Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Half-Life: Alyx

half-life.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 444 posts

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#321

Post by martin1b »

We've been waiting for decades for the release of this. I'm a HUGE fan of HL but not a fan of prequels. Hopefully this will showcase VR as a viable medium.

IMHO, I think Portal VR would have given a more immersive experience, along with less locomotion issues. However, I'm sure Valve has done their research.

My concern is, if this isn't met with favor, will Valve bow out of game development permanently? It just feels as if they are losing interest in new game development and would rather buy other studios and keep Steam chugging along. More money there..

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#322

Post by SimonPStevens »

Impossible wrote: post #303
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…

Vive is 2015 :). Buy an Index and get the game for free.

Yes. Sorry. Absolutely correct :-) For some reason I had in my head the new one was called a Vive Index, but it's not, it's a Valve Index.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#323

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

mlindner wrote: post #200
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…

Female protagonists in game is the new fad. It has nothing to do with the gender ratio of the players playing the game.

Lara Croft would like a word.

Or Samus, if you want to go back even further.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#324

Post by ofrzeta »

skizm wrote: post #230
jonas21 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I have a hard time imagining doing all this stuff in the game without haptic feedback, like loading the gun etc.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#325

Post by SimonPStevens »

2bitencryption wrote: post #316
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…

I see that Windows MR is supported, but I wonder how well my Dell Visor (which is awesome btw) is going to work with this game -- it doesn't support individual finger tracking, just general hand-location. Will that ruin a lot of the immersiveness?

One of the links off the page talks about how it adapts based on your systems capabilities. It supports both the finger tracking controllers as well as the older trigger controllers.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#326

Post by erk__ »

taurath wrote: post #117
erk__ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve have also more recently done it in Dota 2, which itself like tf and cs was a mod, though in warcraft 3 instead of half-life/quake

Dota 2 is its own engine, and has nothing to do with dota 1 which was a warcraft 3 map. How they even got the IP in the first place is... a pretty bad look for Valve.

What are you talking about? Firstly Dota 2 started in source 1 and was the first game ported to source 2. It has nothing to do with dota 1? It is made by multiple of the original developers of the warcraft 3 mod, your whole comment does not make a whole lot of sense.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#327

Post by mikl »

cwkoss wrote: post #226
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.

I doubt it. VRcades will have to compete with people being able to play regular video games from their homes. Not only will playing from home be a lot cheaper, it’s also a lot more convenient.

Unless VR becomes a lot more compelling, I don’t see a significant chunk of gamers being willing to go down to the local VRcade to do their gaming on a regular basis.

And imagine the cost. A VRcade would have to have a lot of space per player, they’d have to be staffed, cleaned, maintained. A good game these days takes at least 40 hours to play through. I’d wager that 40 hours of VRcade time is going to be a lot more than people are willing to pay for a game these days.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#328

Post by akhilcacharya »

2bitencryption wrote: post #316
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…

I see that Windows MR is supported, but I wonder how well my Dell Visor (which is awesome btw) is going to work with this game -- it doesn't support individual finger tracking, just general hand-location. Will that ruin a lot of the immersiveness?

To be clear I don't think finger tracking is supported on anything but the "knuckles" controller.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#329

Post by hombre_fatal »

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…

> Just seems like a small target of players who are old enough to fondly remember the original

Why oh why would you need to play prequels to enjoy a game?

Half-Life is a series where you have guns and you kill shit in an inherently interesting setting: earth invasion. Getting dropped in medias res without knowing 100% of what is going on is just an ancient trope of story-telling.

Look how much people enjoy the latest Doom game. You don't need to have played the original to grasp the idea of demons pouring into earth through some sort of interdimensional gate. You aim and you shoot them.

Re: Half-Life: Alyx

#330

Post by koonsolo »

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…

Hey old man (I'm 40 so for those 2 extra years I can call you that ;)).

I have a very similar situation, with a 10, 8, 5 and 0 year old (yeah I'm a bit more crazy than you). Difference is that I actually do have a bit of spare time.

I also fondly remember all the half-life games, as memory permits of course.

For me this is a different story: The whole VR experience passed me by a bit, until now. By seeing this, my hands are itching to pull out my wallet and pay a crazy amount of money for this toy. The benefit of 40 year olds is that they probably can cough up the money for all this VR stuff.

I'm not sure yet, but there is definitely a strong itch now that I see this.

A new HL game probably also means some cool multiplayer games are coming up. I'm not only thinking about Counter Strike, but also Team Fortress.

Post reply on HN