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Half-Life: Alyx

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Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#221

Post by kiddico »

haolez wrote: post #114
kiddico wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different than a gender swap in a non-vr game? I'll have to join vr chat as a girl tonight and see how things go. That said I normally play star citizen w/ a female avatar, and other than thinking "the person I'm talking to might think I'm a girl" my mindset doesn't change much...

Maybe looking down and seeing big breasts (assuming that's the case with Alyx) triggers something uncomfortable in a male's brain. Maybe we can feel like what it is to be trans and feel that your body "isn't right" for you.

I've sort of experienced that in star citizen... sort of.

You can look down and see them, but they're not egregiously large.

Though one of the funniest bugs (feature?) will only happen if you play with a female avatar: if you lay down in a bed, and then open up your mobiglass (in-game arm-tablet-thing) the UI lands about halfway through your breasts. It's like your character places their arm on their stomach, and the UI is projected forwards towards their face.

If I remember to I can take a screen cap of when it happened to me the other day on stream.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#222

Post by SimonPStevens »

"Play on any SteamVR system. If you have VR hardware that works with a computer, then it works with SteamVR."

Bravo Valve. This is why anyone interested in this should get a Vive and stay well clear of Oculus/Facebook's headsets. They are busy trying to capture the VR market by setting up exclusivity arrangements with studios to lock games to their platform to cut others out which just divides up the already small market.

Value have built a cross platform framework and SDK and are releasing their games for all headsets.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#223

Post by outworlder »

mikl wrote: post #159

Hope they’ll make a non-VR version at some point. Much as I enjoyed previous Half-Life games, I don’t want to buy a VR-rig. They’re obviously hoping that a Half-Life game will be enough to get gamers to adopt VR, but I don’t see a lot of people willing to remodel their living room to make space for a VR setup, at least over here in Europe, where people have fairly small homes in comparison to the U.S.

How small are we talking about?

My PC sits in a very small room, and yet I can use VR. It does not sit in the living room.

Size of the room is less of a deal than obstacles. You may have to rearrange some furniture out of the way while you play. I have to move my desk chair out of the way if I'm not playing Elite.

Usually you don't move all that much – but stuff has to be out of your arm's way. Most games only require you to be stationary. It's just more immersive if you can move a bit.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#224

Post by puranjay »

whatshisface wrote: post #63
mmanfrin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate how popular Half-Life was. The #1 game played on steam right now is a former HL mod, Counter Strike. I don't think the market for HL is small at all. VR, though, is a different story. That absolutely limits the market. That being said, I'd wager that a majority of people who play VR games on PC will likely buy this game, as it's probably the first true AAA title developed specifically for VR…

I think we're all waiting with bated breath to see if Valve can push VR into the mainstream with this or anything else they do. I'm not going to buy a kit just to play glorified mobile games, but if this is really the future of entertainment then I can see myself buying a headset.

I get motion sickness easily. So that counts me out of the VR experience. And I reckon that's going to be true for a lot of other people as well.

The price and inherent limitations (such as motion sickness) of VR are going to ensure that it doesn't hit mainstream, at least for the time being

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#225

Post by shadowgovt »

PAGAN_WIZARD wrote: post #187
coldpie wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll see what we can do about that ;)

If I know I can play day 1, I'll gladly shell out the $1k for the full index package. I just spent about that on new gpu + monitor so I was gonna wait to save up, but tux == bucks.

> tux == bucks

I don't have solid numbers, but a quick Googling suggests the rate of desktop deployments of Linux is under 2%, and VR-ready deployments is going to be a thin slice of any desktop OS deployment (I have no reason to believe Linux users are more likely to have a VR rig attached to their machine than average, and I'd put money on it being actually less likely unless they have a machine configured to dual-boot).

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#226

Post by cwkoss »

mikl wrote: post #159

Hope they’ll make a non-VR version at some point. Much as I enjoyed previous Half-Life games, I don’t want to buy a VR-rig. They’re obviously hoping that a Half-Life game will be enough to get gamers to adopt VR, but I don’t see a lot of people willing to remodel their living room to make space for a VR setup, at least over here in Europe, where people have fairly small homes in comparison to the U.S.

VRcades will probably become a prevalent kind of retail establishment in the next decade. Two people can game together from geographically separate VRcades.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#227

Post by Shivetya »

kiddico wrote: post #103
aresant wrote: post #54

I think a fascinating part of Alyx is Valve choosing a female protagonist. 85%+ of VR users are male, compared to say 70/30 male/female balance of say Fornite. (1/2) Any way you carve it the audience for Alyx is going to weight heavily male. And research suggests that gender-swapping in VR is a profound psychological experience: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8260949 (1) https://www.rakutenintelligence.com/blog…

How is this different than a gender swap in a non-vr game? I'll have to join vr chat as a girl tonight and see how things go. That said I normally play star citizen w/ a female avatar, and other than thinking "the person I'm talking to might think I'm a girl" my mindset doesn't change much...

I think the disappointing part is there is so little choice in the avatar you can play in these games. I would like something with how bioware approached SWTOR, the dialog changes, voice actor swap included, to match the gender of the character and from there it is just as easy to adapt skin colors and features. Even better, her name is about as neutral as you can ask for!

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#229

Post by shadowgovt »

ofrzeta wrote: post #196
delive wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt it, the website says it was built 'from the ground up' for a VR experience.

I don't doubt this but I think it should be quite easy to make a regular 3D FPS from an original VR game.

Emphatically not. The interaction space of VR is entirely different from the interaction space of a standard mouse-and-keyboard FPS. For starters, players in a VR game have two hands. A lot of games in VR could have been FPSs instead, but only because they're generally vastly under-utilizing the dimension space that two VR input controllers (plus the input of look direction) give a designer.

If you used the dimensionality of the VR space and you port it to the FPS space, you'll leave entire game mechanics on the floor.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#230

Post by skizm »

jonas21 wrote: post #156
s9w wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one tried it because it's expensive AF. And you need space. And there are so many of them. And the storefronts don't match. And there are no games. And you sweat. And they're heavy. And you need a monster PC. And it doesn't work. And and and. It's a gimmick. Alyx is a $2000 game for a normal gamer, counting an index and a sizeable PC upgrade.

Those are all engineering and logistical challenges, and there's no reason to believe that they won't be overcome eventually. A gimmick is something that, even in its best form, is not compelling in the long run. VR sounds like the opposite - it's not compelling to that many people yet because it has known issues, but fix those issues, and it would be.

The real challenge is no haptic feedback, which I don't think there is any real way to overcome. The better the visuals get the more your brain rebels at not being able to touch anything or feel motion when moving.
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