I just wish that we will see more AAA games like HL:Alyx in the future! I don't need another sandbox game where "the players" create the story with random mods. Rather I need a nice and well written story game to loose myself in but in VR!
Have you ever tried Skyrim VR? Not as slick as Half Life Alyx, but the story is great, many Quests to play and decisions to make which makes the game interesting enough to play it several times... I finished it once about a year ago and started again a few weeks ago, trying to avoid some mistakes I made and seeking better solutions.... I have a handful mods running (I can pick up some objects and have a full body in the game) which makes it more immersive...
Aint valve is just that? They are the most lack of developer working on their most player populated online game ever Only Half life is their original idea the rest is created by modder or other company
@@vibaj16 created by icefrog The modder of Moba franchise If he work for blizzard it'd be different story overall. Valve corporation of 96% Working on steam platform and hardware 4% on videogame
ive never played artifact but im pretty sure that the game is actually really good as far as card games go. it just wasnt what valve needed to release at that time, and it was poorly advertised :\
Artifact was actually really fun and well designed, however their monetization of card packs is what killed the game. If they made it easier to acquire cards, it would have blown up I think.
@@DeimosPC true! But on a serious note, it is an amazing game and I get what you are saying... Not about the balls thing, but about experiencing the amazingness that is half life alyx.
It took about a decade for other game developers to match the standard HL2 set in 2004. Namely facial animations and a full-blown physics engine. HL2 was unbelievable for the time it released - it ran on the ORIGINAL Xbox. The Nintendo DS came out the same year. Valve has always been way above it's time. When are we going to see games with procedural-generated movement and graphic fidelity like HL:A? It's been nearly 3 years - Elden Ring and God of War look great but they don't even come close
Valve isn't a game developer, they are a problem for game developers by simply making the best of what they decide to invest in. They are the living example of a company that understands that true quality leads the market.
HLA is awesome, even if I put more time and energy into something more open like "Into the Radius" (I love that game too). One possibly little-known thing I really appreciated from HLA was their accessibility features; my dad is a big Half Life fan but he had a bad injury and couldn't use one of his arms anymore. Fortunately, Valve made a one-handed mode for Alyx so you only need one motion controller to play. It was awkward to learn at first, but he was able to play and have fun in the big fancy VR game.
I still don't think I have ever seen anyone mention this. But I found out while playing that you can blind yourself in your right or left eye with the laser sight on your gun. It is a crazy small detail, but clearly isn't just the laser blocking view, there is literally a custom laser in your eye effect. I was pretty shocked.
@@nahashammon1081 The tech was (and arguably still is) too expensive for high quality experiences like HLA. Not that it isn't worth the investment, but the price tag puts up a high barrier of entry. Considering the magic of VR doesn't really come across in flat footage, it's not all that surprising to me that more people didn't take the plunge. Unfortunately VR getting off to a slow start put a chilling effect out there for game development. The small install base means larger game companies only dabble in VR here or there (usually ports or smaller projects) because it's hard to make a profit. Even indies who dedicate themselves to VR find it hard to get publishing deals that'll give them the resources they need to make great games. VR wound up stuck in a brutal catch-22, where there isn't a big enough install base for companies to make triple-A VR games, and without those triple-A games, the install base grows very slowly, or stagnates.
Mostly due to the player requiring a lot of space to play and energy (I have myself a Valve Index and a lot of games but you need a certain mindset and move things around to enter a proper session, and that rarely or never happens)
@@GreyMatterShades i guess so, but the price tag isnt an excuse anymore, with meta putting a lot of effort into vr, a headset at 300 with all the capabilities included is now possible and available to the public, thanks to facebook, vr might still be on the rise. Hype can be boosted with the new apple VR
@@Mushe94 "Alot of space" hasn't been a requirement to play most VR games for quite some time. I played the entirety of HL:Alyx completely seated. It also doesn't take much energy to play VR seated unless you're completely out of shape.
