Goon Squad, a custom map by Steam Workshop user G Kaf, provides Half-Life: Alyx players a new experience playing as a Combine soldier accompanied by two Combine buddies, trying to make it out of a quarantined sewerage system.
Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t played Half-Life: Alyx’s main campaign.
Released almost a year ago, this is a custom map for Half-Life: Alyx that gives you about 30-40 minutes of content in a similar fashion to the main campaign. While playing as a Combine soldier mixes things up a bit, it ultimately makes little difference to the gameplay — you’ll still be using the gravity gloves and the same weapons, alongside the multi-tool to solve puzzles, just with a few fellow Combine soldiers as back-up.
If you want to get a feel for the map, you can check out the first five minutes in the video embedded below.
That footage should give you an idea of the level of polish we’re dealing with here — not only does the map feel aesthetically in line with most of the Alyx campaign, but it employs a few thoughtful design tricks as well. In terms of map layout, you’ll often see the next objective before you can reach it, prompting you to look for ways to get there. It’s a similar trick used in the main campaign and makes this custom map feel quite thought out.
About halfway through the map — spoiler warning for those who want to play it fresh themselves — you’ll encounter a familiar foe from the main Alyx campaign. That’s right, Jeff is back, baby, and he’s up to the same old tricks. Just like in Chapter 7 of Alyx’s campaign, you’ll lead this blind monster astray by chucking bottles and bricks across the map in an effort to distract and misdirect him using sound. You’ll have the added pressure of completing Combine mini-game puzzles this time as well, which adds another layer of stress.
Just like Loco-Motive, if you’re looking for a solid and reasonably short map that offers more of the same high-quality Alyx gameplay as the campaign, then Good Squad is a great option. You can subscribe to the map on Steam Workshop and check out our guide on how to install and play custom Alyx content.
A newly released custom map for Half-Life: Alyx presents a 45-minute level that feels polished and fun to play.
Loco-Motive is available on Steam Workshop now, and the work of Maarten Frooninckx, Ross Joseph Gardner and Joey Bracken, who took care of the level design, writing and voice acting respectively. And yes, that’s right — there’s voice acting! The map starts off with what seems to be a custom Russell voiceline tasking Alyx with investigating a cache in the train yard. It’s a good impression that feels eerily close to Rhys Darby — close enough to make me briefly question whether it was a repurposed line from the game’s main campaign.
I played through around half of the map earlier today, but a full playthrough should last around 45 minutes give or take, according to level designer Maarten Frooninckx.
You can watch us play through the opening moments of the map in the gameplay video above, which gives you a good look at the main area that the action centers around. Some users on Twitter did report a drop in performance when in the outdoor areas. While there were definitely outdoor spots where the framerate went a bit wonky, overall we found performance to be generally stable.
For a custom map, Loco-Motive is really impressive and has a high level of detail. There are plenty of good Half-Life: Alyx maps and mods, but very few of them have this level of thought put into them on an aesthetic level. At times, it just feels more like a natural extension of the game as opposed to a community-made level.
A new addon for Half-Life: Alyx offers a couple test chambers inspired by Portal 2 that you can solve in VR without a portal gun.
The mod is called ApertureVR – Thinking Without Portals and it does a fantastic job recreating the look, feel and sound of Valve’s classic Portal 2 adapted with Half-Life: Alyx’s gravity gloves to pull cubes over to you. There’s no portal gun here, there’s only four test chambers and we were only able to successfully complete the first two — there seemed to be a progression bug with the third one at the time of this writing. Last year we looked at another mod that let you walk through a Portal 2 map and pick up some items, but this latest one actually offers a bit of gameplay and its creators hope it can serve as the basis of much more.
The first playable demo of the addon for Half-Life: Alyx was put together by four people in less than a month and features more than 200 models that are ported or new, according to the creators, and they’re offering the ApertureVR Source Pack with “prefabs, models, scripts, maps and more that allows creators to design more custom test chambers in VR.”
“With a bigger team, we hope we can integrate new puzzles, more unique VR-friendly mechanics and vastly improved assets,” the description for the addon explains.
