Valve Announcing Half-Life: Alyx VR Game On Thursday

[kpedersen]

Obviously, most people don't have VR and that's not about to change.

It is because of vendors like Facebook and Valve that this will not change. They make this whole monetization DRM platform *ontop* of VR rather than *around* it. It is pretty sleazy.

I don't even feel that Khronos's OpenXR standard is enough to solve this because these non-ethical vendors will simply provide the API behind layers of DRM bollocks.

The only real future I can see is the OpenHMD project, completely bypassing all the crap and thus measuring the lenses and providing "magic bytes" down the USB directly. However it only takes the vendor a bit of time to completely encrypt the traffic between the HMD (which of course they will do if OpenHMD gains more traction) and the whole system will die. The locked down Oculus Go type hardware is also a reaction to this which is slowly strangling the development environment requiring device specific DRM licenses just for development. Absolutely appalling behavior from these vendors.

That said, we are using OpenHMD for a fairly large scale music research project and it is working perfectly (OpenHMD is great!). Unfortunately we have had to completely step outside the commercial VR community and support to do it *correctly*. The ecosystem sucks and almost deserves to fail. Obviously the consumers will ultimately be the ones missing out.

[schmidtbag]

So basically, they don't think vr can sell on its own, so they need to chain an exclusive to it.

I take it you've never used a VR headset? Because most games wouldn't make for a good VR experience - having something exclusive is the best way to go about it.

Seems to me you're just salty.

[Aeder]

If VR is as amazing as they say it is, then people would buy into it regardless of exclusives. There would be no need for Valve to force people to get one just to play the only half-life game in over 10 years

VR is amazing... for a bunch of niche genres. Flight simulators, driving/racing games, mech games and a few others could greatly benefit from it. But most don't bother adding support because it only benefits a tiny portion of their players, and in some cases they only release a new game every now and then (mech games and flight sims in particular suffer from this).

So yeah, that also leads to VR having no AAA/interesting games.

[thunderbird32]

It is amazing as they say but after paying 500$+ for some decent VR gear you will realize that you have to spend at least additional 2000$+ on a new pc to run them otherwise you will have headaches and endless vomiting attacks. I dont want to know your personal financial status but at least for a lot of others this is not a no brainer.

p.s.: ...at least the pc got a bit cheaper thanks to AMD Ryzen

That's an exaggeration. I'm using an original Oculus Rift with a Core-i5/GTX970 and I've never had any headaches or nausea from it. For some people that certainly can happen, but it's certainly not a guarantee. The downside of this setup is that the original Rift was too low of a resolution, so the screendoor effect is very prominent. On the other hand, if it was higher resolution my GPU wouldn't be able to keep up.

[gnarlin]

So basically, they don't think vr can sell on its own, so they need to chain an exclusive to it. They also don't think the exclusive can sell on its own, so they cash in on the neutron star of hype that is the half life fanbase. But they ALSO don't want to risk actually damaging half life's reputation, so they make a "spiritual successor" that can safely be buried if people don't like it.

I see your cynicism is as strong as mine ;-)

[CochainComplex]

That's an exaggeration. I'm using an original Oculus Rift with a Core-i5/GTX970 and I've never had any headaches or nausea from it. For some people that certainly can happen, but it's certainly not a guarantee. The downside of this setup is that the original Rift was too low of a resolution, so the screendoor effect is very prominent. On the other hand, if it was higher resolution my GPU wouldn't be able to keep up.

You might have noticed that I have wrote decent. Because of the arguments you have wrote later on. Even now I dont like to have fps below 60@1080p. Buying a computer achieving this on 1080p with settings to max on current AAA Titles is like spending around 1k +/- 200. So if I want to have fluid 60-80+ on an HTC Vive I will have to spend at least 500-800$ more. So well yes I was exaggerating around 300$ true but none the less it will be around 1700$ ..just to be able to play current games.

How about in 2 years ? 40-50fps on VR ? not sure if this is pleasent....spending additional 800$ on a gpu ...crossfire or sli is declining in game support and then there are microstutter which will be seen more in VR games so now cheap upgrade available.

[Cape]

I'm guessing that just like Boneworks this is going to be an attempt to show people "how to do VR right".

Well... The whole HalfLife franchise has always been a big showcase for other developers to teach them what FPS should be like.

Nothing wrong with it, except VR costs a ball of the sack FFS!