Also - welcome to Valve's official Twitter account!Holy crud, it actually happened. Full reveal on thursday!
Valve (@valvesoftware) | Twitter (https://twitter.com/valvesoftware) The latest Tweets from Valve (@valvesoftware). We make games, Steam, and hardware. For support, visit https://t.co/VRsFD4GURP. Bellevue, WA (https://abs.twimg.com/a/1573143618/icons/favicon.svg) twitter.com
Please be good, please be good, please be good...It pretty much has to be good.
"I mean like VR looks cool but I don't know, there aren't really any big games for it you know? It needs a big game to sell me."
— Todo (kete) (@NotRealTodokete) November 18, 2019
"FUCK YOU VALVE HOW DARE YOU MAKE HALF-LIFE ALYX A VR GAME"
but it looks AAA enough but it also still looks bad. i hope they prove me wrong but i just can't seem to not get nauseated on the games that have free movement. and i really hate any amount of standing up while wearing VR,.. i just don't have a room devoid of furniture to dedicate to VR gaming like they showed at the beginning of the clip with jeff. i'll bet it is cool but just not practical for home use, imo.Offers pretty much every type of movement. I'm sure they will also have a bunch of comfort options.
1.3 million views on Valves channel alone. (Makes up most of it I think)Lol yeah this game will be big
Very positive reception.
Just a cursory glance, at other big VR games, there are only a few games that cracked a million views, let alone did it in less than 6 hours.
Edit 3 million views between Valve's and IGN's page.
231k likes to 6.5k dislikes on Valve's page.
Huge.
Lol yeah this game will be bigI'm super hyped seeing all the people getting into VR. Moreso than I am to see the game.
"In addition, we were using prototype Index hardware for much of Half-Life: Alyx's development, and that added another layer of complexity to the software development side," Grimes continued. "Now that we have a polished VR workflow and we've shipped the Index, we're having a blast and feeling highly productive."Here Are The Minimum Required Specifications For Half-Life: Alyx (https://uploadvr.com/half-life-specifications/)
Half-Life: Alyx's listed minimum specifications are as follows:Half-Life: Alyx Will Support 'Community-Built Environments' - UploadVR (https://uploadvr.com/half-life-alyx-mod-support/)
OS: Windows 10
Processor: Core i5-7500 / Ryzen 5 1600
Memory: 12 GB RAM
Graphics: GTX 1060 / RX 580 - 6GB VRAM
A set of Source 2 tools for building new environments will ship with the game, enabling any player to build and contribute new environments for the community to enjoy. Hammer, Valve's level authoring tool, has been updated with all of the game's virtual reality gameplay tools and components.Valve: Some Half-Life: Alyx Interactions Only Work With Index Controllers (https://uploadvr.com/valve-index-alyx-interactions/)
sd
"We've really tried to make the best use of Index Controllers for those who have them, while also ensuring that those who don't still have a great experience with Half-Life: Alyx. There's a small set of things that Index Controllers can do that other controllers can't do at all, and they're fun but not required - like being able to crush a can that you're holding in your hand. But there's a larger set of things that work on any tracked controllers, yet end up being better on Index Controllers because we were developing them in concert with the game. The most obvious example is the core interaction players have with objects in Half-Life: Alyx - picking up, holding, dropping, throwing, and manipulating. Players perform these basic actions many times throughout the game, and over our years of playtesting, we've found that combining the player's trigger usage with their tracked finger locations was the most successful method of supporting their intentions. So while you can perform most actions with just a trigger or a button, we just think it feels more natural with the way the Index Controllers operate. Finally, the ability for the player to relax their hands without dropping their controller turned out to be a significant factor in our Half-Life: Alyx playtests. As our Index Controller prototypes started replacing our older controllers in playtests, we started seeing players able to play for longer and longer stretches of time, because they weren't required to hold onto a real-world object the entire time. This wasn't really something we saw as a problem in our early days of VR development, but now that VR games are becoming longer and more fully featured, we think it's becoming more important."Valve 'Would Love' To Bring Half-Life: Alyx To PC But It 'Can't Translate' (https://uploadvr.com/half-life-alyx-pc-release/)
Valve's own Dario Casali fielded that question in a roundtable interview with Geoff Keighley, published today. "We would love to be delivering a version of this that you could play with a mouse and a keyboard, but like as we said it began as an exploration of VR," Casali said. "The more we used the controllers and the headset we realized -- the amount of interactions this give us, the amount of possibilities these things give us, the more we explored it, the more we realized that there's so much opportunity that we can't really translate back to the keyboard."Gabe Newell on Half-Life Alyx: 'Valve excited to return Half-Life, VR has energized the studio' (https://www.roadtovr.com/gabe-newell-half-life-alyx-valve-energized/)
"Everyone at Valve is excited to be returning to the world of Half-Life. VR has energized us. We've invested a lot of ourselves in the technology. But we're also game developers at heart, and to be devoting ourselves to a VR game this ambitious is just as exciting. For that to come in the form of Half-Life feels like the culmination of a lot things we care a lot about: truly great games, cutting edge technology, and open platforms. We can't wait for people to experience this."
1060 is the minimum? YeeshThe minimum pushes 90 fps slightly above 1080p.
Hey, Chris. James here. Big ups on the article, but Alyx definitely doesn't need arms. Sorry, bud. Ya blew it. https://t.co/ffB2Kjgxxu
— PC Gamer (@pcgamer) November 23, 2019
Are you for arms or not?Either is fine probably.
Are you for arms or not?against. nothing in vr is more disorienting than when the game is trying to translate real world motion to in game motion but then fails.
someday though, when technology catches up, arms would be good.It's something we will probably start seeing in 3-5 years.
Alex Kipman, the chief visionary behind HoloLens, had some serious praise to share after trying the game just last week.
"Had the great privilege to play Half-Life: Alyx at Valve yesterday. Most inspiring and immersive VR game I have ever experience and I have played a few," he shared on Twitter.
On the other hand, Microsoft's Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, lives and breathes games. And while he maintains that the company's next console, Xbox Series X (formerly Project Scarlett), won't focus on VR, he also got to try Half-Life: Alyx this Summer and called it "amazing."
Announcing a VERY special AMA! The Half-Life: Alyx team at Valve will be joining us for an AMA tomorrow - Wednesday, January 22nd at 9AM PST : HalfLife (https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfLife/comments/es15xd/announcing_a_very_special_ama_the_halflife_alyx/)What would you ask them?
What would you ask them?Biggest questions I'd be interesting in seeing answered:
With the exception of some tweaks to the absolute final scene, the game is done. Lots of us at Valve, as well as playtesters, have played through the entire game multiple times.
Right now we're primarily polishing and fixing bugs, which is where we'd hope to be at this point in the development cycle. We're confident we'll hit our intended release. (We let the Valve Time happen before we announced the game.)
Right now it's around 80 people, which puts it as the largest single team we've ever had at Valve.
Our locomotion and comfort features are all done, including things like Seated, Left-Handed mode, etc. We have almost all our accessibility work done as well, but there's a little bit more we'd like to do there (support for one armed play, for instance).
Half-Life: Alyx, available March 23, 2020 https://t.co/NCOLWqSp3e pic.twitter.com/Q04EZwNfBt
— Valve (@valvesoftware) February 13, 2020