We captured a six minutes of gameplay so you can check out how it looks:
You can find the addon here and there’s a Discord server you can join for more information about the effort. The Half-Life: Alyx community continues to build on Valve’s tools in every direction — we recently reported on more BioShock levels planned for release as an addon later this year.
We spoke with several VR game designers and developers about the important (and difficulty) of creating believable and immersive hands in VR.
The Importance of Believable VR Hands
VR hands are a strange thing to ‘get to grips with’ so to speak. Not only do they allow you to interact with the virtual world in front of you but they allow you to become part of it. As you shape yourself to fit into that world, it does the same to fit around you. In real life, you have limited strength and ability but VR gives you that rare opportunity to be better than real life; it lets you become an action hero.
“It was pretty clear right off the bat that it was important,” Kerry Davis, a Valve programmer that worked on Half-Life: Alyx, said in an interview “Even if you didn’t have a full-body avatar yet, to at least have hands so that you could sort of connect with the world and actually participate. We all have an innate desire to control the world we inhabit. As a VR user, you don’t simply want to sit back and let the story happen—you want this organic control over the world. “People really wanted to have hands.”
Half-Life: Alyx’s design encapsulates this. There’s this visceral sense of control you have covering your mouth when you come across Jeff or even that satisfying click you get from loading up ammo. Tristan Reidford, a Valve artist who also worked on Alyx, learned this previously when working on the Aperture Robot Repair Demo that shipped as part of The Lab.
“We didn’t have hands in that… we simulated the controller… that satisfied people’s desires to have representation,” Reidford said.
The most fascinating thing about VR hands is the spectacle itself, the representation of you. When using a controller, you can disconnect and understand that certain buttons equal certain actions. The uncanny valley nature of movement in VR makes it just close enough to true immersion to become distracting when it’s not.
The uncanny valley in this case represents that physical and mental border between what your eyes see in the headset lens and what you feel around you. As VR gets closer to real life, it also gets further away. There’s something distinctly recognizable, yet alien-feeling about this imitation of real life. VR is at its best when it’s immersive and compelling but not trying to lie to you. It offers you a fantasy and, in the case of Half-Life: Alyx, that alien feeling comes from somewhere else: Xen
“Now you don’t need as much of an abstraction so you can almost get an exact representation of reality,” Davis said. “It turns out it’s almost harder to do in VR.”
The complicated nature of emulating some sense of real-life movement means you often have to trivialize or exaggerate that movement. “In VR, your interactions are so close that your brain wants to fall back to actions you’ve known since you were a toddler,” Davis said.“We still have to put this interface layer in there and say we’re defining what the constraints of this virtual world are.”
You are constrained in two senses when in VR. There are the constraints of your movement—such as how far you can move in your actual room and how much you can lunge forward before colliding head-first into your dresser—and the constraints of the tech itself. There is this wonderful creativity that springs from necessity when creating games atop necessary limitations.
Oftentimes, a world has to be made less organic and genuine to feel real, as paradoxical as that sounds. The swinging of a sword feels natural but you don’t have to undergo a year of training before you can use it in VR. It throws a little bit of ‘real life’ out the window to provide a more fun and, ironically, more immersive experience.
Limitless Limitations
Over at Streamline Media, a small group working on their first real VR title. “Due to resolution issues they (the team) often went back to using just larger gestures and bigger levers,” Stefan Baier, COO at Streamline Media, said. “Smaller hand gestures didn’t reliably scale and made it not work well with the dev work we were doing for PS4 where you don’t have that input.”
When working with it, PSVR often has to be at the bottom of the barrel, technologically speaking. This means that whilst hand gestures are held back in some sense, the choice to fit certain actions in are made purely for the player experience. When you can’t show off the tech or provide hyper-realistic details, you only provide what’s necessary. A streamlined control system allows for more natural movement, even if it’s constrained.
“We are always limited by the hardware…Especially with these fairly new technologies…tracking will massively improve”, Christof Lutteroth, a senior lecturer in the department of computer science at Bath University, said. “There’s nothing fundamental that will prevent us from simply tracking our hands. It’s just a computational problem that’s harder to solve.”
