Half-Life: Alyx Preloads [Mar 21, 2020, 2:54 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Preloads are now underway for Half-Life: Alyx
on Steam.
paving the way for Monday's launch of the new virtual reality installment in the
Half-Life series. This may be useful to more gamers than imagined at
first. Despite the fact that it requires a virtual reality headset,
PlayTracker reports more than 300,000 gamers have preordered the VR shooter
(thanks
VideoGamer.com). Here's word:
Valve's return to City 17 is poised to make sales record headlines next week. PlayTracker Insight tracking is showing Half-Life: Alyx has already surpassed 300.000 owners ahead of its launch on Monday, March 23rd.
This already puts the game within striking distance of the biggest Steam releases of 2020 so far like TemTem, Wolcen, Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus, and, amusingly, Black Mesa - Crowbar Collective's re-imagining of the original Half-Life game. Launch sales should propel the game into first place, pending a surprising over-performance by Doom Eternal this weekend.
VR owners account for only 1% of Steam users according to the Steam Hardware Survey, making this sales performance quite an impressive achievement.
Wolfen wrote on Mar 22, 2020, 10:51:jacobvandy wrote on Mar 22, 2020, 09:00:
How can you have actually tried VR and not understand that handheld controllers are a part of the package for a reason? Keyboard and mouse can't track your hand motions in 3D space, it's a bunch of buttons and a 2D pointer...
Depends on the game doesn't it? If it's just an FPS shooter like Serious Sam, or Alien Isolation, Resident Evil, those are all primarily controller based and could technically work with a Mouse and Keyboard. Seated VR experiences.
It could work, sure, and I bet there are some games like that already (seated VR is driving a car or flying a spaceship though, isn't it?). Anchoring yourself to a desk for FPS controls really limits what you can do and is ultimately not that much different than what we had before in stereoscopic 3D and optional head-tracking sensors, except that the screen is attached to your face. If the mouse is controlling where you aim the gun, how do you turn your view more than 90 degrees in any direction? You can't turn away from the desk. Or is the mouse controlling both aim and view simultaneously? Alternately? Are you going to be able to lose track of your 'cursor' or do you keep it locked to your field of view? How are you running and jumping around in all directions while trying to manage where to look and aim? These are problems VR is meant to eliminate, not continue to try to work around.
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