i recommend playing both the saints and sinners games.

Have you ever tried Skyrim VR? Not as slick as Half Life Alyx, but the story is great, many Quests to play and decisions to make which makes the game interesting enough to play it several times... I finished it once about a year ago and started again a few weeks ago, trying to avoid some mistakes I made and seeking better solutions.... I have a handful mods running (I can pick up some objects and have a full body in the game) which makes it more immersive...

Aint valve is just that? They are the most lack of developer working on their most player populated online game ever Only Half life is their original idea the rest is created by modder or other company

@@Deezsirrer ironic how Valve's next game in the Half-Life universe is gonna be a multiplayer game

@@vibaj16 created by icefrog The modder of Moba franchise If he work for blizzard it'd be different story overall. Valve corporation of 96% Working on steam platform and hardware 4% on videogame

Would you do... Me?

@@randyx007 I mean, it don’t count if the balls don’t touch right?

@@DeimosPC true! But on a serious note, it is an amazing game and I get what you are saying... Not about the balls thing, but about experiencing the amazingness that is half life alyx.

@@randyx007 not creepy at all.

@@randyx007 bruhhh

ive never played artifact but im pretty sure that the game is actually really good as far as card games go. it just wasnt what valve needed to release at that time, and it was poorly advertised :\

@@evangrant9312 no that crap is just garbage

​@@nuclearmissionjam3592 source wasn't really an original title. They just ported HL1 to Source

Artifact was actually really fun and well designed, however their monetization of card packs is what killed the game. If they made it easier to acquire cards, it would have blown up I think.

@@csnorth7 yeah valve payed you to say that

i wonder why vr died out. it should of been the future. once you go vr, flatscreen feels so shit

@@nahashammon1081 The tech was (and arguably still is) too expensive for high quality experiences like HLA. Not that it isn't worth the investment, but the price tag puts up a high barrier of entry. Considering the magic of VR doesn't really come across in flat footage, it's not all that surprising to me that more people didn't take the plunge. Unfortunately VR getting off to a slow start put a chilling effect out there for game development. The small install base means larger game companies only dabble in VR here or there (usually ports or smaller projects) because it's hard to make a profit. Even indies who dedicate themselves to VR find it hard to get publishing deals that'll give them the resources they need to make great games. VR wound up stuck in a brutal catch-22, where there isn't a big enough install base for companies to make triple-A VR games, and without those triple-A games, the install base grows very slowly, or stagnates.

Mostly due to the player requiring a lot of space to play and energy (I have myself a Valve Index and a lot of games but you need a certain mindset and move things around to enter a proper session, and that rarely or never happens)

@@GreyMatterShades i guess so, but the price tag isnt an excuse anymore, with meta putting a lot of effort into vr, a headset at 300 with all the capabilities included is now possible and available to the public, thanks to facebook, vr might still be on the rise. Hype can be boosted with the new apple VR

​​​​​​@@Mushe94 "Alot of space" hasn't been a requirement to play most VR games for quite some time. I played the entirety of HL:Alyx completely seated. It also doesn't take much energy to play VR seated unless you're completely out of shape.

It took about a decade for other game developers to match the standard HL2 set in 2004. Namely facial animations and a full-blown physics engine. HL2 was unbelievable for the time it released - it ran on the ORIGINAL Xbox. The Nintendo DS came out the same year. Valve has always been way above it's time. When are we going to see games with procedural-generated movement and graphic fidelity like HL:A? It's been nearly 3 years - Elden Ring and God of War look great but they don't even come close

That's beautiful. I'm glad he got to play it

Completely agree

I would love to see this sort of collaborative effort you're talking about become a thing in VR, whether it's Source or another engine. With all the challenges facing VR developers, it just doesn't make sense for them to be reinventing the wheel every time. I think a model like the Unity asset store could work here. Developers (or hobbyists) could sell or give away their implementations of various VR features (like weighty melee combat physics) or assets pre-built for VR interaction. There's always a bit of a risk that games could start to look and feel too same-y, but skilled developers would be able to use those systems and assets as jumping off points to produce better quality unique games. It could give developers more time to focus on what really matters, and also give other developers a new revenue source.

Thought the exact same thing, then checked out source 2 tools and modding and just couldn't be bothered dealing with the engine, it's just not a great editor. One of the more bizarre things, they could have finally ditched hammer units or "inches" when they moved to vr and made the engine metric and easy to work with real world scale objects... And they didn't :S

One thing you can look forward to is s&box. Garry is the only developer outside of valve that valve trusted with the source 2 repository (because he's the maker of gmod and he wants to do something similar with source 2). He cleaned it up and made a bunch of tools, and eventually be will release this. S&box is basically a game engine on its own, you can make games with it. Like look up "tf2 s& box" and compare to normal s& box gameplay to see how much you have control over. There are also 2d side scrollers, you have an incredible amount of control and it really shows off how good source 2 is. S&box should hold us over, whenever it comes out, and i imagine valve would release the full sdk when half life 3 comes out, HLA was a miracle on its own and they gave basic tools but by the time cs2, neon prime, and hl3 (called hlx internally right now) come out, the engine will be fully ironed out and ready for them to release (assuming they are going to, there's definitely a place for a super optimized engine that can create baked lighting that looks this good even on low end systems), and their new physics engine was made by them this time (and better in every way, anyone that has played hla will know), so they won't need to charge a huge amount of money for a havok license anymore

while I despise where we are at with Graphical Fidelity and Gameplay at the moment, the Quest 2 alone brought 20m players into VR so I really appreciate that in a way

Well it’s just isn’t profitable for devs right now

It makes me so sad to see how much PCVR has stagnated. If developers focused on PCVR, who knows what insane games we would have today and how much mass appeal VR could have. Standalone could very well be the death of VR. Sure, it's accessible, but it gives the mainstream a terrible first impression of VR.

