The Aperture Science labs VR demo for HTC Vive amazed everyone when it was revealed at GDC 2015 and of course, comments made by Valve’s collaborative partner made us think that the possibility of Half Life in a virtual setting was happening. Though said comments were eventually clarified and retracted, Kotaku did speak to programmer Jeep Barnett about the idea behind the demo.
“We’ve said, ‘Let’s take some existing art and see how it fits’. So yeah, we’ll grab some headcrabs, we’ll grab the machine guns from Half-Life, the rocket launcher — all those different fun things—and see how they play in VR. But right now, it’s a tool for exploring the different kind of game designs we want to do.”
Barnett said that as of now, there’s no fixed idea for a Half Life game in VR. That doesn’t mean Valve isn’t interested though. “We’re not saying, ‘no’ but we don’t know what the right thing is [yet].
“Our most precious resource is time, and we don’t have enough time for people to do everything. Would we like to make all of our franchises in VR? Absolutely. But we don’t have enough time or people. So we have to figure out what’s the best fit, what plays to the strengths of VR.
“Is Half-Life a good fit? Is Left 4 Dead a good fit? Is a new franchise a good fit? I don’t know yet. We’re really trying to cover the broad spectrum of what we could do, and then we’ll start focusing on spearheading that.”
Till then, we’ll have to continue speculating and hope that one day, Half Life 3 eventually releases. Stay tuned for more information.
