What is the best headset to play Half-Life: Alyx with?
These days, I’m playing a lot of hours a day to write a review of Half-Life: Alyx (here you can read my first impressions, in the meanwhile). Inspired by the work of TESTED, I’ve decided to do an experiment, and play Alyx with all the headsets that I’ve taken home from the office, asking feedback to some friends (like the ergonomics expert Rob Cole) on other headsets I don’t own.
This way, I can tell you how it is playing Alyx with the different devices on the market! I’ve not obtained feedback on Pimax and WMR headsets, though, so they won’t be present in the post… but if you have some experience with them, please let me know!
Best headset: Valve Index
Half-Life: Alyx and the Valve Index have been developed together, following new Valve’s philosophy of developing the hardware together with the software that should use it. The Valve Index is a marvelous high-end headset, that improves consumer headsets on all fronts: resolution, field of view, comfort.
And Half-Life: Alyx’s input has been designed specifically for the Valve Index Controllers, and so handling the guns, reloading them, and especially using the Grabbity Gloves is best when you are using the Index controllers. For instance, you can take the shells and the magazines with your fingers exactly as in real life, and you can throw grenades opening the whole hand while launching them. With no other controllers you have this level of realism. The sense of presence is very high with the Valve Index.
If you have a Valve Index, you enjoy the best of Half-Life: Alyx for sure.
Runner-up: Oculus Rift (CV1 & S)
With the Oculus Rift, you can play Half-Life: Alyx having a very good experience. I’m using an Oculus Rift CV1, and even if there are some situations where the interface is not natural as I would like to, the game goes very smoothly. Some of the things that are not perfectly natural are for instance the fact that you can’t throw the grenades with the hands fully open or that to reload the weapons you must remember a sequence of buttons to be pressed (and this is not exactly natural). But Valve did a great job in finding the right buttons to press to have the best experience possible with the Touch Controllers, and so I can say that the experience is quasi-natural.
On the pro side, the Oculus Touch controllers are very comfortable, and the batteries last for long, so they are suitable for a long session of Alyx.
I’ve put together the CV1 and the S because after all, they offer the same quality of experience, each one with its pros and cons. The Rift S offers a better resolution and fill factor than the CV1, and has the comfortable inside-out tracking that tracks everywhere, but the CV1 has a better framerate, audio quality and especially has the original Oculus Touch controllers that are more comfortable (and indestructible). The tracking of the S is preferable because it doesn’t suffer from a bad positioning of the cameras, but with the CV1 you can put the controllers close to your face, and that’s fantastic when you want to aim with your pistol.
This has been my first session with the Rift, and I liked it so much that now I’m finishing the game only with the Rift.
Third place: Oculus Quest + Oculus Link
I’ve started playing Alyx with the Oculus Quest, and I have to say that my experience was enjoyable, but not as much good as when I used the Rift.
The reasons are mostly four:
- The Oculus Link is pretty demanding, and so running Alyx (that is not a lightweight game), together with the streaming via OBS, made my laptop overheat like an oven. As soon as I started Alyx, the game immediately told me that the graphical settings were too much demanding for my current setup, and in fact, I had occasional hiccups during my gameplay;
- Oculus Link presents visible artifacts due to the compression of the tethered streaming. On a game with such beautiful and detailed graphics like Half-Life: Alyx, this is noticeable. This completely canceled the superior resolution of the Quest;
- The Oculus Link is in beta, so there are bugs here and there. The biggest problem that I had was regarding the audio, that was not working correctly, and that in any case wasn’t detected by OBS, so I had to resort to using a pair of tethered headphones to perform my streaming on Youtube;
- The Oculus Quest is a very unbalanced headset, and after one hour or such, I started feeling the weight on my forehead.
For what concerns the controls, they are the same as the Rift, so the interactions were not perfect like on the Index, but were usable.
Don’t misunderstand me: the experience was good but not as good as the one with the Rift.
HTC Vive Cosmos
Here I have to disagree with Norm and Jeremy from TESTED: the Cosmos was not the worst headset I played Alyx with. It may be because the Cosmos has been updated many times, and the tracking has actually gone better from when the TESTED people tried it.
If we remove the controllers from the equation and we just leave the headset, probably it has been the best experience I had. The Cosmos is less comfortable than the Rift CV1, but when you manage to find its little sweet spot, it has such a good display, that you can see the marvelous graphics of Half-Life in all their splendor. I was literally in awe. The tracking of the headset was good, and being inside out, I had no problems regarding setting up external stations.
