Half-Life: Alyx is something that we could even call Half-Life 1.5… and Valve has finally revealed the game properly.
„Half-Life: Alyx is Valve’s VR return to the Half-Life series. It’s the story of an impossible fight against a vicious alien race known as the Combine, set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Playing as Alyx Vance, you are humanity’s only chance for survival. The Combine’s control of the planet since the Black Mesa incident has only strengthened as they corral the remaining population in cities. Among them are some of Earth’s greatest scientists: you and your father, Dr Eli Vance. As founders of a fledgeling Resistance, you’ve continued your clandestine scientific activity—performing critical research and building invaluable tools for the few humans brave enough to defy the Combine. Every day, you learn more about your enemy, and every day you work toward finding a weakness.
Valve’s return to the Half-Life universe that started it all was built from the ground up for virtual reality. VR was built to enable the gameplay that sits at the heart of Half-Life. Immerse yourself in deep environmental interactions, puzzle-solving, world exploration, and visceral combat. Lean to aim around a broken wall and under a Barnacle to make an impossible shot. Rummage through shelves to find a healing syringe and some shotgun shells. Manipulate tools to hack alien interfaces. Toss a bottle through a window to distract an enemy. Rip a Headcrab off your face and throw it at a Combine soldier.
Customers who have purchased Valve Index hardware by the end of 2019 will have access to unique bonuses starting early next year: explore environments from Half-Life: Alyx in your SteamVR Home space; alternate gun skins to embellish Alyx’s arsenal; special Half-Life: Alyx-themed content for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2; and community-built environments – 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,” the game’s Steam page says.
„I’ve played through Half-Life: Alyx (it took me over 15 hours) and seen it in multiple stages of development. This is a full-blown Half-Life experience, with a rich, vibrant world, immersive combat, great storytelling, and innovative game design,” Geoff Keighley added on Twitter. He also published a video interview with the developers that include Campo Santo, the makers of Firewatch (they are working on In the Valley of Gods now): „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 number of possibilities these things give us, the more we realized that there’s so much opportunity that we can’t 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,” they added.
Half-Life: Alyx is out in March, and it will support the Valve Index, the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift, the Oculus Quest with a PC and a link cable, and Windows’ Mixed Reality devices. Pre-orderers get a 10% discount.
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