Half-Life: Alyx is releasing in just a few weeks. With all of the hype building up around the biggest VR release ever, we are learning more and more about how the game will work and feel. The latest advancement? The teleporting inside of HLA isn’t exactly what it seems to be, and wont be your typical VR teleporting.
Half-Life: Alyx is set to give users three different locomotion options throughout all of gameplay, with the ability to change at any given time. The continuous movement is self-explanatory and is exactly what it seems to be. The shifting is pretty much the same as any other shifting game, and the teleportation is not exactly what it sounds like.
In a recent exclusive interview with Tested, Robin Walker explained that the game won’t let you have an advantage over the bad guys without having to pay a price. You wont be able to magically jump around levels without the enemy knowing your next step. During the movement of teleportation, the game itself will be filling the enemies in with your movement. That means no matter where you go, they’ll see it as if you moved from point A to point B.
“I think when we started we had this idea that teleport was a concession of some kind to free movement.,” Walker explained. “But, as we put more work into it, we just became more and more happy with it. We don’t think there’s actually that significant a difference at all between the experience, certainly down to all the sorts of ways, like, the AI, are aware of you; they know if you teleport across the corridor they know, they saw you move across. So we’ve tried to catch all those various cases.”
Part of this came in the form of a “full virtual clothing simulator” that is constantly reacting to the way you move. This helps the game understand what movement took place.
“We have a concept of all the things that are essentially on Alyx and they are affected, the sounds they generate while you teleport, they are affected by what our traversal figures out,” Walker explained. “Like if we know that you’re going to jump down an then move across something when you do that teleport, the clothing will play that drop down/land sound as you go and stuff like that.”
The teleport option of movement is now in line with the other two options, which is being able to see the world move while you move, and not having a clear advantage over the other two. The only reason we are getting more movement options is for the sake of kinetosis, not for easier gameplay. That is what the changeable game difficulties are for.
This is something that we haven’t seen inside of virtual reality yet, but something that we hope will get more popularity as time goes forward. It seems like a great idea and we can’t wait to get our hands on a full game with this movement. Teleportation has been around for some time, but none of it has played like this game.
Half-Life is releasing on March 23. It is releasing on a Monday, which we find incredibly interesting, but Valve is known for moves like this one. Make sure you schedule some time off of work and try this game out! You can pre-order it on the Steam Store today for a small discount, and on release day you can buy for $59.99. For more VR news and gaming community updates, make sue to check back at VRGear.com.
