Players can physically move around in room scale to move Alyx in-game. While the game is primarily a first-person shooter, it adds elements of the survival horror genre, as health and ammo are more scarce, and it includes frightening encounters.

Every weapon can be used one-handed, as Valve wanted players to have a hand free to interact with the world at all times. The game includes traditional Half-Life elements such as exploration, puzzles, combat, and story. Like the gravity gun from Half-Life 2, the gravity gloves allow players to manipulate gravity. Players use VR to get supplies, use interfaces, throw objects, and engage in combat. Designer David Speyrer said Alyx was not an episodic game or side story, but 'the next part of the Half-Life story', around the same length as Half-Life 2. Players control Freeman's ally Alyx Vance as she and her father Eli Vance fight the Combine, an alien empire that has conquered Earth. Screenshot showing the VR-perspective hands and user interface It received acclaim for its graphics, voice acting, narrative and atmosphere, and has been cited as VR's first killer app. Valve initially planned to launch Alyx alongside its Index VR headset in 2019, but delayed it following internal feedback about the story Valve writers Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton returned to rewrite it from scratch.Īlyx was released for Windows in March 2020 and Linux in May 2020, with support for most PC-compatible VR headsets. VR affected almost every aspect of the design, including combat, movement, level design and pacing. Recognizing the demand for a large-scale VR game, they experimented with prototypes using their various intellectual properties, such as Portal, and found that Half-Life best suited VR.Īlyx entered full production using Valve's new Source 2 engine in 2016, with the largest team in Valve's history, including members of Campo Santo, a studio Valve acquired in 2018. In the mid-2010s, Valve began experimenting with VR, and released a collection of VR minigames, The Lab, in 2016.

Valve made several attempts to develop further Half-Life projects, but could not settle on a unifying idea, and Valve's flat management structure made it difficult for projects to gather momentum. The previous Half-Life game, Episode Two, was released in 2007 and ended on a cliffhanger. Like previous Half-Life games, it incorporates elements of combat, puzzles, exploration and survival horror.

Players use VR to interact with the environment and fight enemies, using 'gravity gloves' to manipulate objects, similarly to the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. Set between the events of Half-Life (1998) and Half-Life 2 (2004), players control Alyx Vance on a mission to seize a superweapon belonging to the alien Combine. Half-Life: Alyx is a 2020 virtual reality (VR) first-person shooter developed and published by Valve.

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