![]() ![]() ![]() Upload: I’m someone that traditionally can’t handle horror in VR, I have to nope out for a long time. So then, obviously darkness in play just falls out of that, which is scary. And having a flashlight in a dark place and having it on a separate place than just mounted to your head as it was in our prior games.īut now you’ve got your tracked head, you’ve got your tracked hands, let’s decouple, say, a flashlight from the rest of that and control it independently. So like, holding certain tools and using certain kinds of tools is just viscerally actual in VR. JM: And some point to that was to just follow what’s strong in VR. And so we wanted to be pretty careful the whole way for a player, introducing that to those more horrific elements of the experience. Because we had accessibility really high in our priority stack, but the nature of Half-Life when headcrabs are jumping at your face and there’s a lot of tension in dark places, those things are inherent to the experience. There was a lot of careful decision making about those kinds of things, keeping players feeling safe. About pacing and how much fear is appropriate. GC: Also a lot of the experiential design work was done in a way that - I haven’t ever worked on a horror movie but I think a lot of the decisions had the same constraints and the same kind of discussion around them that a horror experience often must have then the creators of a horror movie are working on something. And you’ve got sort of the two prongs there which is, you know, it’s next-gen, our engine had advanced a lot since we’ve shipped a Half-Life game so there’s generally the fidelity of it is just much higher.Īnd then you add onto the fact that that thing is life-size in front of you and it’s pretty darn impactful when it’s a zombie and it’s making hysteric sounds, all of that. I think especially when you expose someone who either isn’t used to VR or maybe isn’t that used to our titles or our genre, yeah, they have a very visceral reaction to seeing that stuff in VR. GC: I think it’s a totally valid response to the game. Upload: So I want to start of with a controversial statement: Half-Life: Alyx is a horror game. ![]() Jason Mitchell: There’s a kind of category of things you intentionally don’t get to until you’ve got a lot of other stuff locked down. It’s not like the story changed but so many details that add up to the experience that even in the past couple weeks a lot of changes have gone in that are amazing. GC: For sure, and especially just in the kind of polish that’s so noticeable. Upload: It’s very, very much one of those cases as with traditional games then that the game together in the last couple of weeks? So we have a little bit of the same experience that you just had when so much new content is going in. So even when we play it we are basically pretty happily surprised by what our co-workers have just added to the game all the time. But it also has just changed a lot in the final few weeks. It’s been especially great to finally show it to other people, because we’ve been looking at it for a while. Greg Coomer: Yeah we are actually very proud of what the game ended up being. Upload: I’m sure it goes without saying, but you guys must be very proud. Note that the latter half of this interview will contain a few spoilers, but we’ll give you another heads up for then. Here’s our full, lengthy interview with the pair. What was it like returning to the franchise after all these years? How did the team find the transition from flatscreen to VR? We talked about those topics and others with the team’s Greg Coomer and Jason Mitchell earlier this month. Thankfully, Valve (largely) delivered Alyx is a polished gem of a game with a few hiccups. It’s also intended as a showcase of VR, one of the first truly AAA titles for the fledgling platform, which Valve hopes will sell more headsets. ![]() Half-Life: Alyx marks the long awaited return of one of gaming’s most popular franchise. ![]()
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