what do you think of this?
Well one of the obvious problems is that the Index is still sold out everywhere. And then the next problem is that Alyx is still a class of its one. I’ve now completed the game and now what? There’s nothing else to play that even comes close.
VR is still in its infancy and it will take some time to gain more traction.
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VR is still very expensive and world economics are in flux with Covid affecting whatever might have been the growth pattern.
It doesn’t change that Alyx has set a graphics performance standard not unlike what Lone Echo did back when it first released.
Whatever shortcomings people perceive in gameplay, many of those writing VR titles going forward will have to consider themselves schooled.
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I actually prefer Asgards Wrath. They are both AAA quality but even after Alyx. I still find myself itching to go back into Asgard.
From the minute i started Alyx. There were little things I disliked that really bring down the score for me. Asgards I have no such complaints.
For Alyx the things I cant ignore are
1. Inventory and weapon equiping.
Reaching over left shoulder for everything. Why not ammo at waist grenades on chest, switch weapons into either hand any time theres only like 3 weapons in the game , so they could have easily put sidearm on the hip, machine gun over right shoulder, shotgun over left,. So annoying filling up the uograde station with resin.
2. Reduced sense of level depth.
What I mean here is if you see a health station without a battery you almost certainly will find one in the same room or next room.
There will be parts of the game where you are thinking man If i had a grenade here I could totally blow these guys up. And then you realize the devs were thinking the same thing and literally put on right in front of you just sitting in the window.
Its like the game was developed by different teams in smaller bite sized segments where segment has everything you need right there. HL2 or 1 did not do this to this extent.
3. Hacking minigames
I get what they were trying to do here, i’ve seen it in every Deus Ex game, but these puzzles are so annoying and grind the tension to a halt.
E.g I just narrowly escape an intense battle fearing for my life, and immediately have to do 4 of these puzzles in a row. And I screw up a few times rotating the orb because the index control grab mechanic isnt perfect. They could have done well to reduce these. Its what you might call a boner killer.
Alyx is great but 7/10 from me.
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True a bar has been set interms of story immersion and gtaphics.
but in terms of gameplay i’ve seen better in certain games.
Walking dead for melee mechanics.and inventory management(Hell arizona sunshine has it beat here too and it came out in 2016)
Boneworks for overall interactivity.
I feel some comcessions were definitely made for VR newbies.
I guess if RPG is your thing, then it’s indeed an awesome game. But I don’t like RPG. So for me there’s really nothing after Alyx. In order for VR to take off, that really has to change. And I’m sure it will some day, but it’s a long road…
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As I said “Whatever shortcomings people perceive in gameplay”
No doubt every game has something somebody will feel could be better.
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I’ve decided that I will upgrade, so that I can play HL:A, which is the first non-sim VR game which really entices me.
The 8KX has really blown my hardware budget for this year!
Just tonight, I ordered a second base station from Amazon. I’m not going to buy controllers (Index knuckles) for a while, but this way, I’ll spread the costs out over a longer time span, so it won’t annoy my wife as much.
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Congrats Neal 
you will luv half -life Alyx for sure .
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I really enjoyed the other Half-Life games and I look forward to playing this one (eventually). In the meantime, I’ll be playing Elite D.
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half -life Alyx is realy a blast… you will love it…
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I really believe that there are some great things coming up in VR in the next couple of years now that PCVR is finally gaining some relevant market share .
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If you have an XBOX controller you should play alien isolation but it’s very scary . I played it a few times on a flat screen before I played it in VR . I can only imagine how scary it would be in VR for the first play through 
I’ve played an hour so far, and it is very impressive.
But…(and of course there was a but), the design is very old fashioned. In a way, this is good - it’s reminiscent of HL 2 et al.
In more ways, this is bad, at least for me. These old school linear games are great fun the first time through, and then have very little replay value (because it’s going to be same thing every time).
I’ll reserve final judgement until I’ve played all the way through, but for games or sims, I am a complete convert to open worlds where I get to choose my path through it, even if it results in a more disjointed story. The linear stuff feels very limited now.
So would I recommend it based on what I’ve seen so far? Absolutely, at least once.
Will it provide hours of enjoyment for years to come? For me, no. And I loved HL2 (and HL, and all the FPS games before them), but I only played it a couple of times, and didn’t finish the second run IIRC. I just don’t replay linear stuff. If you’re the sort of person who replayed it a dozen times, then yes.
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It’s definitely on rails but I have to be honest I prefer FPS single player games to be like this . It’s like experiencing and participating in a great sci-fi adventure .
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I had never played a Half-Life game before. I waited to complete it before coming to this decision - in my personal opinion, whilst far from perfect, this is the best VR game ever.
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Sure but I guess analogous to films, I love sci fi but not so much of the Hollywood blockbuster variety - ie a big focus on lots of eye popping set pieces to ‘wow’ the audience.
Still, Alyx seems to have the story and characters to back it up, compared to other FPS games and especially VR titles
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For sure it’s a very high quality VR title.
It looks to me that Asgard’s Wrath and Stormland are quite open world. I’ll try them at some point.
I’m enjoying Seeking Dawn, for being a Subnautica style game but built for VR from the start, so a much better implementation. I didn’t think I’d like a survival / crafting game like Subnautica, but I was very impressed and I’ll admit it’s the one of the best single player FPS sci fi games I can recall.
Seeking Dawn is like that, but on land and with guns!
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I’m loving it so far for several reasons…
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Linearity: So many VR titles are open world (Skyrim VR), or play from a fixed point (Beat Saber), it makes a nice change to play something that’s more akin to a visual novel, with a story that you play out step by step.
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Lore: From the moment you start playing, you completely believe that you are in the HL2 universe. The sights, the sounds, the feel, everything is true to the original.
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Visuals: I run all the graphics options at max, mostly because I have quite a beast of a PC (I9 9900k @ 5ghz, 32gb of 4166mhz RAM, 1080ti, 2tb M2 SSD) and the game runs as smooth as glass, so whatever optimisations they made to the code, they did a great job.
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Voice cast: Alyx sounds like Alyx, just younger, Eli sounds like Eli, just younger, the Vortigaunts sound like… well… Vortigaunts
(Tony Todd, what a voice!), and Russel (Rhys Darby) has just the right level of cognitive dissonance to bring a proper comic relief to an otherwise oppressively bleak world. -
Interaction: Whoever had the idea of putting ‘gravity gloves’ in the game is a genius. My back isn’t in the best of shape, and having to lean over all the time to pick objects up can be rather uncomfortable to say the least, but now with a pull of the trigger and a flick of the wrist, the object comes to me, brilliant!
There are some downsides though, but they are really minor ones. Not being able to switch weapon hands on the fly is annoying, as from time to time I keep having to re-position my character because if I need to perform an action, but keep a firearm handy, it’s permanently stuck in my right hand. Weapon balance could use a little work, I mean the pistol is weaker than a pint of Bud Light, even with all of the upgrades, and maybe not so many jump scares are needed, this is Half Life, not Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Overall, it get’s a solid 9.5/10 from me, and is by far the best designed game I have in my library. It’s not the one I play most often (Beat Saber) but it’s damn good and not over in a couple of hours.
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I played several hours in Stormland on my Oculus Quest via link. Was enjoying it but didn’t find it as immersive, partly due to potato view. You have reminded me to go back and finish it - maybe this time on my Pimax
Ps from memory I think Stormland was linear too?
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