Valve confirm Half-Life: Alyx, a VR game being revealed on Thursday

Parent comment was edited after this post, so now this reply seems out-of-context. The parent comment originally made a comparison to Pixar and Disney Animation coming up with hair and water tech first and then coming up with stories for Brave and Moana respectively to wrap around the tech.

That's so interesting! I think the fact that they nail the tech so well makes it intuitively surprising that it didn't come first. Not pixar but similarly, when I saw the siggraph talk where Disney Animation showed off how they do snow rendering in Frozen I wondered whether the tech came first

Same for Nemo 2. One of the first scenes (Octopus in the Zoo) was only finalized after 2 years because the puppetry and shading of the Octopus took a lot of R&D to implement

I have to imagine the Pixar shorts are, however, a way to do this kind of technical experimentation to better render mediums between stories? Some examples for me include the sand / features rendering in Piper, and the water rendering in Lava? I guess that's more of a question - are those used as tech platforms, or story platforms to test teams? (Either way, a good way to do it!)

Whoa, cool! What sort of work did you do during your internship? Pixar is definitely in my top-5 list of companies I would love to work for.

Half-Life 1’s “thing” is sort of like Breath of the Wild’s “thing”: every object in the game has physical attributes, and these physical attributes can cause the sim to emit signals from particular objects that interact with other sim objects through general interfaces (rather than only interacting with specific “compatible” objects), with the results differing depending on source attributes, target attributes, and the distance between the source and target; and with the same attribute of the target often taking on a weighted-average of the sum of the input signals it’s been receiving lately.

When an HL1 object is “on fire”, for example, it’s emitting “infrared-radiation particles” as hitscan shots off of a point-source at its center. If these hit something, the physics sim checks the “on fire” object’s “hotness” attribute, and its distance from the target it hit, and from these computes a “heat impulse” that should be given to the target, which may or may not be enough to set the target “on fire.” Different things burn with more or less “hotness”, and for more or less time before burning out, depending on the material they’re made of. Explosive barrels don’t have any special code—they’re just “on fire” for a very hot, very short time (but they’re also “concussive”, which is a separate instantiation of this same logic.) The Crossbow’s alternate fire just slides a physical object that’s intensely “on fire” through the scene at high speed. Etc.

This system continues into HL2 as well. Pheropod/bugbait objects are just a copy of this system, where “on fire” is instead “acts as ally”, and antlions can be temporarily or permanently caught “acts as ally” by getting hit by a strong enough dose of pheropod radiative signalling.

This system is basically why HL1 and HL2 play the way they do: rather than only being able to kill things with weapon-objects programmed to emit “kill” signals toward enemies, you can kill things with pretty much any object, in a variety of ways, as enemies are physical-sim objects that can die for physical-sim reasons. And it’s very easy to make a useful new object in these engines, as you can just model something, give it some interesting physical attributes, and plop it into a level. The sim will then take care of making it useful.

The big idea that the first Half Life explored was never breaking from first person. No cutscenes. Sometimes they’d trap you to focus your attention on something but they never took away the player’s control to look at what they wanted to.

I think a lot of the AI functions like smell, Grunt AI and houndeye group behavior rely on this. A lot of it is easy to miss, like Vortigaunts fleeing, hiding and not attacking below a certain health. Houndeyes for example will react differently to quiet/far away noises than loud startling ones.

https://youtu.be/1tvz0WVaQGg

https://youtu.be/9jO-P3kXlCI?t=105

Yeah I thought it was about smashing facecrabs with a crowbar.

You might be right on their priorities, but I think my reasoning also holds, even if it’s maybe not the primary reason they didn’t make an HL3.

I’ve given some thought to this, and I invite you to do the same: if there was an HL3 that continued in the tradition of serving as a tech-demo for a new kind of realtime physics-sim tech, what are the possibilities for the tech it could be showcasing?

I’m not too deep into physical-simulation research, so I can’t say whether there’s something just sitting around as a journal paper. What I can say is that I haven’t seen anything in a modern title (even an artsy indie title) that would have made for a good basis for an HL game. Have you?

I don't think it's a mistake that we don't hear Gordon Freeman talk, and barely ever see his face. I think the burden is on the player to feel connected to HL2. It's more an exploration of a dystopian landscape, which wasn't as played out 15 years ago as it is now. You get NPCs with excellent-for-the-time voice acting and huge landscapes to explore. You get to insert yourself into the character of Gordon, it's kind of "2004's VR" in that way.

