author: Bart Swiatek
Half-Life Alyx Will Enable us to Spend Long, Comfortable VR Sessions
Robert Walker, a developer from Valve Software, who is currently working on VR Half-Life: Alyx, wss interviewed by The Verge. The topic of the conversation was mainly the game mechanics in the aforementioned production.
The Verge interviewed Robert Walker from Valve Software. The topic of the conversation was the newest installment of the Half-Life series, the recently announced, and dedicated exclusively to VR, Half-Life: Alyx. Thanks to the conversation we got to know some new details about the discussed production.
Comfortable playing in VR for many hours?
Half-Life: Alyx is said to have been designed in such a way that it will enable us to spend long hours in the virtual world. The developers initially planned to base the game on shorter gaming sessions, but the game time got extended. The first people to test this production were surprised that they could spend so much time with VR goggles on their heads.
"Early on in the project, we looked at SteamVR’s data to see how long players were spending in sessions, and tried to fit Half-Life: Alyx’s experience to it, mostly from a pacing perspective. But once we had the first hour or two of the game built, and started playtesting it, we found that literally every player would spend longer in the session than we expected. It was very common for them to end their session, and their first comment would be “Wow, that was the longest I’ve ever been in VR!”
As the game grew longer and longer, and our Index hardware prototypes improved, we saw players increase their session lengths even further. Today, we generally see playtesters go for 2-3 hours before taking a bathroom break. Even subtle improvements seemed to have significant effects, like the way the Index controllers allowed players to open and relax their hands without dropping the controller," said Walker.
Of course, you can expect that a lot will depend on the goggles we use, some of them are much more comfortable than others. Still, if Robert Walker's words are confirmed in reality, Valve will have reasons to be satisfied, because the comfort remains one of the greatest ills of modern VR. The length of the sessions also suggests that developers have managed to circumvent the problem of motion sickness, the symptoms of which appear quite quickly in a large number of users.
The dev also referred to the quality of visuals, stating that the scenes we see on the trailer were taken directly from the game, although they were subject to some processing.
"All the scenes in the trailer were recorded from the game itself, and then we’ve done some post processing, mostly focused on smoothing out the player’s head movement," we read.
Structure of the game and multiplayer
Half-Life: Alyx will be the classic representative of the series, we will have a linear adventure in which our task will be to complete levels designed by the creators. We should not expect the title to offer more freedom at some point (e.g. large, open or semi-open locations with an emphasis on exploration).
"This is a traditional Half-Life experience, so it’s fundamentally a one-way journey. Half-Life has always been about experiencing a hand-crafted, meticulously designed path, where every space is the result of a team of people thinking about what’s in it and why it’s interesting. Some of those spaces afford multiple ways to navigate through them, but you’re always moving forward overall [in the sense completing successive parts of the campaign - editorial note], said Walker.
An important role will be played by manipulating objects held in the hands - e.g. reloading a gun is quite a complicated task, which can be quite thrilling in situations where we have an enemy right in front of us.
"Half-Life: Alyx’s core combat skill is about using your hands to interact with your weapons efficiently. Reloading is the first of the weapon interactions that you’ll learn. Alyx’s pistol has a multi-step process to reload it, and we see almost all players starting out fairly clunky, doing each step in isolation, but after a bit of practice they start to blend it together. Soon it becomes one single, smooth process, after which we often see them start to put a bit of flair into their movement. But eventually they find themselves having to do it while a zombie is right in front of them, and it all goes to hell. Some players have cited the moment where they fumbled and dropped their magazine at the foot of the attacking zombie as the highlight of their playtest.
So, yes, there’s a fair amount of manual manipulation of weapons, some related to reloading and others related to special functionality. In some cases, the same actions can be performed by buttons on the controller. The rules for this vary between the weapons, because we wanted each weapon to feel like a new and interesting object to interact with, and eventually master. We are aiming to have a wide set of accessibility options for players with limited motor capabilities, so there will be automation options," said the developer.
The new game from Valve Software won't feature any multiplayer mode, Alyx will be an experience prepared only for solo player.