I recently bought a VR set and alyx is one of the first game I bought since I can finally play it. A few hours in( and I am really taking my time in it) the random thought came in: this is a game only valve can make. Being baffled when I first played HL2 the same exact feeling kicked in almost 15 years later. Now the hardware is getting better and better I really hope more companies are trying to pursue the quality of HL Alyx!
while I despise where we are at with Graphical Fidelity and Gameplay at the moment, the Quest 2 alone brought 20m players into VR so I really appreciate that in a way
It makes me so sad to see how much PCVR has stagnated. If developers focused on PCVR, who knows what insane games we would have today and how much mass appeal VR could have. Standalone could very well be the death of VR. Sure, it's accessible, but it gives the mainstream a terrible first impression of VR.
@@Skrenja The issue I see is that since 2020 pc component prices have been going to shit worldwide and I mean I'm fortunate enough to have a capable gaming pc at the moment but I also know that many aren't and this is definitely one result of that
@@Skrenja *Don't worry!* Now that *APPLE* has entered the market, AR/VR is finally *_"legitimized"_* and *_"validated."_* Can't you just _feel_ it? It's all so much better now!! Never mind the *FIVE THOUSAND patents* they claim on a product that is essentially derivative of what everyone else has been doing for the last decade. This will be *SO GREAT* for the industry because *APPLE* is an honorable, respectable company and not at all sleazy! Never mind that the people who have been waiting for *APPLE* to say it's _cool_ will be secluded away in *APPLE'S* little walled garden, safe from us PC low-life and all the VR games and experiences that currently exist. Everything will just be _so much_ better now, because *APPLE!* Woo-hoo! We're SAVED!
I finally just played Alyx last week. When it was first announced, I started buying a PC part every paycheck and built my first PC. After saving for an Index, there was a shortage and I couldn’t get my hands on one. Then covid happened, our job site shut down for a few weeks, I missed a few paychecks, then suddenly I couldn’t afford a headset if I could even find one. So I finally just bought one and I am so glad I did. Alyx is by far the best VR game I have ever played and there are so many great mods out there as well. It’s going to be one of those games I go back and play once a year just like I have with the other Half-Life games for the last two decades.
Valve really is the definition of "that quiet guy". While everyone in the industry was chasing graphics, Valve's just standing in the background going "Amateurs." 🥶
Valve somehow manage to be the "good guys" of the games industry by simply doing nothing and letting all the competition collapse under their own incompetence and corruption.
There is only one game I can think of that can truly compete with Alyx as being adefinitive VR game and that's Asgard's Wrath. I played it again recently and was still amazed by the visuals and scale of that game. Such a shame the sequel won't come to PC.
@@inceptionalHavent played RE4 on quest yet but heard a lot of great things. RE8 on psvr2 is stunning and equals Alyx in my opinion. The RE4 remake on psvr2 should be fantastic as well.
Good eye, I never notived the cat, however you missed one crazy detail - CRT TV screens reflects the environment. It looks like a simple cubemap, but if you take it with you and move to another room, the reflection is updated to match the room you are in! This is the detail that blew my mind the most - when I saw the spoon in the thumbnail I thought it will be included in this video, because the spoon looked as if it was also reflecting enviroment :)
It is indeed just using cubemaps that switch depending on which area you're in, which is what everything that has reflections uses in hla (things like metal, floorboards, mud, a bunch of props etc). It's quite similar to half-life 2, but there is a key difference, as the cubemaps are parralax corrected, meaning they have an actual volume, so you can move around and it will morph the cubemap to make it seem like the reflections are actually moving, and not just having a static 360 image projected onto the object like it did in half-life 2. It's not new tech at all but it's very well executed in hla, and it a big reason for why it can look so good while having great performance, as cubemaps take basically no effort for your computer to render.
The first time I tried to use the syringe I went straight into my thigh (which is non-existent in the game) but was amazed that it actually worked basically exactly where my real life thigh was! Needless (haha) to say this is exactly how I've been using it ever since. There's just something so satisfying about stabbing your own thigh full force and hearing the syringe 'tshh' sound right as you make contact - it's a level of immersion that you rarely get in VR for anything other than your hands. Anyway HL:A is great, but I'm hoping the next game will focus a little less on horror cause HL:A can be really scary at times which kinda makes me not want to replay the game again.