Ultimately, we are always held back by the tech but this doesn’t mean we should stop and accept it as it is.
“From what I’ve seen…It’s definitely a big step forward. However, it’s still very rudimentary,” Lutteroth said when talking about the Oculus Quest’s finger tracking. “When you come to hand tracking, there’s quite a lot of error involved with machine learning… That’s very often data-driven.”Due to the varied nature of human fingers (that’s before mentioning those with disabilities) hand tracking technology is dominated by research into what an average hand is. Unfortunately, with the way that research works, it often gets caught up in implicit biases.
One very highly publicized case of these forms of bias is Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Tay. It was designed to pick up on speech and emulate it to make Tay’s speech sound authentic. Within a day, it was virulently bigoted. This is an interesting microcosm of how these biases set in. If the people you test are racist, your chat bot will be. If the people you test have all ten fingers, your hand designs will be.
This is why Davis and Reidford were so outspoken in our interview about the power of playtesting. Reidford spoke of finger tracking and the unique hurdles in making your movement feel both organic, yet slick.
“There’s this sliding scale where, on one side, it’s fully finger tacking and then, on the other side, 100% animation,” Reidford said. ”We had to find the balance there… as soon you put the player under any kind of duress…They just want to slam a new magazine in.”
Surpassing Limitations
There’s creativity to just existing in VR. Davis mentioned that testers told him “‘Yeah, I’m playing this. I don’t feel powerful… I feel like my normal everyday self… that’s not why I go into games,’” Davis said. “‘I go into games to feel powerful and skilled.’” Even though it emulates your actions, VR is so captivating due to its ability to emulate the wonderful and powerful. That uncanny valley is less prevalent when the situation itself is one that you choose to put yourself into. When you’re aware of your world and place yourself in there, you can forget all about the gear you’re wearing.
A fantastic example of this is Half-Life: Alyx’s gravity gloves. “In Half-Life: Alyx it was about having the hands feel so natural you don’t really think about them anymore,” Reidford said.
You hold your hands up, grab an item and pull it towards you, and hope it lands. As long as you’re close to where you should be, it will always land. The same design philosophy is at work with the doors in Alyx. They don’t function like a normal door. You put your hand up to the doorknob and your character just turns it automatically.
“The player can still turn the handle themselves if they want to but they don’t have to, all they have to do is reach out, make a fist, and the door is open,” Reidford said. “Over time, it looks so correct and it’s what they expect to happen that the player actually believes that they’ve done it. They think that they reached out and turned the handle themselves when really they didn’t. The game did it for them”
The genius of Half-Life: Alyx is that this notion of feeling like “the action hero” is deployed so effectively without making you overpowered. You can simultaneously get crushed by creatures, cower away from Jeff, and giggle at the falling physics of a head crab—yet you still get out there, load your weapon, and take down the bad guys. This is a testament to VR as a whole. There’s a spectacle to it that can only be accessed via your hands. From its early days and crude movements to the beginning signs of significant hand tracking, there’s this bustling sense of creativity that keeps pushing the industry forward.
When you stare into the dark lenses of a VR headset and find yourself staring back, you look around your environment, look down at your hands, then squeeze closed your fists and you become something grander than the every day. You become your own version of an action hero.
24 hours before I was set to publish my Half-Life: Alyx review, I found myself in a sudden crisis of confidence.
I’d just turned in my near-3,000 word draft. In it, I’d outlined a game that easily earned full marks for its standout production and refined gameplay, but was curiously measured in other areas. It was disappointing, I argued, that Alyx didn’t let players get their hands a little dirtier. Valve kept a lot of the game’s physicality — namely the melee attacks and fully-interactive environments that made Boneworks and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners shine — at a knowing arm’s length. Alyx seemed visibly weary of taking that step.
When Half-Life: Alyx arrives tomorrow, we know many of you will want to share your first playthough with friends, so we’ve published a guide to help tune the game’s settings for spectating and streaming before you start. https://t.co/4RS3FytHMDpic.twitter.com/2qlgof0zr7
This GIF gave me pause for concern. I’d played through Alyx three times now (including on the hardest difficulty) and not once had to fight off headcrabs with my own two hands and certainly not with the aid of an office chair. Had I somehow played it wrong? Did Alyx actually hide a deeper level of physical action that it just wasn’t communicating very well?
