People were worried that Half-Life Alyx was going to use the teleport movement-style,
instead of letting them get immersed in the worlds by walking about normally. But the
game now supports both options. In fact, there’s even more than that, which I’ll be showing
in this video. In a recently launched gameplay video over
on IGN’s channel, they revealed Half-Life Alyx’s options menu, giving us a good look
at some of the different ways we’ll be able to play this game.
It turns out there are ‘4’ different movement styles, but it’s more like 2 different types,
each with 2 variants you can choose from. Teleport is shown in the first gameplay video,
where you hold down a button and this thing appears. When you let go, you’ll teleport
to wherever your yellow feet things are. This is done ALMOST instantly- for a brief moment
there’s a black screen almost like you’re ‘blinking’, which might give the game
time to load the new area in or maybe is used to reduce sickness or something.
‘Shift’ is kind of similar to teleport, only it’s slower because instead of teleporting,
you quickly FLY THROUGH THE AIR to your destination, which might make it less jarring than teleport,
but also a bit more sickening. And the last movement type is ‘continuous’,
which is the most like existing games where you move by holding the stick and you’ll
move relative to your direction. Sort of like boneworks. I suspect this is the one that
everybody will WANT to play the game in, but is the one that Valve tried to avoid for a
while because it’ll probably lead to the most nausea. To play in this mode you’ll
either have to have built up some tolerance to VR-induced sickness, or you’ll have to
play the game in shorter sessions. At least the game will last longer!
This ‘continuous’ style is also split up into 2 different modes. You’ll be able
to choose to move in the direction your head’s facing, or in the direction your hands are
facing. Thus, in total, making ‘4’ different movement styles. This really is the early
days of VR, it’s like going back to the 90’s when they didn’t know how to control
first person shooter games and they did stuff like using mouse to strafe, or arrow keys
to turn your view! I’m sure people will quickly settle on a favourite way to play
VR. Now I’ve been wondering for a while how
falling is going to be implemented. At one point the player teleports down into a train
carriage, skipping the falling completely. The way they’ve approached developing this
game makes me think that Valve does NOT want VR to make people sick, so I think it’s
going to be made pretty difficult to ‘accidentally’ fall off ledges. Like, when using dash or
teleport, maybe it will only let you move if you choose a valid spot to teleport to.
They’ve already said that your body is modelled to prevent you from doing impossible things,
like squeezing between wooden posts and other small gaps that you physically wouldn’t
be able to fit through. So maybe it’ll also be used to figure out if a drop is too large,
and will stop you from initiating the movement that will lead you there.
While using the dash option, one of the videos shows Alyx softly floating down to ground
level after dropping off an object. (V3, 1:31) Now it could have been that the player crouched
down at this very moment to get into cover, or maybe it’s the game going easy on the
player by dropping them down gently to make it less of a jolt.
I’ve already heard that the game will let you quite freely explore the environments,
jumping on tables and stuff like that, so it’s not like you’ll be stuck in a small
box, unable to explore your surroundings. But when it comes to the ‘continuous’
movement option… who knows how far this freedom will extend to. People who choose
this option will already accept the nausea that can come with it, so maybe Valve will
be all like ‘FINE’ and will let players in this mode freely run off ledges if they
want to. The second gameplay video shows some appealing-looking drops that I can’t wait
to launch myself off. It even starts with a temptingly placed plank
that players might try and step on to get closer to reaching this body, and the grenade
and health pack he’s got shoved down his trousers. I’d be extremely disappointed
if this plank DIDN’T give way under Alyx’s enormous weight, sending her plummeting to
her death. You know what I’ll be doing the moment I reach this point of the game!
And the last interesting option to cover is the LADDERS. On the option menu it looks like
a toggle between hand climbing and teleporting up them. In an early video it showed a player
moving up to one and teleporting instantly to the top. People didn’t like this, so
you can be absolutely sure it was deliberate to feature the hand-climbing method in these
videos, which we see not once, but twice! You can see here that the alternative to the
teleporting is to grab the rungs with your hands to pull yourself up. You can even hold
on with one hand while shooting with the other! (3, 1:07) (IGN 2:10). Disabling this will
likely switch it back to the teleport option again- which will be the least nauseating
option, as well as probably the fastest. I would say this would be better for speedrunners,
but they’ll use some crazy way of flinging themselves up into the air and over the tops
of the levels in some ridiculous, sickening way.
Has anyone noticed how smooth these gameplay videos look? Now you might be different, but
it turns out my head shakes and wobbles about like CRAZY because every bit of VR gameplay
I record is a total mess. I can’t imagine for a moment that the in-game view will be
smoothed- it’ll try to track your head movements as accurately as possible to minimise nausea.
So I reckon there’s been some view stabilisation at work somewhere between this gameplay being
recorded, and it being uploaded to Youtube. Watch this space.