Yesterday we got the first trailer for Valve's VR title Half-Life: Alyx ahead of its release in March, a game that is set between the first and second games, and now The Game Awards creator Geoff Keighley has paid a visit to Valve to hear more about where the idea came from.
"It was definitely, 'Let's do a big VR game,' and then we explored different franchises," Valve's David Speyrer said. "We kind of ruled out multiplayer just because of the small audience for VR, and other issues as well with VR, avatars and things like that. And we kind of settled on Portal or Half-Life as interesting, and Portal is so much about flinging yourself through space and through portals that we thought, well, we're gonna make a bunch of people sick with this game."
"And then we looked at Half-Life and kind of the DNA of that product, and a bunch of elements seemed really enhanced by VR. Half-Life is about this cadence of story, combat, puzzle, exploration, interaction, environmental art, vistas, things like that. And they all seemed to be enhanced or reinvented in interesting ways by VR."
The game "began as an exploration of VR, and the more we used the controllers and the headset, we realized the amount of interactions this gives, the amount of possibilities these things give us, the more we explored it and the more we realized that there's so much opportunity that we can't really translate back to the keyboard," Dario Casali said.
"When you can track your hands separately from your head, they're all 3D space, all simultaneously tracking and moving, you just can't really get that with a mouse and keyboard. And when you put that into game mechanics, the kinds of interactions that we can do now, we couldn't possibly do with a mouse and keyboard."
When talking about these types of interactions, this includes opening doors, moving items off shelves, throwing grenades, shooting guns, and more that you can see in the trailer below, so Valve is really trying to immerse players in this "full-length" VR title.
We can expect to see more at The Game Awards on December 12, but for now are you impressed with this game?
Thanks, PC Gamer.