Not really, I don’t think. I did another half-run of the campaign and came to the same conclusions I had the first three times – some props in certain scenes were still plastered firmly in-place, like a ladder I had first thought would help me clear the gap Alyx must jump in the opening escape sequence.
Then I bravely tackled the sewer section once more, this time arming myself with a giant plastic bucket in hopes that I might be able to scoop up headcrabs, trap them inside and then pin the makeshift cage to the floor with a heavier item. No such luck – if the bucket didn’t catapult itself to the other side of the room in stubborn defiance of my demands, the headcrabs themselves often refused to be caged. It doesn’t help that you can’t pick up live crabs in the same way that makes toying with Boneworks’ robotic counterparts such a joy.
Ultimately I decided not to let this weigh too heavily on my review as it seemed unfair to a game that hadn’t explicitly promised this approach and that I myself was forcing the Boneworks comparison on it heavy-handedly. And, as a result of that design, Alyx avoided some of the messiness its contemporaries chose to embrace. But, one year on, I can’t shake the suspicion that Alyx could have pushed the bar for VR even higher than it already has done if it had leaned into these concepts a little harder. What if Valve thrust you into situations in which you used garbage bin lids as a primitive means of cover as you charged The Combine in the game’s firefights? How much scarier would that hotel headcrab onslaught have been if all you’d had to defend yourself with was one end of a mop?
In fairness, Valve’s Jason Mitchell gave solid reasoning when I asked about this direction ahead of the game’s release:
“In Alyx if we have the player hold something large and rigid there’s a lot that’s gonna happen in a physical simulation that’s not gonna feed back into your hand,” he said. “So basically you’re not going to have any kind of haptic feedback. Don’t even worry about bludgeoning and impaling something, even something just as simple as tapping a tool on a desk or whatever. You don’t get the force feedback from that sort of thing. I think it’s just inherent in VR that we aren’t in the sci-fi future exoskeleton level of VR where every bit of our sensory input and output can be manipulated. So it’s not a strength of VR systems now, so we decided not to lean into it for that reason.”
It’s a sound position and, if Valve had decided otherwise, we might not even be talking about the same game right now. Regardless, these omissions are what made Alyx a strangely familiar experience for long-time VR players. A handful of sequences aside (Chapter 7, to be precise), it rarely feel as revelatory as the moment you swing a katana through a zombie’s neck in Saints & Sinners, or surpassed one of Boneworks’ platforming puzzles not by playing to the game’s rules but instead those you’d expect from our reality.
Standing in for those revelations, though, was rock solid playability. Let’s be clear, this is not intended to trivialize Valve’s work on Alyx, a game that, on its first birthday, has more than fulfilled its duty as a touchstone of quality VR gaming. In place of these interactions was peerless level and enemy design, something that both Boneworks’ single-minded AI and Saints & Sinners repeated open-world environments can’t quite measure up to. And, while it might not have had much in the way of melee combat, rooting yourself behind cover and daring to poke out behind corners or steal pot shots from under cars remains a must-see experience.
There’s still ground to cover, too. Essential as it is, for many Alyx alone won’t justify dropping around $1,000 on a gaming PC and compatible VR headset. But the prospect of the game potentially coming to Sony’s now-confirmed PS5 VR headset is a tantalizing one indeed, and it may well be here that the game truly earns the moniker of a system seller. I won’t join the chorus of speculation about what Valve itself has planned in the future, suffice to say that I hope the game’s ending moments are a direct hint that its next VR efforts might further bridge the gap between my hopes and VR’s capabilities.
A year ago today I had this to say about Alyx: “Half-Life: Alyx makes good on its second chance, it is as essential a VR game as you’ll find in 2020, but perhaps the most exciting thing about it is the message is that the best is yet to come.” On the game’s first anniversary, it’s that ‘best’ part I find myself thinking about most. Half-Life: Alyx set a bar yet to be matched by any other VR game, of that there is no question. But I’m still dreaming about what remains just out of its reach.
