The video game industry continues to be weird the further into 2020 we get. The most egregious example may be that a brand new Half-Life game came out. While Half-Life: Alyx has been seeing rave reviews since it launched, many fans are upset that it’s a VR-only experience. Valve has no plans to make Alyx available for the non-VR folks, but that doesn’t mean the team doesn’t see it happening anyway. In a recent interview, some intriguing comments came from at least one person in Valve about the game’s potential future.
Valve has always been a company about pushing tech forward, and exploring new spaces. So its engagement with VR comes to no surprise. Also unsurprising is a demand for Alyx to be accessible without an expensive headset. In speaking with Polygon, Valve’s Robin Walker is more or less expecting to see fans get around that need any day now. Walker can’t speak for the whole team, but he says he’s personally fine with the idea. And that’s mostly because of what the team could learn from that.
From Valve’s perspective, Half-Life: Alyx is designed explicitly for VR. The example Polygon uses is the tutorial section, which makes sense with a VR headset’s unique controls, but not at all for simply pressing buttons. But what Walker said is interesting; he suggests that if the fanbase mods Alyx to work on standard displays, and folks who play it that way enjoy it just as much as they would in VR, then that’s a learning opportunity. “I love to know whenever I’m wrong,” he said.
Source: Polygon