This was exactly my experience. The story they were telling in HL2 was extremely poorly suited to the technology they were trying to use to tell it. You can't tell a story about being an insurgency in a huge city or running from your life from a totalitarian state while never letting the character deviate more than 10 feet to either side along a fixed path. It just doesn't work, and it never felt like more than a game. I often felt like I was playing a rail shooter like the old light-gun games at an arcade that moved the character for you.

I would argue that HL2 was just “Gary’s Mod the Single-Player Campaign”—probably with Valve first thinking more along the lines of something that would look like Gary’s Mod itself if they had delivered it in that state; and then losing confidence, thinking that a pure sandbox title couldn’t possibly be something people would pay for (those really weren’t a thing back then, until GMod itself showed the demand!) So they backed off and built a single-player campaign instead.

But I think their goal with HL2 wasn’t really to deliver a compelling narrative, any more than the point of a modern Mario title is to give a compelling narrative. It’s a sandbox with a goal condition. (Sort of like Scribblenauts, now that I think of it.)

Going a step aside from the technology itself, here's another way of looking at those games:

Half-life basically helped kick start story-driven FPS games (Bioshock, etc)

Half-Life 2 helped kick off physics based FPS games.

Portal basically kicked off the FPS puzzle genre (Talos Principle, QUBE, Quantum Conundrum, etc).

L4D basically kicked off FPS co-op games (Borderlands, Killing Floor, PayDay), as well as asymmetric co-op.

For better or worse, TF2 with hats and later CSGO basically started the microtransaction/crate system.

Lastly, Dota 2 did a lot to push e-sports forward too.

This is the kind of advances Valve is interested in. It's hard to tell now, but this game could easily have a huge impact on how VR games are made in the future.

It’s a technology for simulating the interactions of these things. Point the paint gun in Portal 2 through a portal into an area with different gravity and you’ll see something that required the invention of novel tech. That system “worked” since Portal 1; they just didn’t fully explore it in Portal 1.

Some Nintendo games are definitely explorations of their own novel input methods; and also, earlier on, explorations of the possibilities of the console’s fancy custom hardware features. (Whether you got one or the other often depended on whether the software/product department, or the hardware/R&D department, was responsible for the game’s design—the product folks [Nintendo EAD] tended to push for the inclusions of novel input methods on new hardware designs, so they built games around those; while the R&D folks were more intimately familiar with the more “gimmicky” hardware features they had included into new console designs, and so only they really understood what could be done with them, until they demonstrated it to the world and to the other departments with a tech-demo game.)

But I would say that, most of the time, Nintendo (and similar allied shops like HAL and Intelligent Systems) just invent novel game mechanics out of thin air, then ask how the player should interact with those mechanics; they make the interaction with the mechanic as a prototype, and playtest it on its own; and then, if that turns out to be fun, they wrap a game around that.

This is why, for example, the Paper Mario series looks the way it does. Nintendo + Intelligent Systems both agree that you can’t just take the same mechanics and make a new game, even if the mechanics you came up with the first time were really good. They already explored the possibility-space of those mechanics as well as they could manage in the first game!

> Brave and Moana at Pixar and Disney Animation respectively

But that's precisely why their first big AAA VR Experience is based on Half Life. It's probably one of the few franchises that (could) force people to jump into buying a VR rig. Yes, it's not exactly cheap, and it has some requirements like space, but being able to experience a new Half Life game after 12 years, is quite exactly the thing that will get people seriously interested.

(This is all coming from someone who's probably going to jump back into PC/VR gaming for this experience, depending on the reveal and pre-release coverage...)

It's a sliver of a sliver of the market. Gamers -> PC gamers -> PC gamers with powerful gaming rigs -> PC gamers with powerful gaming rigs who care even a little about VR and so might buy a headset, if they don't already have one

I don't get this move. But hey, maybe I'm wrong and this'll be what takes it mainstream... somehow.

How many VR first-person shooters are there where you can actually move? The last I heard, having your character move in VR while you are standing still is a fast pass to nauseaville.

Yes but also not necessarily a big spending demographic. It seems better to target nostalgic late 20's to early 40-somethings since they are more likely to have the disposable income for a VR capable desktop and VR headset.

I'm guessing this is going to show Alyx first interacting with G-Man.

