Valve announces Half-Life: Alyx, its first flagship VR game

3 min read

Yesterday, Valve Corporation, the popular American video game developer, announced the Half-Life: Alyx, the first new game in the popular Half-Life series in over a decade. The company tweeted that it will unveil the first look on Thursday, 21st November 2019, at 10 am Pacific Time.

Half-Life: Alyx, a brand-new game in the Half-Life universe, is designed exclusively for PC virtual reality systems (Valve Index, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality).

Talking about Valve’s history in PC games, it has created some of the most influential and critically games ever made. However, “Valve has famously never finished either of its Half-Life supposed trilogies of games. After Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the company created Half-Life: Episode 1 and Half-Life: Episode 2, but no third game in the series,” the Verge reports.

Ars Technica reveals, “The game’s name confirms what has been loudly rumored for months: that you will play this game from the perspective of Alyx Vance, character introduced in 2004’s Half-Life 2. Instead of stepping forward in time, HLA will rewind to the period between the first two mainline Half-Life games.”

“A data leak from Valve’s Source 2 game engine, as uncovered in September by Valve News Network, pointed to a new control system labeled as the “Grabbity Gloves” in its codebase. Multiple sources have confirmed that this is indeed a major control system in HLA,” Ars Technica claims.

These Grabbity gloves can also be described as ‘Magnet gloves’, which allow pointing out and attracting distant objects to your hands. Valve has already announced plans to support all major VR PC systems for its next VR game, and these new gloves seem like the right system to scale to whatever controllers that would come to VR.

Many gamers are excited to check out this Half-life version and are also looking forward to whether the company really stands up to what it says.

A user on Hacker News commented, “Wonder what Valve is doubling down with this title?

It seems like the previous games were all ground-breaking narratives, but with most of the storytellers having left in the last few years, I’d be curious to see what makes this different than your standard VR games.”

Another user on Hacker News commented, “From the tech side it was the heavy, and smart, use of scripting that made HL1 stand out. With HL2 it was the added physics engine trough the change to Source, back then that used to be big deal and whole gameplay mechanics revolve around that (gravity gun). In that context, I do not really consider it that surprising for the next HL project to focus on VR because even early demos of that combination looked already very promising 5 years ago”

We will update this space after the Half-Life: Alyx is unveiled on Thursday.

To know more about the announcement in detail, read Ars Technica’s complete coverage.