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Half-Life: Alyx


spatular
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Nice impressions @spatular I'm hoping to get an old HTC Vive off an old school mate by next week so I can play it. Just headset only though so will take me awhile to afford the two controllers and 2 base stations too but will be worth the wait.

 

Will be worth it as soon as I boot this up and hear that Valve intro jingle.

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Yeah I was listening to Jeff Gerstmann and he seems convinced you need room scale. Don't know myself obviously but a Vive would be a perfect option I'm sure.

 

If I still have a job in a month's time and I have a good picture of my finances I might still look at getting a headset...

 

Ending spoilers

Spoiler

That ending looked cool, the G-Man was exactly like he was in the old games.

 

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yeah when you get to the end 

Spoiler

you know it's going to be the g man in there

 

some of the ending stuff went over my head though as i played the hl2 and the episodes when they came out so forgotten a lot of what happens there - should have probably read up on the plot of those before i played this. it was still cool though.

 

cheers Blakey, and yeah i agree a vive should be great for this with the room scale tracking!

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My take is

Spoiler

Eli made a deal with the G-Man to save his daughter from the Black Mesa incident. G-Man just called in the favour in this game.

 

I'm a bit disappointed though that the next game might be more about saving Alyx than that Borealis stuff they built up years ago? That seemed way more interesting.

 

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  • 8 months later...

I played what's probably the opening 90 minutes of this. I'm assuming it's the opening 90 minutes cause that's what the oculus unthethered battery life is supposed to be around (you can plug it in as well, but you won't be wanting to spend more than 90 minutes in VR at a single time)

 

I think I did three levels. It's got the same level of gravity and physics gimmickry that HL2 had in that but obviously the interactions in Alyx are a bit more novel as you can fling things around in 3D space and catch them and stuff. You can't put a bucket on your head which I found a bit disappointing and makes me dock the game a few points. You can however carry a beer bottle in one hand and a gun in the other which redeems things slightly.

 

I dunno how to take screenshots in VR yet, I know there's a way but I'll have to figure it out in the next session. Not that screenshots of VR games are super exciting

 

I think maybe the coolest part for me was when I got to a train station of head crab zombies who were all asleep, so I gravity gloved over a red barrel and put it in a doorway and threw bits of sellotape and buckets and shampoo at zombies to wake them up and have them lumber over so I could shoot the barrel and save bullets. It was kind of like that one scene in Shaun of the Dead with the records, although it's hard to actually get the AI of zombies to recognise where you are. Maybe there's some sort of mechanic in the game where you can shout at them or something, seems like a missed opportunity otherwise. 

 

There's a sense of physicality to the whole thing but so far it also kind of feels a lot like a more constrained version of Half Life 2. Which is fine, I really like Half Life 2, but I'd say I'm still waiting for that holy shit moment. It does make the objects in the game world feel a lot more meaningful tho, like now there is a reason to pick everythying up that you find and throw it at a barnacle or whatever, whereas before I kind of only did that with barrels. What it also reminds me of a bit is a Resident Evil game in the sense that the environments are so physically constrained and your ability to move around is limited by what you yourself can handle, so encounters can get a bit hairy especially when you drop the clip that you have to reload with and keep on dropping it constantly like I did. The manual reload is finnicky with the oculus controllers cause they keep banging together when you pull the slide back but you can do that particular interaction with a button anyway. It's also very easy to miss with the guns, so I've got into a habit of getting on one knee and hiding behind a corner and doing ADS with both hands holding the gun steady. I've got an aiming reticule upgrade now but it's still not something where you can just blindly spam the gun button at things.

 

I will add this, I'm quite physically constrained myself so this is definitely not something I can fully get into the way other people do, this level of physical interactivity due to having a banjaxxed spine. So if my impressions come across a bit lukewarm I guess take that factor into account, I simply cannot get into VR as deeply as some others. Not that the technology is completely inaccessible to me but it's just I'm a bit more limited in what I can do while in it when it comes to room scale. So I might need to consider modifying the experience if it becomes much more involved later on (you can play seated with teleportation)

 

Edit i played some more, much better impression of the following chapter. The gameplay starts to become much more dynamic and organic, especially with the weapon switching, flashlights, reloading and enemies lurking in the dark. Situational awareness is paramount. I still find some of the action grabbing stuff a bit janky however and throwing explodey barrels at zombies isn't very reliable

 

edit 2 fucking geforce experience, I had an amazing shootout with some combine that I tried to capture (not amazing as in high skill but amazing as in it was a scramble to survive like some desperate Last of Us shit). But the auto replay feature decided it didn't want to work. It does that sometimes.

