Half-Life Alyx is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is hands down the best VR game out there. Normally, VR games are only a couple of hours long, however, Alyx offers over 15 hours of content, all of it with incredible attention to detail.
It’s a shame that most fans of the Half-Life franchise won’t be able to enjoy it as Alyx is a VR exclusive title. This means that it won’t run on a normal monitor. For the majority of PC players, VR is just not feasable, which might have something to do with the fact that VR costs as much as a new console (or more, depending on the headset).
A designer of Half-Life Alyx, Robin Walker, recently gave an interview to VGC where he talked about why Alyx opted to go this way. He also said that he is open to mods that remove VR elements and make the game playable on normal PCs.
"As a result, what I’m confident will happen is that when people get that butchered version, and they’ll have lost all the things that we’ll have got from moving to VR, they will then understand very clearly why we made that choice," Walker said in the interview. "There’s a part of me that’s eager for people to be able to have that experience and realise, 'oh, now I get it. Now I see everything we lost in that transition back to non-VR and I understand why they did it.'"
Walker also talked about how nervous they were about announcing the game. He knew that many fans wouldn't be happy about the game being a VR title. They decided to put all their effort into making the game as good as possible in hopes that people might forgive them. If they failed and the game was bad, then it being a VR title wouldn't matter as much anyway. “We just focused on making the game as good as we could," he said.
Only time will tell whether Half-Life Alyx is a system seller or not. Given how successful the game has been so far, it might motivate other gaming companies to take VR seriously.
So what do you think? Have you played Half-Life Alyx yet? Do you think Alyx being a VR title was a good call? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
