Without spoiling anything that isn’t already in the gameplay videos that VALVE and IGN
have released, let’s take a look at what Half-Life Alyx’s gameplay will be like,
and how it might be different from past Half-Life games.
It looks to be a slower-paced experience. The action still looks like it can be a frantic
affair, but especially in the earlier segments of the game, the combat is going to be slower-paced,
starting from a very forgiving level. The game is built with VR in mind and they know
that most people won’t have had much experience with it before, so you’ll be given plenty
of time to prepare for the challenges ahead. This is best explained in IGN’s 13 minute
gameplay video with commentary from Valve employees. It’s worth checking this video
out to get an understanding of all the decisions which go into making a VR game accessible
to new players. If we go through the first few encounters
in an early chapter, you can see exactly that- the first time you see a zombie it’s behind
a locked door, and shooting it open will cause it to walk into a barnacle’s tentacle. Even
my MUM would be okay with this! As they say in the IGN video, at this early
stage in the game they want to be ‘extremely fair to the player’. Nothing will jump out,
nothing will happen to scare people off. They’ll be lowered in gently.
OR VIOLENTLY SUCKED UP!!! The second time you see enemies is with these
barnacles here, and their placement ensures you either deliberately avoid them, or get
sucked off by them which should hopefully teach you not to run into them again. They’re
in plain sight and are easy to shoot. The third ‘enemy’ encounter is on the
top of this train carriage. These are hidden from view and thus harder to shoot, which
should encourage players to use the canisters. This encounter serves more as a tutorial on
how to use the gravity gloves to pick items up and how to chuck them at stuff to gain
the advantage and to save ammo. Again, you have all the time you need here- the barnacles
aren’t going to suddenly launch themselves off the ceiling to get you. There is, of course,
still risk here- if you run into the barnacle it will still give you a nasty suck. But hopefully
players won’t make this mistake more than a few times.
Finally, as you jump down into the train carriage here, you now have to contend with a zombie
who can’t reach you, but looks scary… and another, who will eventually get you.
But this is the beauty of Valve- they talk about how much THOUGHT went into this encounter.
The zombie can get you, but he’s in no rush. I don’t know how long you have before he
reaches you exactly, cos in this demo he keeps shooting at it which delays its advances.
But I reckon if you don’t do this then you’ll have a good 5 seconds before it gets to you.
Maybe more, because it is dramatically swaying around like it can’t be bothered with stuff.
And all the while he’ll be making noises to get your attention. As the Valve employee
says, he’s in a train carriage, heading in a straight line, so it won’t be a hard
target to hit. They say they’ve tested this with countless players, so they’re in the
best position to know if this is a fair challenge this early on in the game.
Even at the end of this segment, the headcrabs we see are still taking a lot more time to
pounce than they did in older games. Don’t worry, though- this whole game won’t be
set to EZ mode. Valve reassures us that the horror element is still there, and I can hear
the sick delight in his voice as he describes how players fail in VR.
‘…Something and then that first zombie comes at them and they, you know, they may
not be an experienced gamer, they may not have made sure that they had many shots in
their clip- maybe they’ve one shot left, they put that shot in, now they need to reload
for the first time while THERE’S A ZOMBIE COMING AT THEM AND THEY JUST GO TO PIECES!
One of the fun things about watching VR playtests is when people make mistakes, it’s almost
always way more entertaining than in non-VR, so you’ll watch people fumble and drop clips
and you can SEE THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE ZOMBIES APPROACHING THEM AS THEY’RE BENDING DOWN
TRYING TO GET THAT CLIP AGAIN!’ ‘…so he’s kind of looting the room here
in a really, like, methodical way…’ I like how the IGN guy doesn’t know how
to respond to that and changes the conversation. But I know exactly what you mean, Valve guy.
And I know you’ll leave plenty of chances in this game for it to screw the player over
in horrible, horrible ways!
Even staples of the game series, like these health machines, come with their own twist.
