ClearedSteamed is dedicated to everything and within the Valve & # 39; s PC gaming app.In fact, Half life The series always has two main characters: Gordon Freeman and his crowbar. The stainless steel piece is one of the most popular pieces of iconography in all games. And yet, in between Half-Life: Alyx, you cannot use the crowbar as a tool or puzzle solving tool. I mean.
Valve did not enter Half-Life: AlyxProgress aimed at eliminating the small refunds that can be made. In fact, Valve and programmer Robin Walker told Kotaku that the team "lost, for a year, and a half of our lives trying to find a crowbar in VR." They have tried different types of weeds, including those of machines.
"It definitely opened up a great game that we love," Walker said on the phone. “There were puzzles where you had to tell it between the bars and some knocks and pull it to you. It can serve as an extra long, cool hand. But there were many problems. ”
In particular, the perfect storm of physics, gameplay, and storytelling interrupted the legendary performance aside. Physics problems do not arise from how the crowbar will affect the players' experience if they use it but in all the trouble it will rise to its absence.
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"The lack of a strong reaction means that players tend not to put their crowbar in sight, because that's what you do when you carry a real crowbar – you can't always look at it," Walker said. “But they did kick things off. They would leave later, and they would knock on the door. So I said, it was like & # 39; What are we doing now? & # 39; We tried various things like ending the counter turns off physics, or stopping a conflict (with things) on screen. In real life, you will feel your arm twist as you bend the boat's curve towards something, but we have no such answer in VR. We might have freaked out your hand with haptics, but we found that to be completely unrealistic. Some players just don't see enough. ”
"We have lost, for a year, and a half of our lives trying to find a crowbar in VR."
Another knock down of the offense is what would sign the player against the fight. Half-Life: Alyx it's actually a multi-faceted fighting game, but when players have managed to grab the humble steel rod used to cut different types of nations, they naturally think it's time to extend their arms and throw them down with fists.
"Everyone thought it was a melee weapon," Walker said. "We've done a lot of research on melee, and we'll never be able to reach the level we like." He admitted that some VR games were gone in the battle of Meshee and they came up with incredible solutions, but Half-Life: AlyxIf so, it just doesn't sound right. "The player had to come out and take you on a journey beyond what we were excited about … we don't like there is a real way to do that seems natural to you, but the game doesn't always do it."
The biggest problem, ho wever, has been made clear by the fact that it is most apparent backwards: If you give a Half life
"It doesn't matter how much we tell them, like, at the beginning of the game, they are not Gordon," Walker said. "We'll finish playing and ask the players, & # 39; So tell us what happened so far. Tell us everything you've learned about the world and what this story is about. & # 39; And the players will think they are Gordon."
Valve doesn't want Alyx to feel like Gordon 2.0, either. They wanted him to maintain his unique identity as both an actor and an extension of player skills. In the end, Valve realized that there were other direct ways to show that – those that had roots in the previous games of the series.
“Alyx has his big tool and pistol inside Half-Life 2, and I think they talked a lot about him as an actor and tinkerer, some of the types of gameplay we were trying to do in this game, ”says artist Tristan Reidford Kotaku by telephone. “Although the crowbar is just an empty tool. It never sounds false. ”
Then again, Gordon Freeman is a graduate of MIT with a Ph.D. in theory theory, so something in a crowbar is completely unnatural, from a narrative standpoint. Walker was unable to assist in the communication.
“I love that Gordon is a scientist, and all he does is blow things up with a crowbar,” he said. "Alyx is very clever."
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