Alyx footage gives a closer look at the VR experience • Eurogamer.net

Yesterday, YouTube channel Adam Savage’s Tested shared an extensive breakdown of Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx, going hands-on to compare the still-in-development game across a variety of VR devices. And, now, the internet has eked out the gameplay from that original 30-minute video and squashed into down into an easily digestible 11 minutes of juicy stuff.

Tested’s off-screen footage, taken from around three hours of play-through, steers clear of plot details and certain advanced mechanics for obvious spoiler reasons, but it does give a solid look at some of the motion-control-based interactions that players will be able to deploy over the course of Alyx’s reported 15-hour run-time.

The newly released 11-minute edit (created by YouTuber zck2020) features Half-Life fan-favourites like shambling headcrab zombies and dangling barnacles, but on the VR front, teleportation and full locomotion movement are showcased, as are a range of natural motion-based interactions, including aiming, reloading, grenade-tossing, door-opening, and more.

Players appear to be able to summon objects into their hands from a distance for more creative kills, and at one point we see an explosive canister being snatched up, tossed freely toward a barnacle’s dangling appendage, and then detonated as it’s hoisted into the air.

Other eye-catching (and slightly icky) physics-based interactions include moments where the player grabs a box and smashes it against the ground to access an item inside, manhandles a headcrab corpse limb-by-limb, and places several items in a crate before shifting it around.

It’s not the sharpest footage, what with being off-screen and all (off-very-small-screen, in some cases), but it’s a fascinating look at Valve’s next big VR gamble all the same, and gives a solid idea of what the company is striving for in terms of core environmental interaction – even if some of Alyx’s more notable mechanics are seemingly still to be revealed.

Half-Life: Alyx will be playable across a range of PC VR devices when it launches in March next year, including the Valve Index, Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality. And if you’d like to see more exuberant physics-based interactions in VR, why not check out Eurogamer’s Ian Higton having the time of his life in developer Stress Level Zero’s recent Boneworks?

source https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/alyx-footage-gives-a-closer-look-at-the-vr-experience-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=alyx-footage-gives-a-closer-look-at-the-vr-experience-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net