Thank you for continuing to make video analyses like this one. I realize they take an incredibly long time to make but you still put out such quality content! My biggest technical disappointment with the game was the lack of precomputed realtime global illumination for the flashlight scenes, AKA approximated bounced lighting; it is a feature available in lightmappers like Enlighten. Other than that it is a technical marvel.
i cant get over how much i LOVE this games physics engine, not gonna lie i spent the first half of the game roleplaying with a box full of rations acting like i was bringing them to eli and russel
The details are just insane. In Alyx's hideout at the start, there's a drawing of the Combine mini reactor, and a note says "Stand alone? BME?" which is a reference to Black Mesa East, Eli's hideout in Half-Life 2. By the end of Alyx you realise that the Combine's tech is being charged with energy harvested from captured Vortigaunts, and in Half-Life 2 you see Vortigaunts voluntarily charging the reactors at BME. It's an origin story for a random piece of background trivia you only see for a second during an elevator ride. Totally nuts.
@@j3s3oGh4nBoneworks campaign sucks ass! The game was an amazing VR tech demo, but is a shit game. Level design and environment was a massive downgrade from Duck Season VR, as well as enemy designs and encounters. And so fucking janky as fuck! The physics & interactions were top notch though, that's really about the good things about the game.
I like how you gave a spoiler warning about Jeff before showing him. Meanwhile sites like GameSpot completely spoiled him in their review of the game. God that pissed me off.
Regarding Dog, there's also a small photo print you can grab of a young Dog, in the same room as the clipboard with the Dog drawings. It's lying on top of the wall rack at 3:15, to the left of the exit door.
This reminds me I've yet to play with commentary on. Have you made a video about Skyrim VR before? It's fascinating how mods have changed a mediocre VR game into a must play infinite sandbox experience.
This game is immense, I've played it through to the end with my Quest 2 and RTX 3060 but could only play it on medium to low settings to get it to run smoothly. Recently upgraded to RTX 4070 and a Pico 4 with a wifi6 dedicated router, game runs on ultra now and smooth as you like. Taking my time to explore every nook n cranny in this game and it is just incredible, even more so than the first time.
i remember one time when i was playing half life alyx i was in a shootout against some combine soldiers, and i was hiding behind a car, and as soon as they started shooting the car windows and sending broken glass everywhere, it immediately felt real. i literally paniced and bent down to protect myself. my brain just interpreted this as a real shootout with real world laws of physics applied to it. in my mind the cars were no longer just static parts of level geometry, they were destructable objects that wouldnt provide me with 100% protection like if this was in real life. i felt the same thing in the strider boss fight when it started shooting at me, and some of its bullets went through the walls and they started crumbling from it the fact that they can trick players into thinking the game feels real without any actual physics models being used on level geometry shows how good they are at making games
Great video. Heard from another video the part where you hold your hand to your face to stop coughing near Jeff, was from playtesters trying that. So they added it as a mechanic.
I fully agree with you. No other PCVR game comes near HLA in every way. I believe they only made it to promote their new headset. (It came free with it) As they have no financial motivation to create games as they make more than enough money from other games using the steam platform.
9:56 Maybe it's just coincident, but as Russian being I can recognize the second strider noize as a word "оружие" (weapon). This game is fresh air, and I hope we will finally see the Half-Life 3!
Thanks for the awesome video! This me start to replay HL:A! When you got to the first part after the spoiler warning I paused the video and booted it up because I had forgotten so much. I noticed there is a clipboard in the room with the bug you can feed. It shows Alyxs early drawings of her companion DOG from HL:2. I wonder if the radio from the beginning was trying to say anything?
They should really release it on psvr2. The psvr install base was the largest vr headset install base by far, and the ps5 hardware should be capable of a port even if it requires some effort tailoring around that specific hardware. This would open up Half Life Alyx to a large new install base who wouldn't be able to experience it otherwise without buying a separate PC gaming rig and a comparable PC VR headset like the Index which tend to be even more expensive than psvr2. Valve's old ports of orange box and portal 2 for xbox and playstation when I was a kid are what got me into their games and PC gaming as a whole.
