Half-Life:Alyx ma non Half-Life 3

In una video intervista con Geoff Keighley, David Speyrer, Robin Walker e Dario Casali di Valve hanno condiviso alcuni nuovi dettagli interessanti su Half-Life: Alyx. Gli sviluppatori hanno spiegato perché Half-Life: Alyx è un prequel di Half-Life 2 e non del tanto atteso Half-Life 3. Inoltre, hanno spiegato perché non ci sarà una versione non VR del gioco.

Come ha affermato Dario, Half-Life: Alyx è iniziato tutto per esplorazione VR e si è trasformato in un gioco di Half-Life. E anche se al team piacerebbe rilasciare una versione non VR, questo non è attualmente possibile.

“We would love to be delivering a version of this that you could play with a mouse and a keyboard. But like as we said, it began as an exploration of VR. The more we used the controllers and the headset, we realized the the amount of interactions this gives, the amount of possibilities these things give us. The more we explored this, the more we realized that there’s so much opportunity that we can’t really translate back to the keyboard.
When you can track your hands separately from your head. They are all 3D space, all simultaneously tracking and moving, you just can’t get that with a mouse and keyboard. And when you put that into game mechanics, the kinds of interactions that we can do now, we couldn’t possibly do with a mouse and keyboard.”

Dario ha menzionato l’apertura delle porte come esempio di queste nuove meccaniche VR. I giocatori ora possono aprire leggermente le porte e iniziare a sparare con le loro armi, lentamente aprendole o bussandole. Possono anche aprirli, lanciare una granata e poi chiuderli.

Dario conclude che Valve avrebbe dovuto mappare un’intera sezione della tastiera, dedicata solo all’interazione con le porte O che il team avrebbe dovuto annacquare la versione VR a favore della versione mouse e tastiera.

Ma perché Half-Life:Alyx è un prequel e non un sequel di Half-Life 3? Keighley fece questa domanda a Robin Walker che disse.

“I mean in all honesty, back in 2016 when we started this… I mean, Half-Life was just terrifying. Half-Life 3, terrifyingly daunting prospect, right? And I think to some extend, VR was a way we could fool ourselves into believing we had a way to do this.
Because, by starting with VR and then trying to think about Half-Life and how it worked with it and playtesting those, you’re immediately in a space where we have something we understand well, Half-Life’s core gameplay, and a new platform with new prospects and new possibilities and we can do that translation, and then we can watch people play, and so within a week or two we’re starting to learn. We are able to watch someone go through it. And so it was really easy to not try and think about the big picture of “Oh, we’re making Half-Life 3”. We could just focus and figure out what people enjoy in this and then make forward progress.
And in some ways, VR was a little bit, like the way the gravity gun helped us in Half-Life 2. It became the tent pole that you could wrap so much around. The innovation around it. And so VR became this thing that we could wrap everything around. Where as Half Life 3, if it’s like “Hey tomorrow you are working on Half-Life 3!” and you are like “Oh God!” Terrifying.”

Infine, Walker e Speyrer hanno dichiarato di voler lavorare su altri progetti Half-Life. Tuttavia, dovranno aspettare e vedere come il mondo risponderà a questo nuovo gioco di Half-Life.