Half-Life: Alyx is priced 40 percent off through the end of March to mark the one-year anniversary of the release of Valve’s VR masterpiece.
The game is priced at $35.99 through March 31, down from its typical price of $59.99. You can buy it now on Steam and if you haven’t played it already, and you own a PC VR headset, the discount should get some of the last remaining hold outs to experience Valve’s incredible world. We rated it five stars out of five in our review last year and, since release, Valve added Steam Workshop support allowing players to mod the game into a range of game modes and environments. Valve also added more than three hours of commentary to the game with some deep insight into the title’s design.
Half-Life: Alyx also won a lot of best of VR awards and it remains a major milestone in virtual reality game design. We’re intensely curious, of course, what Valve might be planning for the future since there’s deisre for the fabled Half-Life 3 that fans have been hoping to see for many years and there’s clearly a huge amount of VR design experience within the company. Is Valve likely to make that sequel without VR? The upcoming Sony VR headset might also be a candidate for release of Half-Life: Alyx, though that headset isn’t releasing in 2021 and the possibility of Half-Life: Alyx coming to it remains complete speculation at this point.
Are you picking up Half-Life: Alyx with this sale? Let us know in the comments below.
Valve says it’s probably a bit too optimistic to think that a follow-up Half-Life game after 2020’s Half-Life: Alyx is “hot on its heels”.
The team’s Robin Walker said as much to IGN this weekend after taking home the Game of the Year prize for Alyx at the SXSW Festival. When asked if a follow-up to Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was coming in hot after the release of Alyx, the developer replied: “I think hot on its heels might be a little bit optimistic.”
“I think one of the rewarding things about Alyx was to see that community reaction both to the game itself, which we were super happy with at the end of the game,” Walker continued. “At the point we shipped it we were very happy with what we created and we were really excited for people to get their hands on it.!
Turning to the game’s ending (which we won’t spoil here), the developer said that the team was less confident people would react well to the choices it had made, but ended up pleasantly surprised. “So, yeah, the reaction from people to the story and the narrative choices we made at the end have been really– energizing is probably the right term and so we’re really excited to keep going there,” Walker added.
The question of what Valve does next after Alyx, which set a new bar for VR gaming, has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue. A behind-the-scenes experience chronicling the making of Alyx suggested that some at Valve did want to make Half-Life 3, but it might not be in VR, while the team is also working on a top-secret project. We’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed that the studio is planning more VR content of Alyx’s calibre.
Elsewhere in the interview, Walker noted that he expects to see a bigger variety of VR games in the near future. “I think, if I had to guess, in the next few years we’re going to see a bunch more of other kinds of games come to VR and have that rich content in addition to just the mechanics,” Walker said. “And then in between that I would expect we’re going to start seeing, in the ways that as we did that translation of Half-Life into VR, we’re able to start seeing the ways in which VR could add to Half-Life.”
Back in October 2020, we reported on the release of a new mod for Half-Life: Alyx that brought the world of BioShock into the VR game. Now its developer has turned the experience into a full campaign that’s very much worth your time.
Check out the full trailer right here.
Return to Rapture from Wim Buytaert is an eight-part story that revisits even more of the underwater dystopia in a campaign that serves as a sort of VR remake/remix hybrid. Whereas the original demo retooled lots of Alyx’s own assets to bring the mod to life, Wim Buytaert told Upload that the new campaign uses 200 assets from the real game after being given permission from the original developers. The experience now has real Circus of Value and Little Sister machines, for example, and they’re even made to be fully-usable in VR.
The developer also hired a professional voice actor to help guide the story, which sees Alyx herself crash-land outside the entrance to Rapture. And that’s far from the end of it, there’s real audio diaries just like the ones seen in the original game that start to play when you pick them up, and you’ll also find written notes that tie back into the story of the original game.
We’ve got 15 minutes of gameplay from the campaign’s first half below. Pay particular attention at the start if you want to see just how authentic of a mod this really is.
