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Half-Life: Alyx

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Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#291

Post by reificator »

himinlomax wrote: post #179
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…

> I think a fascinating part of Alyx is Valve choosing a female protagonist. There has been other games with a female protagonist, but the backlash was so bad against them that they were completely forgotten. I know it's obscure, but you can look it up, there's those two games called "Portal" and "Portal 2", and the two main characters are female. You've probably never heard of them because of all the misogyny. ... o…

To be honest I'm surprised that there wasn't any backlash. I find the weight and attractiveness jokes that GLaDOS throws at the player absolutely hilarious. But that can be a touchy subject, especially with Chell as the protagonist instead of, say, Gordon Freeman.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#292

Post by Jach »

outworlder wrote: post #150

I just want to know one thing: what happened to Half-Life 2 Episode III ? As it is, I'll wait for people to play this and tell me if it ends in a cliffhanger too.

Since it says it takes place between HL1 and HL2, what cliffhanger could there be?

You can subscribe to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrMEAJ54k0d2Gvjof4GF6Vg/vid... if you want a daily update on HL3 news. But the other comment's link to the writer's conclusion is worthwhile for closure since we'll probably never get the game version.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#293

Post by Impossible »

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…

It's an interesting choice by Valve. They're basically making a bunch of white men play as a black woman. In practice I agree with the other response that it's not a big deal. Most VR experiences either race or gender swap me (I'm a black male) or turn me into an abstract form or a robot. It can be disorienting at first but you get used to it.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#294

Post by ofrzeta »

shadowgovt wrote: post #229
ofrzeta wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dimension…

That makes sense. You could use the scenery from the game (although you would probably provide more for more open world gameplay than in the VR game) and also create FPS specific mechanis such as open world puzzles etc.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#295

Post by akjetma »

d--b wrote: post #273

Wooooo, parallax vertical scroll.

it's funny, VR doesn't give me motion sickness but browser parallax stuff does. i don't think i've ever seen a good implementation of this and i've seen tons of attempts. highjacking scroll just never feels good.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#296

Post by asymptotically2 »

cwkoss wrote: post #216
foolfoolz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

counter strike is a completely different game than half life. it's been sold as a separate game for decades. just because they share a former history doesnt mean anyone who is interested in counter strike is interested in this new half life game. i'd say its almost completely opposite userbases. one more hard core competitive multiplayer fps, the other casual single player VR. VR is an incredibly small market and i t…

Counterstrike and TF both started as half life mods. This is going to expand the market vastly because it will make it much cheaper to develop quality VR games. In a couple of years, I predict the average purchase of this game will be to play the mods rather than the core game.

Team Fortress started as a Quake mod.

Valve bought the developers and got them to create Team Fortress Classic the goldsrc engine (which started out as the Quake engine).

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#297

Post by the_af »

arrrg wrote: post #270
the_af wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea, but my guess would be the previous games are a requirement, or at least HL2. The Half-Life series is "story heavy" single player. These are characters we know.

Story heavy? You need about one sentence to set up the world. Here, the website even does it for us: „Set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, Alyx Vance and her father Eli mount an early resistance to the Combine’s brutal occupation of Earth.“ I would tack on “aliens” to describe the Combine and then I’m done. Half Life is not exactly complex or subtle in its storytelling. Heck, the main character in the…

> Half Life is not exactly complex or subtle in its storytelling

Agreed, but I wasn't arguing it was. It's neither complex nor subtle. It is "story heavy" or rather story-driven, or rather "cinematic". This is a game where the story propels the gameplay. Not saying it's particularly good fiction, just that the fiction matters in the game. Notice how much of what I'm saying applies to Star Wars too, where -- also -- skipping a movie can be done but is not recommended ;)

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#298

Post by kbenson »

eclipxe wrote: post #284
kbenson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Oculus Quest I bought a few months ago is amazing. It's definitely not going to play this, even if it could support it (it can't on the hardware it comes with), but that's not to say in a year or two maybe there will be a relatively cheap system that can. At $400-$500 the Quest is more along the lines of a new high-end dedicated console, but it also offers an experience at that price point which I don't think can…

The Quest can play this - Oculus Link, ALVR, Virtual Desktop, etc.

No, the Quest plus a PC capable of playing the game can play this. Given that regular Quest use requires no external computer, that's an entirely different proposition.

What I meant is that I doubt the game will ever make it to the Quest store, and even if it did the current quest hardware has no chance of performing adequately.

But a couple years from now? An all-in-one headset might be able to. It still probably wouldn't be an Oculus one though, as I doubt Valve will put it on a competing store.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#299

Post by Lambdanaut »

kbenson wrote: post #79
ben7799 wrote: post #38

This has got to be the most narrowly targeted game ever. I played through all of HL/HL2/Ep1/Ep2 IIRC, but I can barely even remember the story clearly it was so long ago. And it's such a blur maybe I never finished Ep2. I was 21 when HL1 came out but I didn't get to play it till I was like 24 maybe when I had gotten out of school and got a nice computer & some money. HL2 came out when I was 27.. still playing games b…

The Oculus Quest I bought a few months ago is amazing. It's definitely not going to play this, even if it could support it (it can't on the hardware it comes with), but that's not to say in a year or two maybe there will be a relatively cheap system that can. At $400-$500 the Quest is more along the lines of a new high-end dedicated console, but it also offers an experience at that price point which I don't think can…

You can connect your Quest to a compatible PC and play this.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#300

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #222

"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 ma…

Although I suspect they have carefully made it so that the game has quite a few mechanics that would benefit greatly from the finger-tracking mechanics available only on the.... Valve Index. To be clear, your point is absolutely correct, but I'd be shellshocked if the experience isn't geared heavily to take the most advantage out of their own headset.
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