Half-Life: Alyx turned out to be an utterly smashing game, the sort of pleasant surprise you just don’t really see all too often in the video game industry these days. With the transition to VR and the stupidly high expectations of a new Half-Life game, the developers of Half-Life: Alyx were unsure of how the game would be greeted by players: With scorn and disappointment or welcome, loving arms? Turns out, people were more than a little stoked by the game as it received stellar critical reviews and a positive response from fans. In fact, the game has done so well that it’s possibly opened the doors for more Half Life in the future.
As revealed in Half-Life: Alyx – Final Hours, a snazzy little documentary in the form of an app available on Steam, Geoff Keighley spoke to the team behind the VR experience about the creative decisions and tension of delving back into high profile software development in the Half-Life franchise after so long. Despite learning some interesting titbits on cancelled Valve games, including an RPG inspired by Monster Hunter and Dark Souls and an open-world Left 4 Dead game, the documentary revealed that Valve had tried to go back to the Half-Life well six times before committing to the idea of Half-Life: Alyx. While a good chunk of the documentary is focused on Valve’s canned projects and failings in the realm of both current game development and hardware production, it ends with a glimmer of hope for Half-Life fans.
Valve designer Phil Co describes the future of the Half-Life franchise by saying:
This ice has been broken, now we’re hoping to smash through the ice completely. We’re not afraid of Half-Life no more.
Apparently a sizable portion of the Alyx team are hoping to develop a full-scale, traditional Half-Life game for consoles but there are still doubts that Valve has the amount of personnel and resources for such a large scale production. Given the amount of money Valve rakes in from Steam, I’m willing to say that I think funding shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Last Updated: July 10, 2020
