Valve reveals Half-Life:Alyx! Preorders open, release in March 2020!

After so long time spent listening to rumors (that I myself reported) and teasing, Valve has finally announced Half-Life: Alyx, and has told us what it is about. With super-excitement, I’m going to tell you what we discovered today!

On Tuesday, Valve made all us gamers go crazy with this single tweet

In less than 24 hours, the tweet got more than 110K likes, and the new Valve Software account gained more than 60K followers. The web went crazy, and people started discussing about if it is fair that Valve releases the new episode of such a hyped game like Half-Life only for VR headsets. As I have written in my editorial, this attention is all beneficial to VR: the hype for the new game, the discussions, the memes are all spreading awareness for the technology that we all love.

Anyway, what is most important is that today Valve with a new Tweet has unveiled the game! It will be out in March 2020, with preorders now open on Steam! The price is £47/$50, but there is a 10% discount for who preorders it! THE GAME IS FREE FOR ALL THE OWNERS OF VALVE INDEX OR VALVE INDEX CONTROLLERS! (No need for a key, it will appear automatically in the Steam library to anyone that has bought or will buy the headset)

Valve has finally revealed what the game is about. As all the previous rumors had already unveiled, the game is a spin-off from the main plot, and this time you won’t embody Gordon Freeman, but Alyx Vance, a character that is central in Half-Life 2. Unluckily, this is not Half-Life 3, but more like a Half-Life 1.5, since its plot is between Half-Life 1 and 2. I guess we can say it is a Half-Life 3/2 🙂 . In my opinion, Valve has been smart in not releasing HL3: the hype around it is so big, that either it comes out as a perfect game, or the public would be disappointed. And then it would be something so huge that there would be riots in the streets 😀

You can also listen to the reasonings of why they have not made a Half-Life 3 game and why they are making it fully for VR in this awesome interview:

This is the plot as described by Valve:

Set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, Alyx Vance and her father Eli mount an early resistance to the Combine’s brutal occupation of Earth.

The loss of the Seven-Hour War is still fresh. In the shadow of a rising Combine fortress known as the Citadel, residents of City 17 learn to live under the rule of their invaders. But among this scattered population are two of Earth’s most resourceful scientists: Dr. Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx, the founders of a fledgling resistance.

You are Alyx Vance, and you’re about to spark a revolution

You and your father were relocated to City 17. In the years since, 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.

The game features some of the most well-known characters of the Half-Life franchise: the headcrabs are there, and are ready to make all us players jumpscare when they jump onto our faces! They were already very effective on a flat screen… I think that in VR their scaring power becomes a lot more effective. VR is the ideal game for this kind of enemies, especially because finally they can really jump onto your face and obscure your visuals. And then you can grab them with your hands and throw them away. It will all feel so natural and cool.

And then there is the famous man with the suitcase, that appears at the end of the video. I’m sure he will play a central role in the game, as always. You will probably miss the crowbar, though. It seems that Valve has experimented to add it as well, but the interactions with it were not that suitable for VR (this is what some magazines have written in the past days).

The game is optimized for Valve’s Index headset, but can run on all VR headsets on the market. It has been carefully studied so that the interactions are natural and are perfect for the Valve Index controllers, that can track all the five fingers of the user. All Half-Life titles have innovated gaming, and this innovates VR gaming with such amazing interactions that are unique in their genre. In the trailer, you can clearly see how the hands are fundamental in all the interactions: you reload a shotgun grabbing the shells with two fingers in a natural way. You can move objects, you can grab walls, etc…

The game will also feature interactions with the environment around you, and everything will be governed by realistic physics. The above GIF is not only interesting for how you reload the gun in a natural way using all your fingers, but also for the first part where with one hand the player is able to move all objects, that clearly respond in a realistic way to its movement. I didn’t realize it immediately, because it felt so realistic that my brain just considered it as something natural. Then, after a while, I become aware of the fact that this has all been coded in the game, and I got how it is incredible and special: the objects react to your hands in VR exactly as in real life! Again, this feels a very nice touch that can increase a lot the immersion, even when it is not strictly fundamental for the gameplay.

As it was teased, you will also have the Grabbity Gloves, that will let you grab objects with your hands at a distance. These are like the successors of the Gravity Gun, and I think they are a smart interaction choice. Thanks to them, you don’t have to lean every time to grab objects from the floor, but you can attract them with an easy gesture of the hand. It is incredibly handy for VR… and it is also very cool! Look at this piece of the trailer!

And since the Valve Index Controllers are special because they let you not only grab objects in VR, but also throw them naturally by opening completely your hand (something that is impossible with all the other controllers), Half-Life: Alyx also lets you throw objects at enemies. Here physics and natural interactions prove to be very important. You can clearly spot how the controllers’ functionalities and the game interactions are deeply interwoven. Valve has made no mystery about this and has always claimed that it was incredibly happy of being able to finally develop the hardware together with the software, so that to design a hardware that is functional for the purpose of playing amazing VR games.

Valve is really pushing to make people buy a VR headset to play this game, that is VR only, and this is great because it will make more people buy VR devices, especially the Valve Index headset and controllers. Apart from having the game for free, people that will buy an Index before the end of 2019 will have some extras:

• 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

The graphics seem of an incredibly high level. I don’t exaggerate if I say that it is maybe among the best 3 graphics I have seen in a trailer of a VR game. Look at the lighting in the above GIF of the grabbity gloves… isn’t it incredible? The shading looks superb to me.

Yes, it may seem subpar for a standard desktop game, but in VR this level is not common at all. I’m amazed, and I can’t wait to try it to feel the sense of immersion that it can give inside a virtual reality google.

The game engine is of course Valve’s proprietary Source 2 engine. And as our game HitMotion‘s game designer Max had forecasted, Valve has made the game moddable. Valve is releasing new tools, environments and such for Source 2 so that to make possible for everyone to create new levels for the game. Hammer, Valve’s level authoring tool, has been updated with all of the game’s virtual reality gameplay tools and components. This means that the game will have a longer life than the one of the campaign, because people will be able to play the mods of the community. And who knows if in the future they will add some kind of multiplayer mode (we hope so!).

In my editorial, I talked about a possibly revolutionary game. From just the description, a trailer and some images, it is hard to tell if it will be able to change everything as Half-Life 1 and 2 did. But what is clear is that this game will have an enormous grade of polishing. It seems well made in everything, exactly as its associated headset, the Valve Index, is. It raises the bar of virtual reality videogames a lot. But to see if it is truly revolutionary, we should play it, and compare it with other AAA virtual reality games, like for instance Asgard’s Wrath. For sure, exploiting the many functionalities of the Valve Index controllers (five-fingers tracking, pressure sensors, etc…) it can offer many innovative hands interactions that other game can’t provide.

This really looks like an AAA game in everything: fantastic graphics, great interactions and gameplay, a very famous IP, and open modding. Half-Life: Alyx is everything us virtual reality gamers were waiting for. It will be an instant buy for me!

For more info, you can refer to these channels:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/valvesoftware/status/1197575830219583488
• Half-Life: Alyx website: https://www.half-life.com/en/alyx/
• Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/

Or you can just admire the trailer of the game here:

I have watched it at least 10 times in a row. I am really excited and I can’t wait to discover more. Today Valve gave us just a taste of what this game will be. I’m curious to discover the full features and story of this masterpiece! And you?

UPDATE: It seems we will have more details on this game at The Game Awards 2019 on December, 12th!

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