 

Not that it would translate super well to a 2d recording, but the shooting against guys with guns in this is sort of like Time Crisis except you're not rooted to the spot. Using your gun to smash out windows on trains so you can peek out and take some shots. Peeking from behind cover or just doing a big wild spray of bullets hoping for the best. It's kind of the limit of what I'm capable of but there's a lot of ducking behind objects and trying to coward your way ahead, it's super cool.

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Clipped some terrible gameplay by me, to the surprise of nobody I was always rubbish at paintball.

 

 

All of my shootouts are like this, a clumsy cowardly disaster.

 

After this section I had blown through all my ammo and had to use a briefcase to fend off headcrabs while I scoured for more bullets. Unfortunately there's no melee to squish them so you can only twack them about a bit.

 

One thing that annoys me is how much better the graphics look in 2D, I wonder if it's the headset that makes it look worse or the compression via streaming, or both. 

 

I also had to limit the fps to 72, the device can support 90 but there is a bug in current nvidia drivers that causes stutter at certain fps in VR and RTX3000 series cant downgrade drivers to before this bug. So the best VR card out there is 2080ti on some older driver, fuck sake.

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So I think I'm near the end of chapter 5 of this, this game is long. I expected it to be short because it's VR but it isn't short, it's really quite lengthy. There's 11 chapters altogether altho checking on Danny O'Dwyer's LP it seems like I'm slightly past halfway. It's occurring to me that the game this reminds me of during its combat is Breath of the Wild in that it allows for some really cool emergent strategies during combat/survival. Like the bit I mentioned with batting away headcrabs with briefcases. It's not quite the same level of clockwork as that game is as Valve do kind of point out to you via their design some clever ways they would like you to deal with shit. But it's got this environmental scavenging type of style to it that makes it amount to more than pure shooting gallery I think

 

The most surprising thing I'm finding is ironically that the game is extremely predictable. Predictable in that it's really just another Half Life game, but what makes it special is how it leverages the format. I was disappointed that the new Half Life was a VR game but when you actually play it it becomes obvious that there was no way to innovate on Half Life and keep it feeling like Half Life in the 2D format. Its natural style of story telling and environmental manipulation needed another dimension to it and for now that is VR. Which makes me think that the reason they didn't just call this game Half Life 3 (because that is obviously what this game is) is that they wanted to save the numbered entry for a platform which wasn't so niche as PCVR. So I think either Half Life 3 will be in production for PS5 VR or they will just put it on ice for another decade and wait for something innovative to happen with AR, or something like that. But it's impossible to imagine that they will go and do another game like Half Life 2 I think. Cause again what is surprisingly predictable about Alyx is that it's just feels like more Half Life 2 but in VR. That sounds like a back handed compliment but you'll have to trust me that it isn't and play it yourself when you get the chance. 

 

I have gotten a little better at fighting even tho I'm still sort of scrambling around the map like a geriatric crab. I use the jump ability a lot more as a teleport (I use the continuous motion instead of blink, for some reason I don't get motion sick in VR. I'm not sure why that is). I've gotten the hang of moving while shooting and I got a great upgrade for my shotgun to attach a grenade to it. A lot of the combat still boils down to 'oh shit I dropped my clip and forgot to slide the gun back and there's some helicopter robot fucker slicing my face up', but that's what this game basically is. It's a game that is obsessed with little interactions in lieu of big, stylish brawls where you kick 50 shades of arse. Honestly half the gameplay loop is figuring out when and how to reload. It's sort of to the point that I don't know I want to buy the reload optimising upgrades (but I'm guessing that the fights later on will force you to do that)

 

A growing number of outlets are saying that this is GOTY. It's usually this or Hades that I've seen jostling for the top spot when there is staff at a site that's actually played it. It's unfortunate that a new Half Life came out and is probably another defining effort in its genre but this time it's gone unnoticed. Not that that's surprising. Anyway I guess I can now say I played a really good 2020 game in 2020 (well, this and Tony Hawk). Sorry cybercunk, it wasn't meant to be

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That is Alyx finito.