I think that would be missing the point. With Half-Life 2, you could buy the game as a disc but it still required Steam to play. They leveraged their legendary IP to bring users into a system that is way more profitable for them than selling copies of any particular game, even a Half-Life game. They've been sitting on that IP for a while now, not tarnishing their repuation from the release of a title that could potentially not live up to expectations. Now they're launching a new platform, and they're leveraging the IP to get people to buy into the platform. If they can own the best VR platform and get enough people to buy in on it, the game sales that come after that will overshadow whatever return they make on a new Half-Life game. Supporting other platforms would hurt them, if I'm correct about their intentions. Years ago a friend suggested to me that Valve might do a combined HL3/in-house-VR launch, and I've been expecting it ever since; it makes too much sense as a business strategy, and fits in with their prior method of operations.

It wouldn't surprise me if it was only compatible with more recent VR sets. They are giving a shot at an engine that could set the pace for the next decade, the same way CryEngine 3 and Unreal Engine 4 couldn't run on current generation average rigs when they came out.

rumors say it is, but considering the rumors are all about the index's finger stuff being used a lot i'm not sure how that's all gonna work out

You don't provide any data for your claims. He's saying less than 1% of Steam users have a headset and declining, and you're claiming that it's growing and vibrant.

There may be some awesome VR experiences out there and a handful of people that enjoy them, but sales numbers don't lie - VR is not currently succeeding. If you compare VR sales to Kinect sales, it makes the Kinect look like a roaring success - and Microsoft abandoned it due to lack of consumer interest.

I can find dedicated communities to restoring antiquated decades old computers - a niche does not make a growing vibrant market. Anecdotally (and I welcome people to provide real data instead) everybody I know that used to work on VR for a living has moved on with their careers, including several engineers who got acquired by Facebook.

Beat Saber really seems to be the closest thing to a Killer App for VR right now. I'm introducing it to people who have never really been interested in video games and they fall in love immediately. It's also the only VR game I've played that has felt like a complete, novel, and interesting experience that I keep coming back to.

Largest installed base is PSVR with more than 4 million devices sold.

It's pretty self explanatory. In fact you answered your own question.

When you cringe it is because you feel shame.

Shame is generally an indicator of un-dealt with trauma. Good to keep digging into those feelings and see the source if you can.

Have you ever been that obsessed in the past? Did anyone say something about it to you?

Personally I find Portal so enjoyable that I'm happy that I have the original Portal and Portal 2.

However, at a first glance it seems like it should have been relatively straightforward to create sequels that just have more levels. But maybe it's not that easy to actually do it.

However, we'd be moaning about them rehashing the same IP over and over if they had done that.

If the game is SteamVR-compatible, most VR headsets will work but generally the most common options are some variation of Vive/Rift/Index.

That said, we don't actually know the requirements yet - as far as we know it'll require full finger tracking or be straight up Index-only (as unlikely as I personally think that is, it's still possible). Definitely don't pull the trigger on anything until the full announcement on Thursday.

> it matters where the audience is.

I don't think that strictly applies here; the stores don't play a predominant role in marketing the games (at least for popular titles), so they don't have exclusivity over an audience.

I think the relevant question is the extent customers decide not to purchase a game because it's exclusive to an alternative store.

> or never reach feature parity with Steam

To some extent this is intentional. Epic Game's market research culminated in a decision to include fewer social features, and less visual clutter than Steam.

Epic Games seems to be competing more on the back-end, offering better rates and licensing to developers in return for distribution exclusivity, rather than the front-end with features for users. That said, as a user, I appreciate the minimalism of EGS.

All great VR games are made specifically for VR from the beginning. Taking a flat game and do a VR version of it is almost never good (I cant think of a single example where they have pulled that off, outside of simulators perhaps).

The reverse is also true.

> but there's no indication they're good at anything else at this point

You mean apart from creating and still consistently updating CS:GO and DotA 2, which are both some of the most played games in the world?

Their "The Lab" VR demo, which is a collection of mini games, is also one of the most enjoyable VR experiences, so I'm very optimistic they can make something great again if they put their mind to it.

I've read somewhere that the flat company structure, which had an initial boost has started to be a detriment to the company.

I’m guessing it’ll be an okay game. But because it isn’t excellent, that’ll be enough of a blow.

Yeah Valve has barely made any games this decade.

That's a much better title.

Half Life a number between 2 and 4

I dont mind that.