Of course, part of that extra stress comes from the sheer physicality of playing a game in VR. They had three gun fights ready and waiting for playtesters to get to grips with, but 'after the first one people were saying they needed a break!' Walker recalls. That extra time did cause some extra problems for Valve, however, as early playtesters were coming out of those encounters 'feeling incredibly stressed,' says Walker, 'so some of our pacing had to change.' Indeed, when Valve were still prototyping Half-Life: Alyx, they built their Combine encounters with the same rhythms of a traditional Half-Life 2 fight. The number of opportunities you have to create a great experiences when you've got an enemy that's going to last a minute or two instead of ten seconds is enormous.' Players actually take longer to do everything, but find the entire experience more involving, and that gave us all this extra time. 'So what we found was that combat in VR gave us the best of both worlds. If you press the R key in the first level of Half-Life, you're not doing that any slower than you are in the last level or anything. Because of that, things like reloading occupy your attention fully as a player, even though you're doing something a fair bit slower than you would if this was a non-VR game. 'For example, you've reloaded guns before, but here you're going to reload guns in a very different way. 'I think one of the main reasons for that is because a lot of Half-Life: Alyx is about doing a lot of the same things you've done before, but doing them all in new ways,' explains Walker. They noticed very quickly that players were 'obsessed with collecting stuff', which allowed them to get more mileage out of Half-Life's more traditional exploration elements in VR, but 'we had assumed that other things like combat wouldn't come along for the ride as well, that we'd lose something there,' says Walker.įortunately, their play-testers proved them wrong. Indeed, Valve weren't expecting Half-Life: Alyx's combat to translate very well into VR when they first started play-testing. And when you're a development team looking at that, that's incredibly exciting because you can do some much more with AI and performance and enemy speech.'

Whereas before 'the average lifetime of a Half-Life 2 Combine soldier was probably somewhere between 10-20 seconds,' according to Half-Life: Alyx's lead programmer and designer Robin Walker, 'as soon as we started to do play-testing in VR, we saw enemies lasting for a minute or two of life. The Combine are still public enemy number one in Half-Life: Alyx, but moving the series to VR has done wonders for their overall health, Valve have told me.

Half life 2 combine