 

Absolutely wrecked after all of that, I tend to spend a lot of time crouching or in a constant squat so I can get behind cover so it actually wears you out after a while. It's hard to collect my thoughts on it all as a result, but it's very distinctly Half Life. In one sense cause of how every chapter takes an idea and the devs explore it within their game design, which is obviously something it's got in common with every game in the series. Chapter 7 is the one that people tend to hype up the most, personally for me it didn't land but I never really liked the first TLOU and clearly somebody at Valve thought that game was so good that they needed a level for it in VR. On the other hand Chapter 11 blew my mind, I never hear people talk about that one. I don't tend to go for superlatives unless it's justified but you can throw all of the big ones like mind-blowing, jaw dropping, unbelievably awesome etc at it. So it's kind of the same deal as HL2 in that respect, how each chapter has its own flavor and some will land with you and others will not (I really like the vehicle sections in 2 even tho they destroy the pacing of that game, they fucking rock)

 

I will say that it kind of feels like Valve were slightly too conservative with their encounter design. It is VR and you can't have battles that are as intense as something like the finale of Episode 2 in it, it makes sense. But as someone who's just sort of discovered that VR nausea doesn't seem to be a thing with them I would have liked to have seen fights which get a bit more complex and reward more knowledge of the environment. I did find after a while that the game didn't have quite as many ways to turn the environment against enemies as I'd wished. It doesn't quite hit that level that Ravenholm did where the entire stage is a weapon. Briefcases as a shield was maybe the most I could manage to find out. I suppose you could throw hammers at headcrabs but a lot of the time all you will find are cartons and tins, nothing that can be really used to your advantage. I don't think it was for lack of effort that I didn't find more ways to do stuff like that.

 

I said before I think when the game was revealed that it looked like they were taking Half Life 2's design and transplanting it into the more claustrophobic environments of Black Mesa/HL1, well that definitely turned out to be the case. It was wise I think cause the game turns into a cover shooter after a while. I know lots of people really did not think HL2's shooting was very good and it definitely dated quite fast in the couple years between HL2 and Episode 2. But in this you can take cover behind anything, that turns into really big deal. It adds a lot, now I'm going to look for mods which go a bit further with the combat than valve did cause I know there's a few that exists. There was one encounter though that I thought was really clever, it involves electricity and dogs. It's the one fight in the game that demanded a lot of situational awareness and management of enemy threats, it was really difficult and it also didn't run super well for me (unfortunately quest 2 streaming puts extra load on your GPU). Kind of had a RE4 vibe a little bit

 

A thing I really enjoy btw is how inventory limited you are and how you'll often run into fights holding something in one hand, deciding when and how to drop it on the ground for when you need to reload. Or reloading ahead of time and bring the grenade or whatever it is with you, or whatever kind of multitasking you're trying to keep on top of. The act of reloading is such a big part of the core loop of combat that it surprised me. Revolver Ocelot would really like this game, the shotgun reload especially. The fact that reload isnt a button anymore but is a deliberate action made up of little gestures means that execution and timing is a thing now. It's not complex or realistic but it's enough that there's overhead in making sure you do it correct while also keeping your cool

 

It's safe to say that this is my favourite game this year. It's not my favourite Half Life game, I'm not actually sure which one is my favourite but at the very least I would put Half Life 2 above this. But it's a very worthy follow up and while playing it you don't really feel the 13 year gap, it feels like you could travel back in time and give the devs modern technology and this game is what they would come up with. You don't often see that sort of consistency when a series takes such a big hiatus 

 

edit I said chapter 11 was mindblowing, I meant to say chapter 10. Although 11 is also mindblowing, so it works lol

 

edit 2 this clip from Danny O'Dwyer's LP is one of my favourite shootouts in the game, if you watch Danny's LP he is really good at it and shows off the ways it can be played really well. I clipped my own fight of this too but it was way more rubbish and cowardly, Danny also plays on an Index which just seems way smoother with its tracking or something

 

This video also includes major story spoilers tho so don't watch too much of it.