If the Cosmos is so down in the classification is because of its controllers. The tracking jitters, and when the controllers are close to each other or close to the face, their position in space becomes random. In my gameplay with the Cosmos, you can see that sometimes I try to spare bullets by trying to shoot the explosive barrels, but every time I fail because the controllers never point exactly where I want. When I needed some extra precision, the Cosmos controllers never gave it to me, and this was frustrating. So in the end, I resorted to playing by just shooting stuff when it was close to me. Furthermore, the controllers are heavy, and I started to feel the weight in the long run.
On the contrary of what TESTED guys said, actually I haven’t found the game unplayable with the Cosmos. The controls are the same ones of the Rift, so good, and while the tracking of the controllers is a bit weird, I managed to perform all the operations, including the ones requiring both hands, like the reloading of the shotgun. But the experience was not optimal at all.
There is a reason if HTC is offering Alyx for free with the Cosmos Elite and not the original Cosmos. The problem is that the Elite comes with the original Vive Wands… probably the top would be having the Cosmos + External tracking faceplate + Vive Index Controllers. This combination would be almost as cool as having the Index.
HTC Vive
My worst experience has been with the Original Vive. The original Vive (I mean, the one without DAS) has a mediocre comfort and has not integrated audio, and this impacts how many consecutive hours you can play the game for. The display is old, and the resolution is not comparable at all with the one of the Index.
But the worst component here is again the controllers. TESTED told that the problem was that the Valve Wands (the big donuts) are too big and so you risk crashing one into the other. Well, in my hour and more of playtest with the HTC Vive, I’ve never had this issue. It was not even the fact that the Vive Wands are big. The problem is that the mapping of the controls on the Vive Wands felt odd to me. It may be my fault because I was used to the Touch-like controllers, but actually, when I had to re-learn how to play the games with the Wands, I was like “why should I press this button to do this action?” all the time. And having to use the top button to perform some important operations like reloading is not much comfortable. The interactions are not natural at all, and this breaks a bit the magic.
Anyway, the Vive is usable. With my usual bad luck, I found myself using the Vive (with also defective touchpads) to perform one of the most difficult boss-fights of the game… but I managed to go through it!
Vive Focus Plus + Viveport Streaming
Some days after having finished Alyx, I decided to give a try also to Viveport Streaming, the system that lets you play Viveport and SteamVR games on the standalone headset Vive Focus Plus via Wi-fi streaming (you can read my full review of the system here). Think about it as the Virtual Desktop + Quest offered by HTC.
My experience with this solution has been quite mixed. The pro has been for sure the wireless freedom. Being able to play Half-Life: Alyx without tethers, in full freedom, moving all around your room is incredible!
But there are various cons, that made the experience so-and-so:
- There is a slight added latency, and if you don’t have a powerful 5GHz router, this may be noticeable. Furthermore, Alyx is pretty demanding, and in a certain point my laptop overheated and started streaming choppy frames;
- Being a streaming solution, the frames featured some compression. The visuals were anyway good, though;
- The game has not been made for the controllers of the Vive Focus Plus. The controllers mapping is surprisingly good (better than the one of the Vive), but there is some kind of a slight offset with the pose… it is like the gun is not where I expected it to be;
- When I tried to put the ammo/resin in my backpack, sometimes the gesture was not recognized correctly.
The game was playable, as you can see in this short video here below, but the experience was less enjoyable than using the Index, Rift, Quest+Link and Cosmos. I think that the fact that at home I don’t have a powerful dedicated router, and I had to use my laptop, had impacted on its performance. I would advise you to use this solution if you have a powerful PC and a dedicated 5Ghz router.
People have managed to successfully play Alyx on Virtual Desktop + Quest, so I think that with the right setup, you can enjoy it on the Focus+ as well. The weak point of this solution remains the controllers, though. Quest has the same controllers of the Rift S, and they are well mapped, while the Focus+ has controllers to which Valve hasn’t thought to in any way.
UPDATE: I got some feedback on WMR. It seems that the game works well on this kind of systems:
Speaking with these people I have learned that the experience on WMR is more or less similar to the one on Cosmos: the mapping of the controls is good, but the controllers tracking has some issues especially when the two controllers have to be close to each other. The advantage of WMR headsets compared to Cosmos is that you can buy them for a much cheaper price… but the quality may also be slightly inferior.
And that’s it with my experience playing Half-Life: Alyx with all the headsets I could! In any case, with all headsets, I had a good experience, and I think that Valve did a great job in making their game compatible with all the PC VR headsets on the market. Great job, GabeN!
If you have tried Alyx with other headsets, please let me know your impressions in the comments! And if you liked this post, don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter 😉
(Header image by Valve)
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