Alyx is cool but it also sucks. The little interactions with items feel novel. The combat is bad.
It’s a thin layer of game design tricks to make you think you’re in something intricate but it’s actually dumb as rocks. The lightning dogs are the peak of this. Even on the hardest difficulty they telegraph their attacks for like… 10 seconds. It’s not clear if it’s possible to dodge it by physically walking 5m. The game wants you to teleport pretty much anywhere to “dodge” it. I don’t blame valve for this. What they almost certainly realized is that humans are incompetent in vr so the enemies need to be dumb as rocks. Not that the AI is bad or anything, but the principles behind their behavior are built for the fact that humans are slow, have low situational awareness, and and especially in vr don’t have a good intuition for where their body is exposed. The electric dogs are still decently challenging. But the limitations on it were incredibly immersion breaking to me, much more than having a helmet benefited.
Superhot solves this the other way by having very short high failure levels and just letting you lose due to human incompetence at your own pace. It works pretty well but it’s not a generalizable strategy for other games. I’m looking to do boneworks next. I’ve never felt wires were a real problem. Mostly because the games I play don’t involve moving around much. I have tried wireless.
I have also done one of those vr domes with a huge open warehouses and multiplayer vr shooters with mild graphics but big gun peripherals. This is the biggest freedom you could possibly have. In my experience playing and watching others, people just slowly walk from place to place, rotate in place, and stand still shooting while monsters get too close and “hit” them because melee attacks feel unintuitive still. They move like they’re an old resident evil tank control character lol.