After 13 years on ice (for some maybe rather surprising reasons), the legendary Half-Life series has returned with Half-Life: Alyx. It’s been quite some time since we’ve revisited this world, but for some fans, it’s a bittersweet affair. The game is a VR-title, only being playable with a virtual reality headset. Since VR is still relatively new, and caters to a certain audience, some fans were less than thrilled about that. With this game currently being PC only as well, it’s also inevitable that some of those fans will create mods to make the game playable sans a headset. One of the designers for Alyx looks forward to that, though maybe for reasons you don’t expect.
In talking with VGC, Designer Robin Walker was asked about the eventual non-VR mods. He coyly said he’s actually looking forward to it. He said once fans do get that, they’ll be in for something of a rude awakening, seeing just how built to the game’s functioning is to VR. He also hopes it’ll help people appreciate the lengths they’ve gone through to incorporate this new tech.
“They will understand why we made this choice. We think we’ve gotten a huge amount from that choice. We would never have made a choice that big if we didn’t think we were getting a huge amount of value out of it.
“As a result, what I’m confident will happen is that when people get that butchered version, and they’ll have lost all the things that we’ll have got from moving to VR, they will then understand very clearly why we made that choice.
“There’s a part of me that’s eager for people to be able to have that experience and realise, ‘oh, now I get it. Now I see everything we lost in that transition back to non-VR and I understand why they did it.’”
Half-Life: Alyx is available now on PC.