I’m only in the very beginning - just got the gravity gloves - but damn is it cool so far.
I’m playing with the Quest Link and have two issues though:
The audio seems quieter than playing natively on the Quest. Though the audio quality is bad anyway so I may just wear headphones
The resolution seems blurrier than the Quest can handle. I’m not sure how to see the resolution it’s running at or how to increase it though. Any ideas?
Haha I know what you mean! I love how tactile everything is, how they kind of simulate weight and objects don’t jitter around in your grasp, and how your hands don’t pass through stuff. Feels good.
It definitely feels better to throw things in this game than any other VR game I’ve played. Even in Super Hot VR which is otherwise excellent, I could never get used to releasing the grip at the right time to throw things where I wanted to.
You can toggle super sampling. You can do it from both the Oculus Debug Tool or from SteamVR options (although don’t use both!).
And yeah, Super Hot don’t have good throwing at all, for example Job/Vacation Simulator already have a better throwing than Super Hot.
Front tracking Rift games have been doing this for years. Robo Recall and Space Pirate Trainer, for instance.
It’s amazing how much it improves immersion to have your hands push up against surfaces rather than clipping or otherwise failing to act realistically
I have no doubt Rift has got it going on, but I remember Arizona Sunshine had the exact same behind the back mechanic and all these mixed reality users complained about the game being really frustrating to play because of it. It’s really the only downside of mixed reality. Anyway, when I finish Nier: Automata I will get this game and report back on how the old and cheapo MR headsets work with it.
‘Continuous turn’ plus speed options have been added.
Update 1.1
That is perfect.
…and here is this. I usually enjoy these ‘how VR messed with my brain’ type posts, and this one seems more contextually relevant given Covfefe-19: https://kotaku.com/playing-nothing-but-half-life-alyx-in-vr-made-me-hallu-1842473637
I have to question how much these guys are exaggerating to be able to write the article and hit his quota. I played a good amount of VR in some weeks, and surprise, and didn’t have any strange hallucination that persisted for days. As much, a nebulous sense of ‘unrealness’ that disappears in 10 minutes after a long session.
I agree. The biggest psychosomatic effects I got from VR were within the first week, and involved tactile, inner-ear sensations during smooth motion in VR-space.
That said, I’m one data point on a spectrum and I’ve no problem believing persistent, closed-eye visuals with 1:1 head motion correspondence while falling asleep… after 4 days of heavy use. It didn’t seem to bother him too much.
Grrr. I haven’t been able to play this because Steam is no longer detecting my Index. Physically it appears to be fine because if I turn off Direct Mode, Windows immediately detects an Index HMD display and treats it as a second monitor and I can see my desktop via the headset. But Steam? Steam just won’t acknowledge I have it plugged in, even after 3 hours of troubleshooting last night. I think it may have been a recent Windows update that busted things for me (that’s happened once in the past but I was able to get things up and running after a bit).
Currently have an email out to Steam support for the issue but they have a warning about delays due to COVID-19 murdering half of Washington state. So I’ll just have to live vicariously through you guys for a while.
Ironic, given that I’m not having issues with my Quest.
That doesn’t help, I know.
Seems like it’s a Steam issue and not an Index issue, FWIW. Found a lot of posts detailing the same problem with Vives, Rifts, etc.
Doesn’t make it any less frustrating, but I’m glad it doesn’t seem to be a hardware problem from what I can tell.
I foolishly loaned my VR stuff to my ex-wife so she can Beat Saber while quarantined. She has terrible asthma and is on steroids that suppress her immune system, so she has been on total lockdown for a while and will be for the foreseeable future. I’m kicking myself for not thinking about Halflife when offered it to her…
Some notes:
-Alyx should wash her hands, they are pretty dirty. Even more, now that we are in a pandemic.
-There are loads between levels, but at least they are brief.
-Graphics are great, atmosphere is great, yadda yadda. Although I will confess I’d have preferred if they would have chosen to pursuit full photorealism with the characters, instead the slightly more stylized art they are using, as they have clearly the tech and budget to go for photorealism.
-Small actions like mantling and switching between free hand and weapon is super smooth. Dropping items to the backpack has worked 100% of the time (looking at you, Boneworks), and the grabbity gloves (I will ignore anyone who dares refer to them with another name!) work great. In fact I suspect they cheat a bit and it doesn’t matter a lot how you do the ‘flick towards you’, the items tend to fly always in the right trajectory so you can catch them easily.