To use them you need to find a grub somewhere in the level, which is then disgustingly squashed
to extract its goo, which is then injected into your hands. This changes the experience
in several ways: first, it turns healing into a bit of a mini-game to encourage players
to search the area. Second, it’s a satisfying visceral display of bug popping and needle-stabbing
into your hands, which I know is going to go down a treat for players who are new to
VR. And THIRD, requiring them to keep their hand on this pad will restrict their movement
and ability to defend themselves, turning healing into a high-risk, high-tension experience!
Also, he let slip that this is not the only thing the combine use the antlions for.
‘YOU KNOW, THE COMBINE USE THE ANTLIONS FOR A NUMBER OF THINGS… AND YOU’RE GONNA
SEE SOME MORE OF THAT LATER IN THE PRODUCT-‘ When it comes to armour, I don’t know how
it’s going to work exactly. Alyx doesn’t have the same HEV suit as Gordon does. If
I’m honest, I wouldn’t even care if we didn’t get armour. It only serves as extra
hit points any way. Why not just increase your maximum health to beyond 100 instead?
And did you really know how much armour was helping in Half-Life 2 or was it just another
stat to maintain? Sorry, rant over. What we HAVE seen so far is the hard-hat, which serves
an obvious and more immediately rewarding purpose by saving you from a barnacle attacks.
They’ll suck your helmet off, rather than your head. What a useful idea! Maybe all armour
in this game will work in similar ways, protecting you from more specific kinds of attacks.
Maybe as the game progresses, you’ll find increasingly lavish and valuable hats to wear
as this game slowly transforms into Team Fortress 3 in the greatest twist the world has ever
seen! We see her use a car-door as a shield at one
point, and a bar found in the level as a weapon- so maybe we won’t be getting traditional
‘melee’ weapons like the crowbar in this game. It’ll be more about what you can find
around you in the environments. Hopefully there will be a crowbar somewhere.
We see a few hacking minigames to unlock things like upgrade stations, or doors. Nothing’s
ever easy, is it. This minigame involves placing an orb so the
lines go through all of the red dots at once. It’s definitely a puzzle that works better
in VR than it would on a mouse and keyboard. There’s another one in the second gameplay
video that shows the colours of all the connections, which then disappear the moment you start
playing and you’ve got to remember where they all were as you join the colours up again.
This one could be done with a standard mouse and keyboard setup.
And there’s another puzzle shown in the trailer, which might be like pipe-mania as
you have to complete a connection from one point to another.
This time around the game has an RPG-style element: there’s an in-game currency, called
‘RESIN’. They look like this, and are scattered about the levels. This rewards you
for scavenging and exploring. You put this RESIN (Nicely stacked in groups of 5) into
these machines and in return you can unlock weapon upgrades, which I assume will remain
with you for the rest of the game. These Combine Fabricators know exactly how
much resin you have, even when you’re not stood at them- you can see it go from 9 to
10 in this sequence here, as Alyx picks another one up in the level.
Valve please fix.
So let’s have a look at the upgrades for the pistol.
We can see here that there’s a ‘Reflex Sight’, which lets you aim through the sights
and it highlights things of importance, like the bits on zombies which will make them explode.
A Valve employee revealed in the IGN trailer that they’re parasitic ‘bloaters’.
‘…SMALL ALIEN GROWTHS ON THEM, CALLED BLOATERS, WHICH ACT AS A WEAK POINT FOR THEM,
IF YOU HIT THOSE THEY’LL DETONATE AND YOU’LL GET THEM WITH A SINGLE SHOT AND THEY’LL
ALSO KILL OTHER ENEMIES AROUND THEM SO…’ If this video’s anything to go by, this
upgrade won’t help your aim(!) (IGN 6:46) (IGN 8:08)
The ‘Bullet Reservoir’ looks like a handy way to store the ammo you find- it might be
what we see attached to the shotgun in this gameplay scene here. It certainly looks like
something similar’s attached to the right-hand side of the pistol in this screenshot.
Burst fire will fire 3 bullets in quick succession, which I must say I use very seldom in games,
but I like the idea of this giving you an excuse to use the lowly pistol later on in
the game when you’ve got lots of spare ammunition. And laser sight is going to be awesome cos
it means you don’t have to waste time aiming down sights.
