Imagine the scene: You walk into a room that no one knows about and include soldiers in Half-Life: Valve's latest VR title, Alyx. You raise the crowbar above your head and prepare to swing down into an alien skull. You go through the door and then pull it back with the crowbar hooked on the door frame.
For some time, Valve tried to let players use the most iconic "half-life" weapons in Alyx, but this caused a lot of problems. This includes players trapped on the door.
Designer and programmer Robin Walker told me in a recent interview: "If I have to think about investing a lot of time instead of investing in products, then I really only have one thing to think of, that is the crowbar."
"We spent a lot of time trying a usable crowbar in the game, but never reached the point where we were very satisfied with it."
According to Walker, many of the problems with the crowbar are solvable, and it does introduce some interesting interactivity, such as being able to manipulate things from a distance with a hook. But there are too many problems.
Walker explained: "We built a map full of small puzzles, you can use a crowbar to complete it, which is really cool." "It's similar to the way that both hands can finally accomplish many things that can be done before, but keep The truth is higher, and it has more creative uses than the past, which is really exciting. But there are many problems.
"The hook itself is indeed a problem. Without any real feedback, it is very easy to display it off the screen and hang it on something that you do n’t know, so the player will eventually hang it on the door frame when passing through the door, and then start walking away, And we are like, & # 39; Now, what should we do? What ’s the point? & # 39 ;. "
Valve tries to disable the hook, so the hook has no physical effect whenever it is off the screen, but this has some problems in itself.
He continued: "Therefore, there are a bunch of things we don't like." "Then it also encourages players to engage in melee combat. We spent a lot of time in melee combat, but never found something we like. I think it is based on melee. The whole game is well done. We ca n’t. "
Melee combat is never an important part of "Half-Life", Valve feels that it is best to take the time to ensure that everything else is as bright as possible. There is another big problem with crowbars: people forget who they are.
"Then we hit the catalyst that I think really decided to abandon it, that is, every time we talk in the future, we will tell us as we did after the game, 'So, what happened? What do you want to do now? What is the plot of the game? 'Everyone feels that once the crowbar becomes Gordon.' Walker explained.
"We will start the game with text scrolling, similar to what you have now, such as & # 39; Alyx Vance & # 39 ;, and everything else, as soon as people get the crowbar, the game testers will tell us, The stick is Gordon's. "It's not Alex's, we should stop fighting it. So, in the end, we just abandoned it."
Read our "Half-Life: Alyx Review" to understand our impressions.
