Arise, dead thread.
Here’s 9 minutes of IGN gameplay.
I don’t understand why IGN released 30FPS video of a VR title. Ugh.
Valve’s official videos are 60FPS and demonstrate the three movement styles. Very cool stuff:
Looks and sounds pretty special!
I’m 50/50 on the movement. But I probably will get it. Eventually.
or be sick a lot
I’m late to talk about the idea of this game overall, but I have to say, that Valve making a VR-only Half-Life game is the Valviest thing ever.
I can only assume they’ll release a non-VR version at some later date. Or maybe not, because Valve is run by a bunch of crazy hippies.
Looks great. Except for the janky teleport movement. And hand fumbling.
The three videos show three different movement styles though. You should watch them.
I think I must be getting old, but watching those videos makes me kind of dizzy.
None of the movement schemes looked great. Well, the second one was smooth and not jumpy, but it was too slow. The third was teleporting, but with the interstitial shifting being shown - better than the insta-teleport, but still too staccato for my taste.
At any rate, the hand fumbling and VR puzzles (like the door “lock”) put me off.
The new voice actor for Alyx doesn’t sound much like Alyx. Since the voice is all you have to go by, it kind of fails at invoking the character. Even her gloves look different.
As for the gameplay, the clunky node-based movement makes the whole thing feel more like a glorified light-gun shooter than a proper FPS.
It’ll be interesting to see if modders can rip the maps and assets from this and make something playable with mouse and keyboard. I’m sure they’re keen to try.
I get motion sick on roller coasters (though admittedly not in cars or on boats.) And yeah, the first few times I tried full motion VR I got a little twinge of nausea. But you really do develop VR legs if you keep at it, and it doesn’t take that long. The minimal lag and high resolution of modern VR experiences just works.
Are you talking about the teleport movement? It’s one of three options.
And even with teleport movement, it’s not node based. There aren’t fixed locations you can teleport to. You can teleport anywhere you could walk to within a certain range of your current location.
Even if it isn’t literally node-based, and even though it apparently offers a free-movement mode, the existence of the teleportation movement mode acts as the lowest common denominator around which the entire game must be balanced. The offensive AI design straight up can’t assume the same level of player mobility as in a traditional FPS, so we’re inevitably going to get a more Virtua Cop-style experience where you defend a succession of points instead of just running around.
Sure, you gain in immersion but lose fluid movement. That’s basically how all non-cockpit VR works.
In non-Alyx, but related world news, Black Mesa releases on Thursday! (and you don’t need VR to play it)
Not really.
In general, you want to slower, more ‘realistic’ movement in VR games in comparison with traditional games. Playing a bit of HL1 on the Quest, I thought it was too fast.
I don’t think this will be the case at all, both by looking at the 3rd video and after having experience playing many other VR games like Superhot.
Just because you’re teleporting from node to node doesn’t mean you’re stuck in place with your feet firmly cemented to the ground. The way VR teleportation works is that where you teleport to is the center, but then you can freely walk around multiple feet in every direction.
In the 3rd video I linked to for example it shows the player moving around quite a bit to dodge around corners, duck behind car doors, and move all over the place. Seems very open-ended with tons of potential for super dynamic combat situations which go so far beyond a “virtua cop-style experience”