These are of course all for the pistol. I don’t know what the shotgun’s will be
but I expect it will have ‘bullet reservoir’ cos we’ve already seen it, probably some
kind of ‘grenade attachment’ cos we’ve seen that as well.
Half-Life hasn’t had upgradable weapons before, but it works out well in the lore
because in Half-Life 2 (set after this game) you can see that Alyx’s pistol is super
modded out and kitted with all kinds of firemodes and stuff. So the upgrading in this game makes
sense.
When it comes to your HUD, it’s all displayed on your hands and weapons. You can see your
health, measured in hearts. The red thing is your flashlight, which I guess you turn
on and off by twisting the red thing with your other hand. The blue thing shows the
amount of RESIN you have, you can see your ammo displayed here.
Last are these two LEDs, which can either be off, glowing green OR glowing red. Maybe
it’s to show whether you’re free to move. Or whether enemies can see you. Or if your
teleport feature needs to recharge. Or whether your health is increasing or depleting. Or
maybe something else entirely! I have carefully looked through all the gameplay footage and
can’t find a pattern yet. I even did a google search. Nothing. So I’ll just admit defeat
here and say that I don’t know. Your weapon appears to glow red when it’s
out of ammo, and has a visible ammo count running down the grip. It does this even at
the start of the game, so it’s probably not something that needs upgrading. To add
to this, Alyx can be heard saying how many magazines you have left when you reload. I
don’t know if anybody else saw this, but the enemy’s weapon on the ground here disappears
as the player teleports towards it, so I guess that’s how you pick up extra ammo.
When it comes to items, you can store them in your sleeve. We see in several of the gameplay
videos that the player picks up a syringe and places it there, and it remains on show
there for the rest of the video for easy access. It seems like you store ammo and resin by
placing it over your back.
This kind of syringe can be found lying about, or on the bodies of enemies. And according
to this bit of gameplay, is used to heal you. ‘Does it have a skull and crossbones on
it?’ ‘I don’t see one…’
‘Probably medicine then.’ You can see it being stabbed into Alyx’s
hand here during the third gameplay video, even though Alyx already had full health at
that point. In fact, she remained at full 3 health throughout this video despite being
shot up so I think they might have been cheating a bit.
It’s nice to see that the supply crates break so easily. Looks like one brisk motion
is enough to do it- which makes them a helleoalalot easier to get into than the ones in boneworks,
which I felt would often interrupt the flow of the gameplay as I either searched for a
suitable weapon, or smacked it repeatedly against a wall.
We also see two different types of grenades being used- the first seems like the standard
type, while the second is taken from this alien creature, and squeezed to activate.
Speaking of enemies, we see numerous types. We see barnacles, as well as baby ones to
show that they don’t just ‘appear’ on ceilings out of nowhere. We see zombies. In
Half-Life 2 if you reversed their voice clips you’d be able to hear them screaming stuff
that made it obvious they still had a bit of humanity left inside. In this game we see
they’re still hanging about, doing kind of human stuff, like browsing maps or trying
to get a machine to operate. Poor things. We see manhacks, which look just as annoying
as ever. We see antlions, which now look fabulous.
We see other variants of zombies and headcrabs. We see the Striders, which are half machine,
half creature and go waltzing about looking very clumsy.
We see a scary electrical monster and his pet headcrab.
Combine come in various shapes and sizes. Some have explode-able cannisters on their
backs. In Half-Life 2 there were 3 tiers of guards- regular Civil Protection with small
arms, Overwatch soldiers with SMGs and shotguns, and Combine Elite with advanced weapons and
armour. At normal difficulty there wasn’t a lot of difference between them, but on hard
mode it really did take a lot more bullets to bring these guys down! So I assume we’ll
see different ‘ranks’ of combine in this game as well.
This one here looks better-armed and armoured than most.
If we freeze it here, we can see that there are 4 different difficulty modes, of which
NORMAL is… second hardest? Does that mean we’ll get a ‘harmless’ mode?
Hopefully this video has given you a better idea of what to expect from the game. Check
out this one to see what differences VR makes to the Half-Life experience. And this one
to watch me climbing all the way up the Citadel.