Thanks for the spoiler warning. Still haven't had the chance to play HLA. Hoping it comes to PSVR 2 someday. Excellent job with the video. It really shows why even after all this time, HLA is still considered a masterpiece of VR design. It looks like a staggering number of elements were incredibly well thought out. The attention to detail is remarkable.
@@j3s3oGh4n Oh I forgot L4D 1 and 2, and CS:GO. Really most of Valve's major games have been on console. You're right it was 2 generations ago, but how many games has Valve released in the past 2 console gens? Consoles have only become more similar to PC's in terms of architecture and ease of porting games since then. There's no reason why they couldn't port HLA to PSVR 2, or hire another company to port it.
My favorite game. Best graphics (even in comparison of non VR), best pacing, best immersion, best gameplay-polish. Amazing Liquid Shader!!! Also everything you do is good. No Filler-Missions, no collect 100 Feathers. Even the consumables are really fun to collect, because the reward has really impact. Ammo is a huge part of the gameplay and they got it so right. Movement is another huge step that other games should start copying. And the reload functionality is so rewarding. Great mix of complexity and you feel really good when you have to reload in fights.
"Movement is another huge step that other games should start copying" I hope, you're about teleport movement or something? Or you really mean games should copy these gigantic amounts of invisible walls, slow movement with no sprint button, no body colliders, so you just go trought some objects while strafing, constant difficulties with picking items up from containers, because the player rises when he approaches them, player autoejection to the top of the ladder even if you moving manually, zero movement physics and zero freedom of where you can move?
I've never considered it before, but I'm curious about where other people used the health injector items. I always instinctively targeted them to my legs, like I was using an EpiPen. Did other people inject their hands?
Hands, head, chest, legs, pretty much anywhere just for fun or, while in a panic, whatever was closer when I grabbed the thing and hopefully didn't fumble it. Even playing the game with a cheap "Windows Mixed Reality" headset it's the most immersive game I've ever played, it's a bit painful that I can't use it now that I switched to Linux, really need to pick up a Index or whatever Valve launches next
Absolutely, even after a couple years it feels like something I expirianced, not just a game I played, still on occasion catch myself trying to use gravity gloves I don't have XD
This is one of the most awaited games in the world, id expect it to set the standard just like Halo CE did. They had many years, many viewers here were children or werent even born, id expect a game that was planned for this long to take first place in VR with no questions asked.
i made a comment on another HLA video where i complained that the game didn't look like Unreal Engine 5 games but from what i see now, Half-Life: Alyx was meant to be a game to showcase what VR gaming could be capable of and not necessarily for eye candy. aside from the buckets being a little too low poly than what i expected and the humans looking like they're made of clay, the game looks alright. at least, it looks like 2004 city 17 after 15 years or so. but it's more about the VR immersion than anything else. Valve isn't metal like id Software, they're punk in that they want to keep moving forward and only release games that are "game-breaking" or "next-generation". no wonder why they took such a long break it seems that Half-Life 3 will either be a mouse and keyboard game that looks absolutely beautiful (nah, that sounds like something that could only come out of socialism at this point) or it will be a VR game that is even more impressive than HLA. maybe it'll have graphics that impress me 🤭 we simply just don't live in a reality or timeline where Half-Life games are just like every other game franchise that releases another sequel in 2-4 years or so, or every year like CoD. despite Half-Life not being all that different from the regular shooter game, it does have an environment that would make perfect sense for such a genre and is different from all the obvious military and war shooters like battlefield and call of duty. the obvious downside is that if we want a mouse and keyboard remaster of HL2 and even a mouse and keyboard version of HL3, we'll probably have to make it ourselves using Epistle 3. oh look, i mention socialism again. if only there were more countries on Earth that embraced the good effects of socialist ideals to counter the bad effects of capitalism
Valve need to fully release source 2 , I know they did with S&box but that is just a singular example. We need more crazy stuff like e.y.e divine cybermancy 2
