It’s a VR game called “Half-Life:Alyx”. Disappointed article here.
So is this just going to be a tech demo to show off VR functionality, or will it actually advance the game story in any sort of meaningful way? I’m betting on the former.
Strange but I always thought that if Valve wanted to make a VR push that Portal 3 would have been perfect.
Yikes! If they made a VR Portal 3 I’d buy stock in Depends.
Portal depends on big jumping. That’s something that’s very difficult to make immersive in VR.
I am not really sure if I count Valve as anything but a software distribution company now. They were a games company, which leveraged their big successes into changing to another business.
So I’d not expect much from it. Soon be like Game Of Thrones where everyone who liked it will have dementia and forgotten about everything, it’s taken that long…
The sudden change in perspective/location jumping through portals, falling and bouncing, and so on would probably make me vomit.
It might be good training for astronauts though.
I can’t imagine the VR installed base is large enough to support this as a top-tier game. It’ll be another tech demo for sure, but probably the best one to date.
Personally the disconnect between what people imagined VR was (headset and speakers), and what actually appeared (a computer monitor, mouse, speakers) has never been reconciled. Really VR was born in the late 90s with Quake being rendered on a 3d graphics card onto a monitor. To make it work, you have to disconnect from real reality, we can run at 20 miles an hour, jump 20 feet in the air, and not be violently sick (for most people). The headset was redundant then.
Headset VR will have its niche in showing people houses and other such things, working remote cameras, but the TV series Community parodied it effectively 4 years ago, with “Lawnmower Maintenance and Postnatal Care” episode.
“And Jesus wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer!”
“WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS!”
“I have set the time zone”
While I’m not averse to seeing some of the story from Alyx’s perspective, I maintain that all Valve has to do to is call me, and we’ll get a finale going.
Spoilered for wall-of-text reasons:
[spoiler]Half-Life 3/Portal 3 will be the same game, bringing the two stories together at last when Chell finds the Temporal Integration, Modification, and Exploration Annex of Aperture Labs, where the TIME module for the portal gun was/would have been developed. This area adds elements of time portals and multiple instances of Chell to the “tests”, culminating in the modified portal gun accidentally linking to dimensional rifts created by the Black Mesa Incident and subsequent teleportation experiments.
Once Chell and Gordon meet, the story progresses as they use the portal and gravity guns to intervene at various critical points in the Half-Life story, extracting past-Gordon from the timeline and placing him where he needs to be, as well as making other (previously unseen) changes at G-Man’s direction, like retrieving the super-portal codes for Episode 2. (I also have an explanation of who G-Man is, but I’ll keep that to myself for now.)
Throughout the story, the player collects clues as to the location of the Borealis, but learns that the Combine are searching for it as well, a process complicated by the fact that the ship seems to appear and disappear at random. Gordon and Mossman produce a targeting algorithm that makes it possible to place a portal on the ship during one of its brief appearances, but Mossman is the only one to make it through before the portal vanishes. Among her notes, the player finds a message specifying a location where a new portal will appear, giving them access to the ship.
That location is Mossman’s old lab, which has been placed under interdiction by the Combine, who are trying to use Mossman’s (falsified) notes to find the Borealis. Mindful of their previous failures to keep Gordon out of places, the interdiction fields protecting it have been adjusted to destroy organic matter, rather than machinery. This leads to a run-and-gun section where the player plays as Dog, with an autonomous, shoulder-mounted weapons platform operated by a Cave Johnson sphere, on a mission to destroy the field generator and cause chaos. There’s a boss fight with the Advisor that’s after the Borealis, some platforming, some Donkey Kong barrel-throwing action, and big explosions. Dog is badly damaged, and there’s a fade to black, with weapon noises and Johnson’s voice trying to get Dog to move.
With the field down, the Combine researchers routed, and the portal open, the player finally reaches the Borealis to find an elderly Dr. Mossman waiting. She’s been on board for years, as the ship slipped back and forth through time portals, learning its secret: its mission was to deploy the Aperture Relay Constellation, an array of LEO satellites designed to link portals all across the world. The ARC can be used against the Combine, but it has to be deployed first, which means stopping the Borealis from portal-slipping. Once that happens, the Combine will easily locate the vessel and send their own ships to intercept it. This leads to a timed sequence in which Chell and Gordon use the portal gun in orbit to jump from ship to ship, sabotaging Combine vessels to buy Mossman time to complete the deployment. In the end, an enormous rift forms and a full-size Combine warship begins to emerge, and the player must portal to it, force an entry, and fight their way through the ship to disable it before it can destroy the ARC.
Finale: the ARC powers up, simultaneously generating Aperture portals inside every Combine portal on the planet, causing them to implode, cutting the Combine off from reinforcement and wrecking their facilities on both sides of the portals. Credits scenes show the Resistance working with Chell, using their portal-enhanced mobility and weird Aperture tech to mop up the stragglers, vortigaunts helping to clear headcrab infestations, and other “cooperate to rebuild the world” stuff. Maybe Gordon and Chell looking at the last entrance to Aperture Labs.
Post-credits scene: Alyx is working in a new lab, with Gordon looking on and Johnson-sphere grumbling in the background. Pan to show that she’s working on Dog. She flips a switch, and Dog “wakes up”.
The game can be played single-player or co-op, with one player taking each protagonist (or, for the run-and-gun section, one player “driving” Dog while the other takes the turret as Cave). There’s a standalone pure co-op section in which Gordon and Chell use the portal and gravity guns to navigate a final Aperture facility and save a badly injured Rattmann.[/spoiler]
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
(seriously, that sounds like a game I’d happily pay full price for.)
<Starts throwing fistfulls of money at Balance>
It’s not like Valve hasn’t given me time to think of them. 
I’d start a Kickstarter, but I don’t think their page will handle the number of digits Valve would charge for the rights. :eek:
Just the idea of a Cave Johnson core mounted on Dog, constantly bitching about the fact that he was built by Black Mesa scientists, has me laughing right now.