-While several aspects of the game are excellent, the writing is not so much. The story start has been typical basic motivation concept for a FPS, seemingly an afterthought in how characters react to it. You really can’t believe Alyx character as a real human . Her dad has been captured by the enemy, they are going to kill him for sure, and she doesn’t seem to particularly care. She should be desperate, hopeless, or at least super worried. But she is super calm, she barely reacts when Russel states as a matter of fact he will be tortured and killed, it’s like she knows she is in a character in a video games and therefore, for sure the plan Russel proposes will work without any doubt. In real life it would be a desperate plan with a low chance of success. And ironically this a greener Alyx, only 19 years old! I’d say that despite Alyx being now a voiced character, they way the games and characters has been written is still very similar to previous HalfLifes where G. Freeman was really a stand-in for the player.
They don’t even try to create a ‘moment’ when they discover the train plan went awry and she has to cross the -quarantine zone-. Like, the writers don’t try to raise the tension and the stakes making it sound as a reckless, almost suicidal plan that Alyx is still pursuing for her dad’s sake.
-I read the game was unexpectedly funny, but for now Russell had more misfires than good jokes. A disappointment, as I loved for example Portal 2.
-HL Alyx is still a very linear FPS. Yes, the previous HLs were also linear, but I almost feel it even more here. In fact I died twice by trying to fall in parts where I thought I would survive, but no, the game fades to red and it’s ‘game over’. Or the moment where you find the dark area of the sewers and you need a flashlight, you are directly and magically blocked from trying to enter before getting the light, the game is guided and linear like that. I don’t remember any scene like that in HL1 or 2.
More examples: The flashlight is automatic which kind of sucks, there are some dark rooms where I’d like to use it but I can’t because the game decides for you. And the introduction of mantling to the game is problematic, as in several places I found that it allows the player to find ‘blocked’ areas where invisible forces don’t allow you to enter.
So virtual thumbs up? Down?
The game could be harder. I’m playing at Hard already. My little stash
That’s two of my complaints, super limited inventory (2 slots for all your grenades, 2 types of health items and quest items is a joke) and the game could stand to have a ‘Very Hard’ difficulty too. As a minimum it should be 2 slots per arm.
I also miss the ability to find and use armor, like in the old games. FPS without armors are really missing how good it’s this simple mechanic. From a gameplay perspective armor is another item to collect and use in combat so another reason to explore, and it’s ideal in how it works: it’s a clear advantage, it can’t be stacked up with health and it isn’t a simple ‘hp pool’, but a %DR, so it stills make the player receive damage so he still has a reason to avoid enemy fire.
Finally, we have discussed before the lack of melee, which is weird here (both as a Half Life game and as a VR game). Gameplay-wise, having a melee weapon like a crowbar is useful as a tool for resource management, to exchange life for ammo: simply fight the next two or three headcrabs with melee, that way you won’t waste ammo, in exchange of surely receiving 2 or 3 hits.
-The game has usually very solid physics. I like how you can drop casually objects on a table or a shelf and it won’t glitch or jump or move nearby objects magically, the same with the ability to move partially big containers, inclining them sideways while one edge is still touching the ground, in other games items can be at rest on the ground or being moved by the player, and states between those two are more unstable.
-It upsets me slightly that they haven’t been totally thorough in making all the cases/boxes to be interactive, some of them are ‘fixed geometry’, and in some furniture there are little handles to open a drawer but again they are static. Yeah, they are the minority, but in VR the lack of consistency is more noticeable, you know?
-Headcrabs are scarier here. Not because they are more lethal, their behavior has been adjusted to compensate for VR, but just because looking at them at scale is creepier. And they are bigger, too.
Beyond what I just written in the two big posts, the summary is that it’s a 12-15 hour (as per reviewers) single player FPS, with AAA graphics and Valve polish, well paced, great atmosphere, in other words the type of experience that still barely existed in VR. And well, it’s more Half life!
People are mostly loving it.
That said, it’s a surprisingly conservative VR title. I wonder how we will see it in the future. Just from memory, the game lacks:
-weapon variety (only 3 weapons)
-can’t holster weapons like in H3VR, Dead Walking, Boneworks, etc
-no melee weapons, which is very puzzling for both a VR game and a HL game (crowbar?!). Other games has shown is possible to do it well.
-no sprint ability, you are limited to a slow or a slightly fast walk
-You can’t pass weapons from one hand to the other, or do ‘akimbo’
-small things like the teleport when getting to the top of a staircase. Walking Dead already has a better solution, with a very natural animation that accompanies the player’s gesture.
-no good inventory
Sucks about Half Life but you’re a good dude, JPR.
While I don’t really miss armor and you don’t really need to carry multiple healing creatures (since you can’t use multiple creatures in one station and there is always a creature around a station), I do agree that Valve oversimplified inventory too much. There are VR games with good inventory UI, Valve didn’t have to dumb it down like that.
IMO it’s still the best VR game I’ve played to date but I kind of expected more from Valve. More polish, I don’t know, more moving the genre forward.
If anything, for me, the game highlights all the limitations the current hardware still has but it also makes me excited to see how this whole VR thing will develop and improve.
