Lockdown 2020: Here's Half-Life: Alyx Running On That Oculus Quest

super half life special

@ripelivejam: He's also used his platform to shit on the franchise quite often.

Fuck I am so glad it's Jeff playing this. I love when he critiques VR. This was great to watch.

Colorblindness strikes again.

I'm running the game on a Vive and index controllers and I think your experience was greatly effected by the setup. Sitting position, non-room scale, streaming at a lower frame rate, and carrying a rat around which, while entertaining and I admire the dedication, slows things down even more and loses you a hand the whole time.

I know not everyone will have the ideal setup, but have you felt like we had a AAA game yet to this scale developed specifically for VR? I've never been more immersed in VR before and if more games were like this, I'd actually have a reason to put on my vive more often. Nothing out there is even close, which is a tremendous step forward.

I do agree it doesn't do everything you'd want. I was disappointed with a lack of melee and there's a dark segment coming up with a flashlight that is very disorienting because you lose track of where you are easily.

Lastly a couple FYI things- Rip the boards of with your hands! You CAN wear the helmet and gas mask! Hope to see some of your later game impressions.

You can literally get that experience from any other video on YouTube. I cried when Jeff's rat friend was gone. They won't be forgotten.

Man, I kinda forgot that Valve can make some really solid singleplayer games. Too bad it's VR only, I'm too much of a cheapskate for a decent PC let alone a headset. I'll just make do with a Portal 2 replay.

I would love to see how different it plays with Roomscale/Valve Index for the so called "full" experience. There's a lot of promise here, and a ton of interactivity, even if the fidelity is a tad off.

so, i think im nearing the end of alyx.

it's been really good so far and surprisingly it's not because of the vr. in fact, i'm even going to dare make the claim that it's the lesser of the interesting things about it.

the vr works absolutely fine, it functions on what it needs to do but it doesn't necessarily do anything that hasn't been done with vr already.

i was expecting to see or experience something that was new that vr games that just couldn't be done before unless a big studio like valve actually focused on a full-fledged vr game.

really, the only unique claim they can make with this is that it's a half-life game in vr.

the great thing is that it happens to be a very good half-life game. the things i really enjoy about it is the pacing and the moments in-between encounters where you can just vibe out to the aesthetics of the environments and the dystopic world it presents. there's really fun witty dialogue between you and your scientist friend who isn't dr kleiner and there's little things you can pick up and read or look at. it has some very fun encounters you need to strategize about, the vr definitely makes the shooting aspect of it waaaaay more enjoyable than if it was without it.

it seriously evokes the feeling of half-life 2 a lot, which is great after so long of not seeing that universe.

my main takeaway is the vr absolutely adds to the experience but i wouldn't say that it's essential which i think goes against what valve kept claiming alyx was and could only exist as

I hope someone that likes Half-Life in the office gives this a try. I'd like to hear their opinions.

Man that rat made my whole week

I thought Jeff carrying the rat around was the best part of *this* particular video of Half-Life: Alyx. I've watched other "regular" videos of it by now already and I like that Jeff brought some of his own silly stuff into the mix.

That said, unlike Jeff, I still very much adore the Half-Life universe and if I'd have Index and plenty of space to play this in, I'd probably be ready to declare it as the best game I've played this year, because it really seems to capture that same magic that I felt when I played HL2 all those years ago.

It's a shame that they couldn't release even a somewhat "scaled-down" version of this on PSVR, cause at least I still have one of those gathering dust in a closet. As cool as this looks, I still don't want to cough out +400€ for the cheapest option in VR helmets, let alone near 1k for Index.

Weekend at Ratties

I love this real AF setup

You can find the gnome from episode 2 in a spot. I wonder if there's something in carrying it the whole way in this game too...

Can we get a best time for a Half-Life Alyx rat run?

The audio situation is unfortunate. Still fun to see in action.

I‘m playing this on bare minimum specs with oculus quest link. I do have quite a bit of room for room scale though. Game is amazing. I had a good laugh with Jeff messing here, but others should know that this is a legit ass video game in VR. And it’s half life! Really impressed and enjoying my time so far.

You get an achievement for carrying the rat to the end of the game and launching it in a rocket.

Jeff's rat shenanigans are exactly why I come to this site. I can see standard-ass regular gameplay anywhere else I want.

I feel like Valve needs to add a dedicated Steam achievement for getting a Rat to the end of the game, if there is not an achievement for that already. Title it "Jeff and Ratties Adventures (in the Apocalypse...)" :-D ^_^

I really wasn't sure it would persist between area loading screens, very happy when it did! :-D

And Jeff shooting himself in the face after Rattie went and activated full 'idnoclip'... LMAO! Ahaha! :D

Agreed! ^This! :-D 8-D

Of course the first Half Life game in a decade came out during a global pandemic.

yo that rat is RAD

every VR game needs a rat

I played to the exact same spot on my first night and was also a little underwhelmed. sure, the presentation an detail + all the interactions are on another level, but it didn't wow me. in my second session the game picked up the pace considerably. dealing with darkness while beeing attaced by 2 headcrabs and some zombies, frantically trying to reload the "cumbersome" shotgut, dropping the magazine, the stress is unreal. this game is really going places so far. city 17 is more depressing than ever =). can't wait for tonight for my third session.

my living room is a mess, i don't know how much longer my wife will tolerate this chaos! ;-)

So this is what killed two of my favorite podcasts and a game I was looking forward to, huh.

Jeff breaking a coffee cup over the rat's head had me laughing. Great job!

