In December last year, Valve News Network released a video claiming that the VR title Boneworks greatly inspired Half-Life: Alyx's development direction.
The video quoted inside sources as talking about how it influenced Valve ’s choice of movement, and essentially “demonstrated Valve” and demonstrated the potential of VR. This is the video:
Recently, we had the opportunity to talk to Valve programmer and designer Robin Walker and ask him the truth of these claims.
"The Boneworks thing is strange," he told me. "Everyone seems to think there are some hidden stories out there. This confuses me. I don't know where it came from. Over the years, we have been showing our games to many people.
"So, you know, there must be those Boneworks guys, and there are a whole bunch of other original works, which is Tilt Brush. We showed it to a group of people."
During the period of presentation and storytelling, a game in particular stood out, not Boneworks.
Walker explained: "Probably the biggest impact on us is the budget reduction activities a few years ago." "Budget reduction made us realize that long-distance transmission will not cause damage to the experience as we imagined.
"I think we all think this is for the same reason, because you think that when you look at others doing this, no weapons are really devastating. You look at other people transmitting, which is very bad for your experience, and You think this is the case for gamers. But "budget cuts" show us that this is not the case. "
Valve found that even if someone passively seems strange, players can quickly adapt to the lack of arms and invisible teleportation.
Walker said: "For any manipulator who likes sports, in the early stages, you will be very focused on the execution, execution and learning of sports." "Then, when you reach the point of automatic memory (almost muscle memory), it will Back in your background of thinking, you will focus more on dealing with it.
"When you play a first-person shooter game, you didn't think about pressing the WASD button, but to complete a few games. You are just thinking about where you want to go."
Although there is an option to move freely in Half-Life: Alyx, stealth messaging is the default setting, and it can be said to be its playback method. After all, this is a full-length game. When the body is not in the game, it moves around instead of moving freely, which helps to make this discomfort disappear.
One of the keys to staying immersive is actually level design – making sure that players are always worth a try. Players need "new information" when traveling to prevent them from having to slide continuously over long distances.
"It turns out that things like world density are very important," Walker explained. "The new information may just be looking at what might seem to be a threat, so you need to pay more attention, see what you might want to collect, or see the opportunity to look for opportunities, see what looks like" Wait a minute. I should stop and see. ’
"If none of this happens, then people will notice their movement mechanism at that time. Once the world becomes so dense that you have to stop because you have to pay attention to certain things, and then rarely go on in a row With more than two teleports, then once we reach this density, our game testers just stop talking about teleports altogether and seem to become more focused. "
You can read our review of Half-Life: Alyx here. If you want to know why we do not have the full version of Portal in VR, we are still asking Valve on this link.
