Let’s take a look at ALL of the things you didn’t notice in the trailer for Half Life:
Alyx. There are a lot of particles, smoke and volumetric
lighting used in the video- I wonder if all this stuff will be overused in VR because
it looks cool in 3D. Where do you think all this electricity is
coming from? Couldn’t it be from THIS enemy, found later on in the trailer?
A new type of enemy? ENHANCE! Scissors and screws on the shelf here- you
think you could use them as makeshift weapons? I know what you’re all thinking- what excellent
subsurface scattering! The alien’s legs are thin enough for you to see light through
them. This isn’t a new tech- I think I first saw it on the tech-demo, ‘Luna’, and this
was back in 2005! In other words, this tech is old enough to be in Half Life 2 episodes
1 and 2. I wonder how close a view you’ll get of
this in the game, and how you pull a headcrab off in VR.
This game is set between the two existing Half-Life games, but just after the 7-hour
war where the combine attack Earth in the first place. You can see them constructing
the citadel seen in Half Life 2 here. This game is made by Valve.
There’s a lot to see in this shot. A strider… in an exoskeleton… carrying a look-out tower?
I wonder if part of the game will be set up here to give everybody vertigo and motion
sickness. Also it reminds me of this bit near the start of Half-Life 2.
And this park reminds me of another bit early on. They’ve deliberately shown all of the
same park rides as they had in Half-Life 2 here. What I think happened here was that
they made a demo for Half-Life VR using Half-Life 2 assets, and people spent more time than
expected doing random stuff in the park so they decided to keep it in. I expect this
to be one of the first places you see, and you’ll be free to play about with all these
things. The more I think about it, the more it makes
sense for this game to be in VR. Half-Life 2 was all based around its cutting edge physics.
All of the puzzles and environments were made deliberately to showcase physics and the gravity
gun was your way of interacting with it all. VR makes more sense in Half-Life 2 than it
does in most games. They said in an interview that people had
fun with VR even when the graphics were rubbish, but they went and did it all in Source 2 any
way. That being said, you can still make out the polygons on the wires over here, most
of the bricks surrounding this doorway are flat and the bottom of this hedge is disappointingly
flat. And if anyone can explain why the shadows on these wires suddenly cut off half way up
a flat wall, please let me know. Valve pls fix
Just as the citadel was the thing you headed towards in Half-Life 2, I expect this floating
ship to be what Half-Life Alyx is based around. And I wonder if you’re meant to sabotage
the power cables leading to it at some point. I have no idea how this puzzle is meant to
work but I fully expect it to utilise VR and your hand controls, so I don’t think it
can be compared to anything we currently have in games. That being said, it looks a bit
like pipe mania. As for what this is, the more I look, the
less sure I am. It’s on a track, so you’d think it’s a train of some sort. But that
front bit really doesn’t look like it can move along the track, yet fits perfectly with
the rest of it. So is it a vault door to the inner part of the city? A train undergoing
a transformation? Or a loading bay for a train that’s about to arrive? Or something completely
different? Place your bets. The first friendly person we see! Character
models were something very important in Half-Life 2, being ahead of their time by several years.
It looks like this game has adopted a more cartoonish look, not too dissimilar to the
facelift the models in CS:GO have received these past few years. He’s wearing some
kind of biohazard suit here. I assume that because it looks just like what this poor
guy’s wearing. I think you’re charging up or activating
your gravity-gloves here, as you can see these things are made out of make-shift microwaves,
turned on their sides. I assume you have no hud, no crosshair or
anything in VR to get in the way of the immersion. So instead, your health and ammo are shown
on your left hand, on nice little glowing displays. Later we also see a torch attached
to the left hand. I’m actually looking forward to using a torch in-game, shining it into
all kinds of weird nooks and crannies. I don’t know what these 2 green lights mean, but they’re
red later on- and these come on as your hand’s going into the health machine, so maybe that
means you can’t use it for anything else while the red light is showing. Also, an engine
warning sign shows up on this screen here. And this next sequence is nice as well, reminding
me of the bit in Half-Life 2 where Barney drops you the crowbar. If we slow it down
enough I’m happy to report that the bullet does fire out the direction the gun was facing
at the time. I’m sad the glass particles fade away almost instantly.
These gloves are the game’s gravity gun, it seems. It makes sense as Alyx was the one
to give Gordon the gun in the first place, so who knows what steps went into developing
it initially. And for VR it helps to pull stuff towards you because if you’re in a
restricted space, or are sat down to play this game (Yes that is an option) then you
won’t always want to be crouching down to pick stuff up, and sometimes it may simply
be out of reach in your play-space. I can imagine VR scales nicely as you use a bigger
and bigger zone. Now’s a good time to talk about movement
in VR. You can see Geoff in a room here, teleporting about in Half-Life Alyx, with brief black
‘blinks’ between the transitions… though the website says it supports 3 different styles
of motion, the other 2 being a smoother transition between zones. I am worried about motion sickness
with some of these. I have never been travel sick, but 5 minutes of running about in VR
using WASD made me feel terrible for about half an hour. I’ve been too scared to return
to it since. Back to the game, the ammo glows too, so although
you get an ammo counter on your hand I wonder if that’s reserved for later and for the
first part of the game you’ve just got to count your ammo, literally, by hand.
