Aside from just generating tons of goodwill, does anyone have any insight into why Valve would do this? Obviously, I think it's great regardless of the motivation, but are there rumblings of Half Life 3 that I've missed or something?
And that's ignoring the fact that HL2 is 90% off right now ($1) and they're giving away HL1 for free.
No. Valve just does whatever Valve wants. The most valuable thing they're getting out of this is probably goodwill.
* - big picture mode - steamlink - vr integration (somewhat successful)
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great they’re finally pushing things again, but they were stagnant for a very long while. Ramming the downvote button in a blind panic doesn’t make that less true :)
In theory, it's not that hard to compete with Steam. Valve's cut of game sales is massive, and a competitor could easily slash into that to undercut them. Which is what Epic Games is trying to do. Yet, Valve maintains an extremely dominant market condition largely predicated on that goodwill.
And, of course, exactly because of that dominant market condition, they've got all the money they could possibly want to burn on random vanity projects.
I do kinda wish they incorporated the fan Black Mesa remake and improvements, though.
No thanks. Black Mesa is a nice game, but it is not Half-Life 1 and should not replace it.
Today, not so much. Aside from a prequel, the series had been dormant for as longer than it had been alive (11 years alive 1998-2007, 13 years dormant 2007-2020), and the prequel required a pricey hardware peripheral to run. It’d get attention, but it wouldn’t be that big of a deal at this point.
> the ending of Alyx does retcon the old cliffhanger.
that's semi-disappointing, if for no other reason than that they'd do it in a game so few have the ability to actually play.
But remove the VR and you're left with an above-average short FPS that would've been entirely unremarkable if not for the Half-Life tie-in. If they released it for non VR, it would probably get trashed just for not being HL3.
Honestly I don't think you're missing much. It's a good VR game only because the bar for VR gaming in general is so much lower.
I almost broke my TV with Alex and that is a slow, slow game.
Alyx also misses many of the things that made the HL series great and replaces them with "modern" game design anti-features. Not looking forward to future HL games going even further in that direction.
The new voice actor doesn't even sound anything like alyx FFS and her lines are a perfect argument why the silent protagonist in the HL games was not a mistake.