The biggest downside of half life alyx is its aimed for noob VR players Making it easy doesnt make it fun, making the antlions the stupidest enemy and headcrabs absolutely weak They limited movement and made the game much more easier for noob vr players. Destroying all the potential for a PERFECT vr game
A lot of the custom campaigns like C17yscape are balanced in a much more challenging way than the base games campaign/story. I think the makers of custom maps feel the same, there's less ammo and more enemies a lot of the time
@@inceptional why would you want an antlion that is barely a threat and headcrabs that WARNS YOU before jumping on you?, When i talked about it being for vr noobs i didnt mean making enemies health and damage increase. Combine soldiers dont even run from grenades, wasting the opportunity for a gameplay mechanic where you have to time your grenade throw for example. The movement is so limited in half life alyx its annoying. Slow movement, slow falling, no jumping, no sprinting, its no longer a half life game anymore
@@inceptional do it like half life 2, always place headcrabs infront of you, at least for the first encounters This is how you dont make headcrabs easy without making it look unfair Also allow players to plan and counter attack. Simple
It's the best VR game for sure. Playstation grabbed some good ones too though with the psvr. I friggin loved Wipeout Omega Collection and Resident Evil 7. I tried a mod for the pc version of re7 but there really isn't any antialiasing which still looked better than the psvr version, but didn't make me feel like revisiting it. I wish they'd release wipeout omega collection on pc, I might have put more hours into that than any other vr game.
I found Half Life Alyx severely lacked in movable objects honestly. They could have made ragdolls for the garbage bags for example. There's heaps of stuff i've found laying around that in Half Life 2 would be dynamic props, but in HL:A were baked in to the map. Hardly anything in HL:A was revolutionary in any stretch, as it still relies on very dated techniques for pretty much everything, and played it extremely safe with the control design and gameplay. It only seems advanced because most people develop VR games with low graphical fidelity, when this is mostly unnecessary, as all you need to do is bi a bit stricter on resource bloat, and to make sure no shaders are extra intensive in stereo projection. As someone who does graphical design in Unity, Source2 was extremely unimpressive, and it's performance has a ton of issues. The physics is clean because it's using the refined Havok physics engine, but this also doesn't thread well, so it murders performance if there are heaps of stacked dynamic props, which i've tested and experienced heavily. So claims that it runs well on "lower spec hardware" when i have a 6700xt and 2600x, while it's borderline unplayable, are a bit misplaced. In high action scenes, the gam can lag out so much that it becomes impossible to throw props because they just drop like they had zero momentum. Hand poses was a missed opportunity, because they could have used raycast finger curling to wrap aboud objects wherever you grab it.
PCVR is incredible in *MANY* ways! For now, the Valve Index is STILL the best choice (in my opinion.) You can also connect a Quest to a PC with the right cable but, fecebook...
There are a lot more cheaper options than Index instead of facebook spy junk (HP Reverb G2, Pico Neo 3 Link, DPVR E4). Quest 2 is not a good choice for PCVR (no display port, you have to buy extra straps to get comfortalble and this fb account with their stupid cringy metaverse push)
I had an Index but sold it because the wire was too annoying. Using Quest Pro and Virtual Desktop until a better wireless option is available. Wireless is the way to go.
@@JamesBond-qv2ht Well, that depends on what it is that you like to do. For me, I'm seated most of the time racing, flying, wandering around in VRChat or what-not so *_for me_* the wire is just a minor nuisance and a small price to pay for what I get from VR . I would love to see wireless PCVR become more of a thing though!!
with the legible newspapers i think they missed out on a lot of worldbuilding opportunity. hl alyx was great (tho i preferred the vibe and style of hl2), but theres a lot of storytelling room they could play with in vr that i hope they do
Im a bit lost 'with this chair it feels heavier if you hold it at the end' have I missed something with the interface? How are you feeling weight in VR?
The Valve Index controllers have built in force feedback and vibration. Also just the fact that the chair moves slower than your real hand really makes you feel the weight.
It's not that you feel the weight, but you can precive it from how the object moves, even when using a cheap WMR headset it adds so much to the expiriance
Only Valve can pull out such quality in games, Quality control of this corporation is something else, unmatched & unrivaled Rockstar games are close second.