This is a healing station and it uses the same sounds as Half Life 1 and 2. It’s interesting
that you have to give up one of your hands to use this machine, meaning your movement
will be limited, making this a vulnerable situation to be in. You sure wouldn’t want
to have to fight enemies in this state! Also, this looks like one of the antlion bugs seen
in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. They’d give you health when you killed them, and if you focus
on it in this sequence you can see it gets liquidated as you’re healing. Poor thing.
And the health is more sophisticated than being just 3 hit-points, looks like you can
get smaller hearts as well to indicate smaller increments.
It’s nice to see more than one shadow being cast from this case on the ground, but not
so good to see such sharp looking shadows from what I assume is shrapnel from the explosion,
meaning it treats this huge fireball as a single, tiny point of light.
Very high quality motion blur in this shot which is generally used to smooth out motion.
As the game should be running at more than 60 FPS I expect the effect to be more subtle
in actual gameplay. Also, the zombie’s hand passes straight through the wall.
And this is when the environment starts to change. You notice all this goo stuff oozing
out from the vents? You’ll see a lot more of that in other parts of the trailer. What
I THINK has happened is that, by coming to Earth, the combine accidentally contaminated
the world with this alien stuff. This will be a 3-way battle between you, the combine
and the alien things. I’ve seen a few combine with what looks like a canister on their backs.
Maybe this is for flames or some kind of poison to help clear buildings of this stuff which
seems to get everywhere. I think you’ll be spending a lot of this
game rummaging through debris for stuff. I have a few questions about ammo in this game.
What happens if you pick up a stash of ammo? Where does it go? We see the player pick up
2 at the same time, which magically stack on top of each other to make for easy insertion
into a shotgun! Are we going to see two-handed weapons in this game, or is everything one-handed
for convenience? Can you dual-wield? Also unlike the pistol, this gun shows its ammo
on the back. What’s with everything being sideways in
this game? First the microwaves, now the TVs. If you look closely, you’ll notice you’re
stood in an elevator in this scene. It was never made clear how organic these
things were, they always seemed part animal part machine. But these dangly bits indicate
they’re more animal this time around. A few nice things to point out here. Firstly,
I love the hairs on the headcrabs! Second, what will it be like to be sucked up by one
of those tongue things in VR? And third… there’s a headcrab in a toilet.
You get a mix of blurry and sharp shadows, depending on how far from the surface the
item is. This is nice to see and as it shows a more advanced lighting model than the real-time
lighting seen in CS:GO, for instance. Of course, that’s assuming that Source 2’s lighting
IS all in real-time… Notice how all these combine have canisters
on their backs. Also, hello, good old van model!
There’s no sign of him yet, but Dog is guaranteed to make an appearance isn’t he- and there’s
got to be another fetch sequence where you pass and catch items thrown by him. Of all
the speculation in this video, I am most confident about this. How can anybody working on Half-Life
Alyx NOT have gone back to this bit of Half-Life 2 and thought ‘wait… this is perfect for
VR’. And if for some reason you haven’t done this Valve… what are you waiting for?
Get to work on it GO GO GO. Dog was one of the best bits from Half-Life 2, so much so
that they found ways of cramming him into important bits in BOTH episodes, and he’s
known Alyx since she was a child.
‘Gordon this is Dog. My Dad built him to protect me when I was a kid. First model was…
YAYYYYYYY high. I’ve been adding to him ever since.’
Of course, he’s going to be in this game, and when he shows up I expect him to look
less advanced than he did in Half-Life 2. I don’t mind if Dog’s cuter… as long
as he can still murder people. Here you are being briefed on a mission. You
can see a map of City 17, the combine wall… and then what looks like a giant person in
a suit. You can see the Australian guy here again. And I’m confident it’s him in this
room because you can see everything from another angle in this screenshot on the Half Life
website. You can even see the cup she places on the hologram, just here.
We’ll play this in slow-motion so you can see all of the flaws with the physics in this
game. I’m hoping you can play with, and rummage through the bits of polystyrene found
in these supply crates. REFLECTIONS! But I doubt it’s raytraced.