This looks very neat. There's nothing truly mindblowing here, but i do think it generally looks like a very well executed game. The game oozes style. That little wristflick to pull items towards yourself looks fun & easy to pull off. The iconic medbay sound is still there. Sad times when the rat clipped through the world.

That said, i do feel like there are missed opportunities here. Items seem to be classified either as a weapon, critical item or random junk, and that breaks the immersion for me. When you find a pipe, you should definitly be able to wield it as a weapon. Sure, make it do garbage damage, but it should still be an option in a game that is so much about playing with random junk. When you throw a briefcase at a dude, he should react to it. A barrel that deals damage to you, should also have some effect on the enemy if you throw it to him. A wooden board that will fall down if you run at it, should also be affected by you swinging an iron bar at it. The game seems very set on what your 'damagedealers' are, and that makes the random stuff you can pick up and fling around quite meaningless because it doesn't do anything.

I would love to be able to fill buckets of water and flood an area and then shoot an electric cable loose to make my own electric death trap. Just like the one you encounter in Half Life. But i doubt that it is possible based on what i've seen. It would also be nice if they made like an invisible head at your viewport, so that when you move with your head through a bunch of wires there would be some collision with that, instead of you phasing through the wires and them not moving one bit.

I also wonder why they didn't just model a torso & legs? Yes, if you want to you could make it look all fucky compared to what you're doing in the real world, but 95% of the time it would add to the immersion that you're really a person in this world i think. Especially when a key mechanic is to fling items towards yourself, you don't want to end up with the items phasing through your 'body'. It would be very nice if ammo packs would just bounce off your body and land in front of you instead.

But yeah, this seems like a quality product and i'm happy for the people that can play it :) Perhaps in 5 years there will be some random internet dude that manages to retrofit all those little VR specific controls onto a keyboard & mouse and it ends up being somewhat playable outside of VR :P

I'm all for Jeff doing dumb shit to try and break the game, but it really relies on a group setting and being able to hear him. Plus the incredibly loud game audio makes this pretty unwatchable.

I realize that this is hard, but yeah. No more VR games in quarantine please.

Reviews claim this is the best VR experience out there, and the real "episode 3". All that maybe true, but I'll wait for a FPS version of the game. Not willing to spend money on a VR setup.

I would watch Jeff play the whole game with his rat friend.

This looks like a real bad way to play this game.

protect the rat at all costs

@onemanarmyy: This was exactly my take away.

Not being able to pass your gun freely between your hands, not being able to use junk as weapons, couldn't knock the boards down with the pipe...

These are all things that just worked as expected in Boneworks which was widely regarded as the "This is cool but just WAIT for Alyx" experience. Now Alyx seems to have far less immersive interaction by comparison.

Seems like folks way into the Half-Life world and lore are getting that out of it though, so that's rad.

Im about 11 hours in, and unlike Jeff im totally blown away. As a 36 year old dude I can't remember the last time i said "holy shit" once every hour "just" because of a game. Sure, it's not a vr revolution like some might have expected, but to me it's by far the most polished VR game I've played. The graphic and world (esp on ultra) is amazing, the sound design is spot on, the writing and voice action is (like all Valve games) spectaculair.

Granted, I AM a Half-life fan, which definitely only makes the experience better. Nothing like seeing all this stuff you watched in 2d in hl1/2/episodes suddenly fully blown up in 3d and in amazingly high resolution.

Just for reference, i played it on a Quest (with link cable, 2070 gfx) and only had like 1.3x1.3m (4x4 foot) space after moving my couch around, and while it wasn't perfect it was plenty fine to have an unforgettable experience. If you (like me) love half-life i would highly recommend trying out this game.

Just an FYI. Danny O'Dwyer has a full playthough on YouTube.

I get why, but he decision to not have melee combat in a 'survival horror' type game is incredibly strange though...

@hurricrane: I agree with you there. The game audio was just way too loud and very distracting when trying to listen to Jeff's (albeit slightly snarky and sometimes negative) observed input into the gameplay and visual experience he was having. It was borderline unwatchable. Lapel mic next time?

Maybe he wasn't really that into wanting to play HL:Alyx in the first place, but possibly the only GB Crew that has the VR set-up at home to do so.

@tefari: Oh, why is that? What didn't you like about this?

I am around chapter 7, just over half the way through the game- I set up a room dedicated for VR, modded my controllers to feel more like pistol grips and extended the thumbsticks on the index default with some extra controller pieces from a dualshock and a broken xbox elite pad and ddduude. Jeff you are really missing out on some excellent VR, the opening like, three-ish chapters are a little slow but never really devoid of interaction the way you want it to be; if you want more of that, keep playing but do so with roomscale. There are sections in the game where ducking and pushing doors open or rolling explosive barrels down the hall has direct effect over your life or death, (speaking of, get the most by putting this on the second to hardest difficulty). I dunno, I wouldn't expect one game to sell people on vr, but if you have VR, like VR games, this is by far the most rounded and polished 'VR video game' yet, and definitely should set a standard. Lots of 'moments' in this thing, scripted and player instigated with plenty of choices to approach scenarios. I am totally playing this a second time on hardest difficulty and look forward to (hopefully) other developers using this and Boneworks as benchmarks on what to build upon.

"You want to be my friend?". This is exactly the kind of stupid I need, that rat was awesome! Also, hopefully this makes its way to non-VR, or there is a cheap and easy way to play in VR in the future. Even Jeff's minimal setup in lockdown mode kind of seems daunting to set up... I guess that's just where I am in my digital media life right now.