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Half-Life VR: Looks Like Valve Will Surprise Us Soon
Butcher79
As 2019 steadily draws to a close, we are increasingly turning to Valve, who said they would be releasing their first “flagship” VR game this year. Although there are only two and a half months left until the end of the year, the company still hasn't officially announced the game. However, a series of code leaks suggests that this will indeed be a Half-Life VR game.
For several years now, Valve has been saying that it has been working on not one, but three VR projects. Earlier this year, the company confirmed that the first, which it described as a "flagship VR game", would launch in 2019.
In addition, the company has not said anything about the game. We don't even know the name of the title, let alone what game it will be. But Tyler McVicker, who runs the Valve News Network Youtube channel, thinks he has a pretty good idea.
For years, McVicker has been trawling the source code of Valve's publicly released games and gaming tools and spotted clues here and there that point to the development of the "HLVR" project, which McVicker believes is a "Half-Life VR" game and should appear this year. In the new video, he offers an overview of the evidence he found and describes what he can tell us about Valve's upcoming VR game:
While some of McVicker's broader claims sound like pure speculation with a bit of fanaticism, there is certainly plenty of concrete evidence in the form of the many lines of "HLVR" and "VR" code that have been found; these are textual links to the objects, attributes, and systems that underlie the game, revealing very little about what types of enemies, weapons, interactions, and settings the game will contain.
From his research, McVicker believes that Valve's upcoming VR game will be a Half-Life VR game set in the 20-year period between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. The player, he says, will play the role of Alex Vance, the central character of Half-Life. Life 2.
He goes on to review some of the specific objects and interactions the game is likely to contain, including the "Grabbity gloves", which is a clear reference to the gravity gun from Half-Life 2, but players can also reasonably be expected to be able to use "force-grab ”, a technique commonly used in VR game design to facilitate the interaction of objects by allowing players to capture objects from a distance.
Of course, it's worth noting that not everything revealed will certainly make it into the game. Some of the code that was found might be from experiments and the like; it could be one of Valve's VR games, but not necessarily the first to launch; and there is certainly a ton of code that hasn't been released to the public yet that could radically change our understanding of what the game will be like. Of course, if the uncovered code is indeed an active project, a wide-eyed look is quite specific that this is Half-Life VR.
McVicker believes the title will be a single-player, story-driven game and will be AAA scale with 12-16 hours of gameplay. And while Valve has said the game will launch in 2019, the company is well known for its missed deadlines; McVicker expects the game to receive an official announcement in 2019, but won't launch until early 2020.
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