Home Gaming First “No VR” mod for Half-Life: Alyx is now live and wonderfully clumsy

First “No VR” mod for Half-Life: Alyx is now live and wonderfully clumsy

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You tell the dwellers of the internet that they can’t do something and they’ll go out of their way to do that very same thing. They’re a stubborn bunch, those lurkers of the forums and reddits that never grace the light of the public eye. One can only imagine the vitriolic reaction to being told, “You can’t play the next Half-Life without a VR headset”. They laughed, and smirked the way edgy anime characters do in an attempt to look cool and menacing, knowing full well that those limitations wouldn’t be held in place for too long.

Turns out, they were correct. The first “No VR” mode for Half-Life: Alyx is finished and live for all to download.

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Reported by PC Gamer, the mod has been made available on Github and the experience…it’s reportedly clunky to say the least. Mapping certain actions to a single key, functions such as grabbing ammo from a backpack or throwing items, means that many of the VR exclusive movement options have been catered for but that doesn’t mean that they play all that well. The rest of the game plays like a normal FPS, using the mouse as your camera control. So you’ll be able to move around and shoot but the experience is obviously going to be markedly different from playing through the game in the intended fashion.

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The thing is, Half-Life: Alyx hasn’t even been out for a month and there’s already a mod that changes the core experience of playing the game into something far more accessible for the masses. One can only imagine that in a few months time, maybe a year if the process is slow, an updated version of the very same mod will prove to be as playable as an unmodded version of the game.

What a time to be alive.

Last Updated: April 14, 2020

2 Comments

  1. D@rCF0g

    April 14, 2020 at 11:40

    This game, while apparently great (I wouldn’t know. I’m one of the unfortunate.) still riles me up!

    Reply

  2. Caveshen Rajman

    April 14, 2020 at 10:51

    Glad Valve stuck to their guns about HL: Alyx being a VR-only experience. They had an idea, they designed it, they implemented it.

    The benefit of having a game on PC, and specifically on Steam, is that there WILL be the opportunity to mod it to play it in ways the developer never intended, and that’s great too.

    I would much rather have end-users try to get it working without VR (no matter how janky the experience) than have the option built into the game, where the developer must then figure out how to make two versions of a game, resulting inevitably in one being a lesser experience, tainting user impressions, reviews, and ultimately the validation felt by the developers who worked on the mode people deemed inferior.

    Reply

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