Spoiler

 

 

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So I told myself I'd put this aside and play Hades and Portal 2, but I'm still at this. I'm doing a second playthrough on hard mode with a mod called 'campaign+ (with resin)', which scales all the encounters in the game way up with custom enemies and kind of crams in a higher enemy count. It's a little bit janky tbh, some of the AI pathfinding seems to get a bit broken. Either by the modifications made by this dude or the fact that the game engine seems to find it hard to calculate what to do with more than the usual number of enemies. I've seen some combine run into the corner and stare at it like it's Blair Witch. I shoot those guys in the bum with my shotgun.

 

It also seems to do away with the passivity of the combine. I'm playing with the developer commentary on and it's got interesting anecdotes of the challenges of making this for VR and how people really hated the combine running at them, so they dumbed them down a bit so they would try and take you out from behind cover. Now that I'm am playing with a mod that enables just that I totally get it, it fucking sucks when a giant hybrid of alien, man and technology runs right up in your face. These fuckers are enormous! I don't think I appreciated how generously proportioned they were in HL2, it took VR to strike the fear of these cunts into me.

 

Alyx is kind of a one and done sort of game, the weird little gimmicks, puzzles and surprises really aren't as impressive once you've seen them once. It's not a deep game with lots of strategy, it's much closer to being a lite survival horror with some puzzles (which are quite repetitive and the worst part of the game, watch Dunkey's video to see). But I am having a really fun time playing this still, maybe my favourite cover shooter ever at this point. When I really like a game like this I just sort of want to keep finding reasons to play it more. Pulling a car door open and using it as cover to fly off some blind fire is a very natural but cool thing to do, a million miles from what you could do with the gunplay in the other HLs. Probably for me it's the novelty of doing this all in VR for the first time, but the way Valve bring everything together makes it enjoyable. The VR multitasking and inventory juggling makes even the most basic of battles fairly heated, I think you could make an excellent Resident Evil mod out of this game. I'd really like to see Capcom go full VR for a RE1 remake or something. Not a half-and-half like they did with VII, go all the way like Valve with Alyx.

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  • 1 month later...

I'm about two hours in and finding it a bit too intense. It's the constant lack of ammo. I've also just got to the bit...

 

Spoiler

Where you get the flashlight. The following dark bis are nuts. Fuck me that terrified me. I think I now hold the world record for the fastest removal of a VR headset ever. I'm too old for this shit.


But yeah, otherwise it's great. The writing's top notch as well, as you'd expect from a Valve game.

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  • 1 month later...

Some real progress made on the non-VR mod for this. I'll always say though that 90% of the game in Alyx is in the VR-exclusive interactions. Eg, catching a vodka bottle at the last second when rummaging through shelves to not alert a massive monster to your presence. Or panicking and dropping all your ammo when reloading your gun in tight quarters. Or lying on the ground and peeking around corners to shoot out a gas canister on a combine's back. Or chucking a grenade behind you while running in a different direction. Or turning every bit of the environment into cover to take shots from. Or peeking from behind cover and grabbing a combine's grenade off them with gravity gloves and blind chucking it back at them etc. The game takes place within these interactions mostly, not in story content or experiences which are platform agnostic like in REVII

 

 

 

It's why when explaining VR to people I try and use the Mario 64 analogy, how it's not possible to map the gameplay design of that into a SNES game. It's just a different way of doing things. Not necessarily better or worse, but VR has super high fidelity in its interactions where lots of emergent possibilities occur. Nobody 'coded' a cover system into HL Alyx, it exists just as a natural extension of your own body and movements in VR. IMO a LP would better get across why Alyx is great than a mod that mods out most of the game, but if motion sickness is a limitation then this is the best way I suppose

 

One thing I'll say tho is the visuals of Alyx come across way better in 2D for some reason, VR displays are still not as high res as needed for a game like this. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I found out you can shoot the grenades back at the combine. While I'm sure that has worked in previous Half Life games with physics in them it's much more fun in VR lol 

 

 

 

I'm not really trying to take cover here cause I was testing the 120hz mode in VD (which is why I'm constantly looking at my hand, there is a framerate display on it in VR. Spoiler, Alyx will not run at 120 unless your computer is powered by nuclear energy)

 

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  • 1 year later...

This pretty cool looking mod got a shoutout at the PC show yesterday, looks like it's a non canon story expansion. Basically an alt story to HL Alyx 

 

 

 

Doesn't seem to be doing anything too crazy that wasn't already in the original, maybe the strider gets used for something later

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