It actually happened. A new Half-Life game is out in the wilds, and it’s a pretty fine one too. Alyx took some 13 years to arrive, though of course it wasn’t the only time Valve meddled with a follow-up to its much-loved series in that time – and it certainly seems like it won’t be the last. Just ahead of Half-Life: Alyx’s release we spoke to game designer Robin Walker and level designer Corey Peters about the long and winding road Half-Life has taken to its return, and what possibly lies in wait for the series.
I’d like to rewind to how the project started. I’m sure you’re well aware there’s been a lot of anticipation and excitement about a Half-Life game for quite some time – you might have seen that around in the few years since Episode Two. How did this project get off the ground within Valve?
Robin Walker: It started because we wanted to work on a VR game, and we were looking at what we felt was the biggest problem facing VR as a platform – we felt like there’d been a lot of technology investment that was moving rapidly and improving in lots of ways. As we often do, we found ourselves looking forward a few years in the future and asking what’s the biggest problem we’ll be facing – and what could we do to help?
And it seemed, if you went and looked at what customers were saying, they would say VR looks interesting, but I’m waiting for the big games to show up, or you’d see people saying stuff like they’re waiting for a game – which we thought was adorably derogatory to all the interesting games out there! There’s so much amazing stuff being done by what’s essentially the indie developer community. But we felt that those are companies that don’t necessarily have the resources or the freedom or the capability to really make something with the sort of scope that it seemed people were referring to when they said they want to be triple-A title. One of the great things about being a customer is you don’t have to make trade offs. That’s not your job. You’re like, I want it all and I want it all now!
Let’s Play Half-Life: Alyx Episode 1: DREAMIN’ OF CITY 17 – Ian’s VR Corner Watch on YouTube
So it seemed obvious that given where we’re at, we could justify putting a real serious and significant resource investment into a VR title. We started with that premise – we weren’t talking about Half-Life or anything, we were just saying let’s try and build something in VR that looks like we could justify putting a whole bunch of our time and effort into it. Once we started doing that, we started out by doing what we almost always do, which is use all the tools we have at our disposal to try and get a head start. We started looking at the various IPs we had, what codebase could we use to start prototyping, what game design space can we explore?