping for.
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Another thing that feels off is how often it’s playing music, like they’re over-concerned I won’t get the emotional tenor of the scene from how it’s dressed. Half-Life felt much more confident that it was in tonal control and could reserve music for emphasis.
But I agree, this is still very good and very enjoyable. Even with the divergence in design, I still love opening a computer bank to find a brain just mashed into the steel. I like how clearly they set up Earth as crossroads between multiple factions, humans as refugees in a war they are barely involved in. But this has come at the cost of the very specific aesthetic capable of communicating about eastern bloc nations, grinding paranoia under totalitarian states, and the fantastical inhumanity of these power structures.
I spent three minutes watching a mushroom cap float out of the quarantine zone as it rippled, ambiguous as to whether it was waving in the wind or moving on its own power, gracefully seeking to infect.
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I haven’t gotten nearly this tangled up in the cable with any other VR game
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Ok I beat this game! Uhh yeah this owned. Combat, exploration and art direction were definitely the highlights. If I have a gripe with the game, it’s that the first half of the game feels a bit indistinct compared to HL2, with a lot of indoor city environments (which I assume is because of having to target a specific hardware spec). The second half of the game is awesome, though, especially the distillery and zoo levels.
For the love of gaia don't click this until you've beaten the game
So was anybody else completely unsurprised by the ending? I guessed what it was half way through the game. As soon as the game started being coy about what the weapon actually was I knew immediately it had to be G-Man.
Do you ever have to hug someone with the weird floating hands? That would be a funny gag to me.
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Yeah is there an equivalent first person hug scene like the one where you hug Alyx in Episode 1 or whichever it was? Do you get to hug someone as Alyx? You should.
I hereby deem VR acceptable
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What I want to see this please someone do this
I don’t know how to find the original source, but I did have it saved.
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Cracks me up every time
Want to resurrect this wholesome thread a again
Tried VR for the first time yesterday with this and Talos Project VR. Talos made me a little queezy, but Alyx was perfectly fine for me and totally amazed me. So much fun to just look around and touch things.
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