In fact, I don’t even know if it’s using screen space reflections. At worst, it could
even be the same old cubemapped reflections seen in Half-Life 2, but maybe with the sort
of parallax trick seen in CS:GO’s new Lunacy level. OH SORRY DID I SPOIL AN UPCOMING 3KLIKSPHILIP
VIDEO THERE A lot of the stuff seen here is from the Zen
world from Half-Life 1. I think this shows a late-stage infestation of one of the houses
in City 17. Like how Half-Life 2 had different chapters, I expect this alien contamination
to be one with it ending somewhere super disgusting like we can see here.
Another shot of the VR puzzle games, this time really obviously using 3D space.
I’m going to assume you use your gravity-gloves to steal a grenade from a combine soldier
here. And I’m going to speculate that you can
physically rip head-crabs off zombies, and that’s why there’s this new, armoured,
poisonous looking one, which you won’t be able to deal with in the same way. Also, this
headcrab’s really cute. It clearly hasn’t seen sunlight in a long time. And I hope I’m
not the only one who can’t wait to stick my hand into this zombie’s chest cavity
and to wiggle it about! The future of gaming is here.
This is the same gun the Australian guy almost killed you with earlier in the trailer, but
it now has some new side-attachment. Will this be a jump-scare near the end of
the contamination episode of the game? Whatever this dude is, he’s wearing the same stuff
as the enemy in the NEXT clip, who can seem to summon lightning and send it travelling
along the ground towards you. I really respect the new antlion models. I
thought they were one of the best looking creatures in Half-Life 2, but now they have
glowing, translucent limbs that can be shot off and stray hairs sticking out everywhere-
like everything else in this game it seems. Also, they recommend you play Half-Life 2
Episode 2 first before playing this one, for reasons that will become apparent later. It’s
hard to do this without spoiling anything, but in Episode 2 there’s one bit where Eli
shouts this: …and in the trailer for Half-Life Alyx there’s
this. Which hints that it may… conclude whatever
started in Episode 2. Even though that was set after Half-Life 2. They can’t just have
thrown that into the trailer to troll people. Not after keeping their fanbase waiting for
12 years… And then a look at the floating ship, which
I am sure must be this game’s equivalent of the citadel, and where the Alyx’s mission
must eventually lead. …and there’s Gman. Here he is in Half-Life
2. This is how they compare. The new one has nice fuzzy hair.
To save you some time I watched the 22-minute interview. This is how I interpreted what
they said, but it might not be how they wanted to convey it.
I think the past decade has been used to develop Source 2 and to figure out how to use VR.
It seems like they’ve spent the last 4 and a half years on Half-life: Alyx, and that
the VR came first, with Half-Life being chosen because they decided its theme and gameplay
worked best with it. What’s been going on at Valve for the last 10 years will be revealed
in the ‘FINAL HOURS’ released next year, where they talk about their tests with VR,
the Lab and all of the cancelled games which served as stepping stones ultimately leading
to Half-Life: Alyx. With this game, they started by making a 15-minute
demo using Half-Life 2 tech and people ended up spending 45 minutes in it. From this they
saw that VR could be so much more immersive and it led to player behaviours they hadn’t
seen before. From this small test, they learned what was important in VR, and what wasn’t-
notably being graphics. And from their testing and experimentation, it naturally grew into
a bigger game and is now roughly the same length as Half-Life 2. More than 50 people
have been working full-time in secrecy on it. I got the impression that calling it ‘Half
Life 3’ was too much pressure, but they hinted that they liked the idea of producing
more stuff for the Half-Life series, depending on how this game was received.
They say mouse and keyboard would lose so much of what makes this project special, as
it has been built from the ground up to be for VR. Trying it on mouse and keyboard would
almost be like watching a movie… on a radio. As an example, they say there is so much you
can do with doors in this game and it would take up a portion of your keyboard to get
the same functionality from traditional mouse and keyboard gameplay. As an example, using
VR you can open a door slightly, peer in, chuck a grenade through and then close it
again. You can duck behind cover, dodge enemy attacks and so on. No doubt this game will
be modded to support mouse and keyboard later on and people will be like ‘ah yeah it is
better with VR’. After Half-Life Alyx is released, I reckon
progress will pick up and we’ll begin to see more games from Valve again. Just like
the old days! Because VR is a new technology with a limited audience, they said that multiplayer
isn’t ideal for now, but that once VR is established, I’m hoping for Half-Life VR
Deathmatch and Left 4 Dead VR! They said that they considered Portal, but that it would
make people feel too sick. So that’s all the stuff I picked up on from
it. It seems like Valve are heavily invested in VR and that there’s a lot riding on Half-Life
Alyx. I’ve seen a lot of comments from people who are disappointed that the next Half-Life
game is limited to VR only… and I think Valve were expecting this kind of response.
VR has failed to gain mainstream traction until now. And while Valve are taking a huge
gamble by putting so much time and money into it… I really do think that if VR succeeds,
gaming will never be the same again. And if Valve can’t get it right with Half-Life
Alyx… I don’t know who can.