Half-Life: Alyx – Valve‘s VR game will be good, but one of the three new screenshots had an unexpected extra…

Yesterday, we wrote about when Half-Life: Alyx will launch. The game, which will tie together the events of the first Half-Life game with the second, has kicked the keyboard and the mouse away to put a VR headset on while the keys are falling on the ground from the keyboard. Already then, we asked what that ERROR message is on one of the screenshots.

Valve has its proprietary engine, called Source Engine. Multiple games used it: Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but it wasn’t just Valve who used it: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (Arkane), Garry’s Mod (Facepunch), but even Respawn used it for Titanfall 2, albeit in a heavily modified version. So the engine is not weak, although Half-Life: Alyx will use Source 2 (Dota 2, Dota Underlords…).

This engine has an error message model. It is a big, bright red 3D model that has the word ERROR. It shows if a model hasn’t been loaded properly.

How is Half-Life: Alyx related? Well, Valve is using its engine for developing the game, as they know their creation the best. They still managed to make a mistake, as one of the official screenshots from the game has the error in the top left corner!

So Valve’s game didn’t load one of the models in right, which is why the placeholder error took its place. However, Gabe Newell and co were not paying attention while taking the screenshot (or the programmers had a mistake… but let’s say they both messed up). Brad Kinley, an animator of Valve, has responded to the issue on Twitter: „We forgot the error model in one of the screenshots. I guess at least it shows they’re not bullshots!” So they also don’t take it too seriously.

Half-Life: Alyx is out on March 23, but it will require a VR headset to play. (At least we might see Mr. (?) Error in virtual reality!)

Source: PCGamer

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