Right now, people are probably working on Half-Life: Alyx no-VR mods, but Valve’s Robin Walker is unconcerned about it. In his estimation, Half-Life: Alyx wouldn’t be as good without the use of a virtual reality headset.
“[Half-Life: Alyx no-VR mods] will clearly demonstrate to people why we did this in VR,” Mr. Walker told Polygon. “It will be a very crisp way of seeing all the stuff we got for the move into VR.”
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Half-Life: Alyx was clearly designed for VR from the ground up and it shows. Players can move objects like car doors for cover, and a lot of the game’s interactions require that you carefully manipulate objects and interfaces. Strictly speaking, however, a mod that made the game work without the VR headset could accomplish many of the same things, albeit not in as smooth of a fashion.
Robin Walker, for his part, thinks that such a mod will show exactly why Valve went with a VR requirement from the get-go, but he’s also open to being proven wrong.
“If people play [a no-VR mod] and say this is is just as good, that will teach me a lot,” Robin Walker explained. “I will realize I’m wrong, and we didn’t get as much as we thought, and I love to know whenever I’m wrong.”
