Half-Life: Alyx l Quarantine In City 17

That train yard fight was one of the most intense things I think I've played through. It just felt so good. :wub:

I really enjoyed the Up Is Not Jump video on this, yesterday. There are no major story spoilers, but he does show a lot of locations and talks about enemies that have been treated as spoilers elsewhere in this thread, so watch with caution if you want everything to be a surprise.

It's refreshing to hear someone who obviously makes a fair chunk of youtube money off VR videos talk so frankly about the current state of the VR landscape, and how Alyx is likely to remain an anomaly for a little while. My only hope is that with source engine 2, there's an engine out there that should be easy for people to work with, and we know is optimised for great performance in VR, so hopefully we'll begin to see smaller teams putting out more "complete" packages, sooner than we would have otherwise.

Finished it.

Spoilers ahoy!

Game Of The Year? Possibly. There's quite a few contenders released in just the past few weeks!

Certainly I'm calling it as VR Game Of The Year. I don't see anyone topping this for a while.

So I'm a few days removed from this now and feel I can share some more of my thoughts about it.

It's astonishingly good from start to finish and is utterly masterful at immersing you in the place and atmosphere that it want's to present.

That said there are a couple of things I think detract from it slightly.
I would have liked more combat areas with Combine troops. This fights with them were amazing fun, especially the early ones where you're pushing through the train platforms, but they just seemed a little too spaced out. More please.

The very end section where the Russells get upgraded and you're fighting your way to the cell was very short and felt a little thrown together. Almost like they had to rush to finish it. The corridor with all the grenades? Just weird and not up to the rest of the games standards.

But those are minor complaints for me.

I really can't see how they can do another Half-Life game without making it VR now, especially the way this ends. Anything other than a full VR follow-up like this will feel like a lesser experience and a step backwards. It'd be like Nintendo saying Breath of the Wild 2 is going to be exclusive to smart phones. It'll rub a lot of people up the wrong way, but those people are already annoyed about Alyx anyway.

I've been unable to get this out of my head for days now and I'm genuinely considering another playthrough already.... Perhaps once I've finished FFVII Remake.

What VR headset did you use? I've got a Rift and am tempted to get it set up again for this.

Cheeky Devlin wrote:Certainly I'm calling it as VR Game Of The Year. I don't see anyone topping this for a while.

I'm not saying they are going to be better than this, but there are two other big high profile single player story VR games coming out this year in Medal of Honor Above and Beyond and Lone Echo 2

HSH28 wrote:
Cheeky Devlin wrote:Certainly I'm calling it as VR Game Of The Year. I don't see anyone topping this for a while.

I'm not saying they are going to be better than this, but there are two other big high profile single player story VR games coming out this year in Medal of Honor Above and Beyond and Lone Echo 2

Not PC, but there's also Iron Man VR. I can see that being PSVRs 'equivalent' to Alyx.

Oh I hope I'm wrong. Multiple games of that length and quality in one year would be just lovely.

Super Dragon 64 wrote:What VR headset did you use? I've got a Rift and am tempted to get it set up again for this.

Just a standard Oculus Rift. Looked just lovely on it too.

Looked great on my v1 Vive too. Can't wait to play it again :datass:

Semi related, I was looking through my books box in the loft earlier and found this:

That top picture makes it look a bit tatty, when it's in excellent condition.

State of that carpet :dread:

Cheeky Devlin wrote:Oh I hope I'm wrong. Multiple games of that length and quality in one year would be just lovely.

Super Dragon 64 wrote:What VR headset did you use? I've got a Rift and am tempted to get it set up again for this.

Just a standard Oculus Rift. Looked just lovely on it too.

Excellent, I'll try to get the headset out over the weekend. What specs are your PC?

Super Dragon 64 wrote:
Cheeky Devlin wrote:Oh I hope I'm wrong. Multiple games of that length and quality in one year would be just lovely.

Super Dragon 64 wrote:What VR headset did you use? I've got a Rift and am tempted to get it set up again for this.

Just a standard Oculus Rift. Looked just lovely on it too.

Excellent, I'll try to get the headset out over the weekend. What specs are your PC?

Ryzen 7 2700X 8 Core (3.7GHz-4.35GHz)
16GB Corsair Vengeance 2666MHz RAM
8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080

My processor is quite old but I have a 1070 so I'll see how I feel once it's all set up again.

Super Dragon 64 wrote:My processor is quite old but I have a 1070 so I'll see how I feel once it's all set up again.

I ran it on an i5-2500K, (overclocked, but still,) you'll probably be fine.

Knoyleo wrote:
Super Dragon 64 wrote:My processor is quite old but I have a 1070 so I'll see how I feel once it's all set up again.

I ran it on an i5-2500K, (overclocked, but still,) you'll probably be fine.

That's good to hear, thanks. I'm excited! :toot:

I look forward to you updating us as you go through it.

So many great moments.

It's masterful at making you feel tense, but I would say that it thankfully never strays too far into Horror. I pushed through the "scarier" moments and I'm a total shitebag.

Not really a specific spoiler but it has at least one "they're coming out of the god-damn walls" moment.

God I wish there was more of this to play. :lol:

Finished this earlier today. Thoughts:

That was some ending. It didn't come entirely out of the blue since I'd had some of it spoiled already (I knew the G-man would show up since I'd seen a ton of Youtube thumbnails relating to HL:A with the G-man in them, and not having come across him so far meant he had to show up at the end).

I intentionally spoiled the Jeff chapter for myself. I'd seen bits here and there and had read about it being very scary and tense, and I wasn't looking forward to that.
I regret it now (looking back it really isn't as bad as people made it out to be and I might have enjoyed it a whole lot more if I'd gone into it blind), but at the time I felt like the game was already tense enough and at times I struggled (a little) to push through.

More shootouts with the combine would have been nice.

All around fantastic game, best thing I've experienced in VR so far by a mile.

Minor quibbles: I found some of the controls to be a little awkward at times, especially in the middle of combat. Often I would try to switch to the glove with my weapon hand to grab a thrown grenade, only to realize I had managed to switch to one of the guns instead when pressing the trigger on the controller fired a shot instead of locking on to the grenade. That cost me some health a fair number of times, and my life once or twice.

One of my favorite aspects of the game are the visual gags. The best ones are any involving headcrabs. My favorite is probably that one headcrab which you catch "in the act" with a mannequin head. It looks so ashamed, like a teenager whose mom has just caught him looking at porn.
The alcoholic headcrab in Chapter 7 is another good one.

The workshop tools are out now, which hopefully means we'll get some more content soon.

*Bump*

I'll be giving that a shot at some point.

I've not been keeping track of updates to Alyx or mods, but I did see the update to liquids in bottles, which looks amazing. Will probably have a second play through of this soon.

Victor Mildew wrote::datass:

I've not been keeping track of updates to Alyx or mods, but I did see the update to liquids in bottles, which looks amazing. Will probably have a second play through of this soon.

Yeah I've not been explicitly keeping an eye on them, but sometimes stuff pops up in my Youtube recommendations which peaks my interest.

Half-Life: Alyx l Quarantine In City 17

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