@@Skrenja The issue I see is that since 2020 pc component prices have been going to shit worldwide and I mean I'm fortunate enough to have a capable gaming pc at the moment but I also know that many aren't and this is definitely one result of that

@@Skrenja *Don't worry!* Now that *APPLE* has entered the market, AR/VR is finally *_"legitimized"_* and *_"validated."_* Can't you just _feel_ it? It's all so much better now!! Never mind the *FIVE THOUSAND patents* they claim on a product that is essentially derivative of what everyone else has been doing for the last decade. This will be *SO GREAT* for the industry because *APPLE* is an honorable, respectable company and not at all sleazy! Never mind that the people who have been waiting for *APPLE* to say it's _cool_ will be secluded away in *APPLE'S* little walled garden, safe from us PC low-life and all the VR games and experiences that currently exist. Everything will just be _so much_ better now, because *APPLE!* Woo-hoo! We're SAVED!

I suspect it has a lot to do with the shift in focus towards low-end, mobile/standalone VR by many developers.

It's a combination of the shift toward moblie headsets like @StubbyPhillips said (because that's the only place where VR developers have a decent shot at making a profit), but it's also because Valve didn't need the game to make a profit. They've basically got unlimited money, so they can take a loss on a VR game to try to push VR forward... and also sell their headsets. No other developer (with the possible exceptions of Sony or Meta) could or would put so much money into a VR game. They'd never turn a profit and would have no other motive to do so.

Totally agreed. 2023 is ocming to an end and yet we havenn't seen anything that comes close to half-life alyx. And I am not even talking about the gameplay and story, just VR mechanics and immersiveness.

@@AcCeSsDeNiEd65 Unless Valve releases another Index headset and new nice game to promote it.

​@@inceptional I hope RE4 vr gets a graphics upgrade on the Quest 3 (like shaders?)

​@@inceptionalHavent played RE4 on quest yet but heard a lot of great things. RE8 on psvr2 is stunning and equals Alyx in my opinion. The RE4 remake on psvr2 should be fantastic as well.

Glad someone mentioned this animation technique (originally developed by Ubisoft) many games are popping up now using similar methods and it looks amazing. Its also very interesting to learn about but somehow not very well known, there are several GDC talks explaining motion matching if anyone was wondering :)

It is indeed just using cubemaps that switch depending on which area you're in, which is what everything that has reflections uses in hla (things like metal, floorboards, mud, a bunch of props etc). It's quite similar to half-life 2, but there is a key difference, as the cubemaps are parralax corrected, meaning they have an actual volume, so you can move around and it will morph the cubemap to make it seem like the reflections are actually moving, and not just having a static 360 image projected onto the object like it did in half-life 2. It's not new tech at all but it's very well executed in hla, and it a big reason for why it can look so good while having great performance, as cubemaps take basically no effort for your computer to render.

If you tune the radio down it plays G-Man's creepy trumpet theme from HL2.

Boneworks?

​@@j3s3oGh4nBoneworks campaign sucks ass! The game was an amazing VR tech demo, but is a shit game. Level design and environment was a massive downgrade from Duck Season VR, as well as enemy designs and encounters. And so fucking janky as fuck! The physics & interactions were top notch though, that's really about the good things about the game.

​@@j3s3oGh4nHad more great experimental ideas than Alyx but falls flat in level design and execution

@@DawnAfternoon yeah it's still a good game though :)

@@j3s3oGh4n yeah its a good game, neat mechanics

Valve somehow manage to be the "good guys" of the games industry by simply doing nothing and letting all the competition collapse under their own incompetence and corruption.

what about lone echo

I’ve just started my second play through of the game because I’ve upgraded to a gaming desktop - I never knew this on my original run, and was flabbergasted such a small detail existed! A real funny surprise, love the detail Valve put into this game - still one of the best VR experiences out there.

I can run it on low settings surprisingly well on a 1060 and vr headsets are getting cheaper.

The Valve Index controllers have built in force feedback and vibration. Also just the fact that the chair moves slower than your real hand really makes you feel the weight.

Def not a valve game will be on consoles

@@d00mu half life 1 and 2, portal 1 and 2, and team fortress 2 were all on consoles.

​@@GreyMatterShadesyeah but that was 2 console gen ago

@@j3s3oGh4n Oh I forgot L4D 1 and 2, and CS:GO. Really most of Valve's major games have been on console. You're right it was 2 generations ago, but how many games has Valve released in the past 2 console gens? Consoles have only become more similar to PC's in terms of architecture and ease of porting games since then. There's no reason why they couldn't port HLA to PSVR 2, or hire another company to port it.

@@GreyMatterShades right they could hire another company to make the port they have enough money