Valve has announced it will be releasing its Half-Life virtual reality game Half-Life: Alyx on March 23, 2020. This means the game will be released as originally planned and will not be delayed.
According to a recent announcement, the game will take place between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. It can be considered a prequel to Half-Life 2. In the game Alyx Vance and her father Eli mount an early resistance to the Combine's brutal occupation of Earth.
In VR, players will be able to make use of "gravity gloves" to manipulate objects in 3D space similarly to the iconic gravity gun introduced in Half-Life 2. The game is expected to introduce several other new enhancements not seen before in the franchise.
The game is advertised as "full-length game built from the ground up for virtual reality", suggesting that traditional PC gamers might be out of luck. The trailer shows players can lean around walls and under a barnacle to make an impossible shot, rummage through shelves to find a healing syringe and some shotgun shells and manipulate tools to hack alien interfaces.
Half-Life: Alyx will support a variety of environments, movement systems and input devices. It will be compatible with all major virtual reality headsets, including Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality devices.
The game will also support community environments and creations through Steam Workshop. It is expected mods will appear to allow players to play the game without a virtual reality headset. The game is built upon Valve's Source 2 engine.
Half-Life: Alyx releases on March 23, 2020, for PC.
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