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Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

So one third of Valve is working on VR... absolutely definitely not working on Half Life 3 or Portal 3. Which pushes their possible/probable/hypothetical release dates even further into the future. :-(

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Or... they could be working on Half Life 3 in VR?

When you think about it, Half Life would actually be a prime setting for a VR game. The reason being that VR FPS work best when you can teleport rather than physically move (or move the camera through a continuous operation). Half Life always has had characters that can teleport, so it's not a big leap.

Additionally, HL3 will have to be big to wow fans, or it will be a disappointment. People have been waiting a long time, and riding the hype-train the whole way. The HL games were revolutionary, and, this would be another revolutionary step for them.

Which is too bad. I really just want a conclusion to the story. If they used the old modified Quake Gold engine to deliver that, I would be psyched.

That seems like a bit of a stretch. While many of the Half-Life games have involved teleportation as a plot element, the vast majority of their gameplay has used more traditional methods of movement -- either walking or driving small vehicles.

I think that was a joke about the classic HL2 bug that lets you teleport NPCs from waypoint to waypoint during their scripted cutscenes to get through them faster.

I wouldn't play HL in VR. Headcrabs jumping at your face would be nightmarish. I'm being serious, too. If I'm playing VR, don't go for my face!

Valve's Chet Faliszek has said pretty clearly in the past that Half Life 3 won't be a VR game, and I think that's pretty realistic. First person action based shooters don't translate well into VR. Any kind of locomotion that isn't walking around your room-scale space or teleporting just feels incredibly jarring, and it very quickly makes you feel motion sick.

So it'd be a pretty significant change to what we've come to expect from the Half Life games if they made it a VR title.

Valve is no longer a video game developer, it's a service company.

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