Flagship VR title finally released today Half-Life: Alyx from company Valve, concurrently being the first major release in the legendary series since 2007. Obviously, such a large pause between the second episode Half-life 2 and adventure Alix Vance developers from the company Gabe Newell never planned. And in a recent interview with the portal Kotaku Senior Valve Designer Robin Walker and one of the concept artists represented Tristan Reidford confirmed that over the past years their team has been constantly working to continue the story Gordon Freeman.
“Our team worked on various projects that could potentially become the new Half-Life. But the problem was that Half-Life was always a series within which we tried to find the most interesting combination of relevant technologies and a vibrant artistic approach that taken together would have turned into something impressive. “
The classic Half-Life was a game that upturned the presentation of the plot in first-person shooter games. In turn, the sequel experimented more with characters and physically-oriented interaction with the game world. And in two independent episodes of Half-Life, the developers from Valve tried to build on the experience accumulated over the years in order to further improve already implemented ideas and concepts. But when it was time to work on the third episode, no one in the studio could come to a common fundamental understanding of the future game, which was supposed to give the players a sense of “surprise, discovery and real progress”, as all previous iterations of the cult shooter dealt with.
“Then we realized that the third episode would have to grow in scale, break out of the framework of“ episodicity. ”The game was supposed to become much larger.”
And after that went a long period of trial and error. Walker did not go into the details of all the projects in the Half-Life universe that he had worked on over the past time, but he mentioned that caught in the net the so-called “script” of the third episode from Mark Laidlaw, who left Valve in 2016, was never seen by anyone as the final and canonical version of the plot. As it turned out, the third episode of Half-Life (or Half-Life 3) never had a clear ending or overall structure.
“After reading the published“ script ”of Mark, I immediately thought to myself: we never planned that the third episode would follow this storyline. But Mark had written similar things that are based on his fresh ideas. We never had “a plan that clearly states exactly what the third episode should be. There has never been a detailed description of all the events and the plot. We worked with several draft versions at once.”
Ultimately, Valve comes to the decision to create Half-Life: Alyx precisely for the reason that the team finally found a plane where technology can enter into synthesis with real creativity – virtual reality.
“We no longer had to ask abstract questions like“ We are working on Half-Life 3. How do we get players interested in it? ”We had access to a completely new platform, we could study its strengths, realize what wasn’t they’ve done before. We had clear tasks that could be started day after day. Take and work. “
Now that Half-Life: Alyx has reached the players, we can say that Valve has officially returned to the gloomy and dangerous universe of headcrabs. And even though it’s too early to talk about the next steps of the company, it is very likely that in the foreseeable future, further announcements from legendary developers are waiting for us.
“We really enjoyed working on this game, and we are not at all against continuing to work on similar projects,” Walker explains.
The creation of Alyx made noticeable changes in the familiar atmosphere inside Valve, where before employees could not find a suitable opportunity to launch the next Half-Life into full production.
“During the development process, we often share some interesting thoughts with each other. Fantasies on the subject of the plot, helping to implement any ideas. This is a pleasant process, and over time, these small concepts accumulate much more than we can afford to implement in as part of one game, so for ourselves, we just check them and then put them in a separate pile, because we need to complete the actual work first. Over the past three years we have come up with a lot of cool things. It seems to me that in the future waiting for a lot of interesting things, “concluded Tristan Reidford.
Our review on Half-Life: Alyx is available. here.
See also: Dungeons, a linear beginning and more – an insider shared new details of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2.
Add to our Telegram channel via the link or search for it manually in the search by name gmradost. There we publish, including that which does not fall into the news feed. Also subscribe to us in Yandex.Zen, Twitter and VK. And do not forget that we have a dark theme and a ribbon instead of tiles.