Half-Life: Alyx BioShock Mod Gameplay
Note: There’s some spoilers for late-game Alyx features in the rest of this post and the video below, so use caution if you haven’t played it yet.
I’ve played about half of the campaign and it’s really impressive work. For the most part it uses the same enemies from Alyx itself (though there are some new types we won’t spoil) but they fit right in with the dank remains of Rapture and Wim Buytaert has used some of the original game’s elements in incredibly smart ways to mirror features in the original BioShock. The Vortigaunt energy you wield at the end of the game, for example, has been turned into the electricity plasmid for use in combat and puzzles, while you’ll need to avoid cameras if you don’t want to deploy security forces. Each of the eight chapters introduces new ideas and tips its hat back to both games in different ways.
There’s been some great Half-Life: Alyx mods in the year since the game’s launch (yes, we’re just a few days away from that anniversary) but nothing with the scope and depth of this. If you haven’t dived into the game’s modding scene yet then this is a really great place to start and, if you’ve dreamed of a BioShock VR game, this is as close as you can get right now. You can find them by searching for the developer’s work on Alyx’s Steam workshop page.
In an excerpt from our upcoming interview with community modder Simon ‘DrBeef’ Brown, he said that he would love to port Half-Life 2 to Quest but that it will “probably never happen.”
The reason is mainly practical — all of Team Beef’s ports are possible because the games’ original engines are open source, allowing them to be ported to Android for a Quest release.
Half-Life 2 runs on the Source engine, which is free to use for Steam users but not exactly open source (pun sorta intended) and therefore any Quest ports of the game would not be direct translations of the original. Open source engines also allow modders to port the engines in full without running into any issues.
Here’s DrBeef’s response in full:
UploadVR: I’m wondering if you decided to port something that was Quest 2-only how recent do you think you could go with a game. And is there a dream game that you would like to see ported? Or have you already gotten there?
DrBeef: The problem is there’s a dependency on the actual software being open source. As far as modern games go, I think Doom 3 is kind of — I’m quite happy to be corrected — but Doom 3 is probably one of the most recent well-known popular games that actually has its engine code open source. After that point, I think, id software stopped doing that. There’s not many games studios where they actually open source their engine software. It’s a bit of a shame.
The game I would most like to do, but I think will probably never happen is Half-Life 2. Because I’m slightly ashamed to admit I’ve never played all the way through it. And also I got halfway through playing it on the original dev kit, but never finished it. You know, it’s one of those games that we get asked about all the time. There’s somebody who’s managed to do some sort of Android port somehow. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but it’s, you know, it’s not like a truly open source engine port.
So I think there would be some risks entailed with trying to pick that up. So as it stands, I think that game is out of reach, but, yeah, that would kind of be the dream game to bring to the Quest, but I fear it’s probably never going to happen.
Keep your eyes open for our the rest of our interview with DrBeef, which releases tomorrow on our YouTube channel and here on the site as a transcription.
A new video from Polygon breaks down how the team at Valve created the amazing liquid effect for the in-game bottles of Half-Life: Alyx.
The video features an interview with Matt Wilde, a VFX developer at Valve who work on Alyx and was the person behind the incredible liquid shaders that were added to the game post-launch.
Wilde says he did some preliminary work on the bottle shaders in the lead-up to Alyx’s release, however he wasn’t able to finish it in time. So the game shipped with opaque bottles that lacked the realistic outer shine and the appearance of liquid within.
However, the day of Alxy’s release — March 23 — was also the day that Washington state went into lockdown. Valve employees were now working from home, and so Wilde had a lot more time on his hands. Wilde says he spent ages just looking at bottles to understand the various tiny details of how the liquids and the surface of the bottle reacted to movement and light. He then resumed work on a pixel shader that would give the illusion of liquid within the bottles and provide more realistic interaction with light.
It all culminated in an update for Alyx in late May that added shockingly-realistic shaders to all of the game’s bottles. The liquid within the bottles looked and acted so realistic that you would be forgiven for thinking Valve had added some for of liquid simulation. However, it’s all smoke and mirrors — the entire effect is a visual change to the surface of the bottle and there’s nothing actually inside them at all.
