it’s funny because I’m finding this easiest the flakiest VR game I’ve played so far in terms of the assumptions it makes around free movement
Maybe this relates to what you mean, but I was surprised that they let me just walk off a ledge and fall into an elevator cab. Thought that is something VR experts always worried would trigger an instant kill switch in a human’s subconscious.
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oh, no, I don’t have any perceptual issues or panics with it at all, I’m very bad at immersion and usually very aware of where I am in my apartment and where my wife and pets are no matter what, I’m just finding valve to be pretty bold about how much they think you can turn and climb and warp around compared to other VR games that conspicuously restrict movement, it feels like I’m constantly clipping into edge cases
it also uses too many buttons on the controller, last night I ejected the clip out of my gun three times in a row when trying to pick something up because I couldn’t get my brain to internalize a specific asymmetry in an otherwise symmetrical control scheme
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RE: Too Many Buttons, with the Vive controller I only find myself having these issues in the most intense combat situations (usually by the time I’m panic-throwing grenades) since the paddles need a pretty deliberate press, so I think mileage might vary with the controller in question. Really wonder how the experience deviates with the Index now!
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yeah I think I’m finally perceiving some limits of WMR but hey, it did cost a hell of a lot less and take this long
I have to disagree with this a little bit insofar as it seems it’s partially deliberate. Like I think it’s implied you’re in city 17 at a time before it had been crunched up by combine architecture. the supply train you take (if you’re referring the one I’m thinking of, the one you get on before the first main section of the game) is supposed to be a plain old still in commission human train, sort of like the one you get on at the end of episode 1. when the game includes combine machinery and architecture it still seems fairly faithful and coherent with the original game’s style.
beyond that I feel like the art style feels much more like the portal 2 team, but I honestly prefer that to how episode 2 was looking anyway, and I don’t feel as if its dissonant with the existing aesthetics.
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OK I have the hang of it now, obv the gravity gloves’ explicit purpose is for you to be able to remain stationary more often and pull objects to you but even the half an hour of gameplay before you get them had me trained playing it wrong and trying to climb all over everything
it’s good! the combat is clumsy as hell and the sense of dread doesn’t really compare to RE7 imo so the sewer hallways aren’t blowing me away but I’m having a good time. the object friction is nice, the valvey little puzzles are nice. anecdotally it’s pretty CPU bound and I’m sitting right at the minimum there but thankfully haven’t had any trouble
I’d be happier if they drifted the character & mechanical design further to accomplish this, though. It’s so close that it reads as confusing fan-following to me; I’d love it to be more its own thing.
You’re on, what, a 2-core Ivy Bridge? I’m on 4-core 6700 at 4ghz and I appear to be GPU-bound even if I ask it to go to 144hz, which I can’t do with non-VR games.
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christ no, I couldn’t still be playing this new stuff in that case, it’s a 3570K cranked up a fair bit
Huh, I would have thought that to be within 25% of where my machine is
yeah, I think 20-25% is about right
the scariest moment of the game was when I went to grab a box off the ground and my hand touched my my cats fur
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everyone has their first
Jess reached down to pet the robo dog in Valve’s The Lab and bonked our beagle dog on the head
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holy cow, I am posting FROM VR to say the Jeff section is a pitch perfect wonderful comedy of errors where you go from unimpressed to terrified to feeling clever to watching all of your bad habits come to bite you from behind like you’re being played by bugs bunny. IT IS GREAT.
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Finished the game. The fact that I willingly endured being in an fairly uncomfortable VR helmet for 12+ hours inside of a week probably speaks volumes on its own, but yeah, some of my above reservations aside I think they nailed this game just about as hard as they could’ve. I had many moments of naive wonder and the game almost never stepped in my way, letting me discover at my own rhythm.
I only ever got mild motion sickness while learning the game and whenever I was in an elevator/lift, which is a miracle. Things like Talos Principle VR make me go from 0 to Puke, like, instantly, so I think my big takeaway is that clarity of design and polish go a long fucking way in making a longform VR experience tolerable for me (and probably the many others like me). I guess it just took Valve and co. taking years and dumping probably ungodly amounts of money into this to get to this point, so I hope we get more games out of it.
Spoilers
re: the ending, I considered multiple times “hey, no G-man sightings” and “they must be saving him for the end of the game”… and also, I had the general sense that the rug would be pulled in classic Valve fashion, but I will admit that I didn’t consider the G-man twist until I was approaching the cell.
But anyway, I really appreciate the tidy conclusion that essentially clears the runway while also conveniently (elegantly!) threading in Episode 2 and using tropes from the earlier games to break HL out of it’s weird decade-long purgatory. It was well done and also somehow danced around the whole issue of prequels!
Can’t believe I’m excited for the future of Half-Life again.
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I woke up from nightmares about being chased by alien state forces in industrial and institutional settings three times last night
which is a Very Good Sign
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ah wow actually getting to fight combine is pretty wild, the game seems to think the easy parts are hard and the hard parts are easy (at least for me) since I keep getting tons of ammo and health exactly when I don’t need it but this is a real great time
the writing is absolutely portal-y but basically very good for what it is (and, obviously, it’s not a bad setup for the someone-in-your-head-seeing-what-you-see trope). I hope I get some basic pretty architecture again, I miss that first half hour before everything got extremely dark and threatening
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never been happier to be one-shotted in a game ever.
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did anyone else save up for the grenade launcher pretty much right away after the targeting sight for the pistol because I just got it like within five minutes of the game introducing grenades and I feel like I made a good call
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