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Comment by breckenedge | Hacker News Reader

You can play it without VR.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/half-life-alyx-is-now...

Not to gatekeep it, but having played all HL games on PC and Alyx on VR, I don't see this PC conversion being a meaningful experience.

It's mainly because of the restrictions of different mediums, for example Alyx has much less enemy density, very narrow corridor-based levels made for limited movement of real human bodies and environments, a lot more emphasis on interactivity with the world and objects that would lose their meaning if replaced with "press F to $WHATEVER" buttons. It might be pretty mediocre as a flat-screen game.

I guess it may still be worth it if you desperately need something Half Life and want to see the story, though for that I'd rather watch it on YouTube, or just rent a VR headset for a month.

Being jump scared by head-crabs scary on 27" monitor, and entire another thing in VR glued to your face.

It does still let you experience the story, and enjoy the stunning environments. But I agree the experience was tailored too much to VR for it to be an excellent gameplay experience in flatsceen. Some mechanics are pretty mundane and the combat sequences preferred less walking movement and less enemies.

I played in VR and it was an all encompassing experience, still the best VR game I have played. I had even been playing VR games for a few years before trying Alyx, and it still blew me away, in a way that other VR games had not yet. That level of graphical fidelity and immersion is simply not in any other game. Which means it's a skill issue for VR studios, not a hardware issue (in my humble opinion)

At that point you might as well just watch someone stream the game from start to finish, at least you get the "experience" the game the way it was meant to be played.

That’s good to know! I might try that out one day.

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