So today's the day Half-Life: Alyx actually came out, and I've been refreshing the Steam page like it's going to change into something I can afford to play. Valve put out a full, honest-to-god new Half-Life game for the first time since Episode Two back in 2007, and the catch is you need a VR headset to touch it. Not "supported," not "enhanced," required. You cannot play Half-Life: Alyx on a monitor and keyboard no matter how much you want to.
And I do want to. I've been playing this series since I was way too young to be sneaking around Black Mesa in the original Half-Life, and Half-Life 2 is still the game I measure physics engines against, seventeen years later (the gravity gun ruined every other shooter for me a little bit, honestly). So watching the reveal trailer back in November was one of those moments where I actually yelled out loud in an empty apartment. Then I remembered I don't own a Valve Index, an Oculus Rift S, a Vive Cosmos, or anything else that would let me actually stand in that world.
The Index specifically has been backordered since basically the day it launched last June. Valve's own store has been showing extended shipping windows on and off for months, and resellers were asking silly money for units even before this week. Now you've got a genuinely great, genuinely exclusive piece of software sitting behind hardware that a lot of people who want it most literally cannot buy right now. I don't think that's some grand conspiracy, I think Valve just underestimated demand the way everyone always underestimates demand, but it's a strange kind of launch day. All the enthusiasm, none of the headsets.
The early impressions I've been reading (and yes, I've read way too many for a game I can't play) all say the same thing: this isn't a tech demo wearing a Half-Life skin, it's a real Half-Life game that happens to use VR the way Half-Life 2 used the physics engine, as the actual point of the thing rather than a gimmick bolted on top. People keep talking about how you physically reload magazines by hand, how you can pick up a soda can and just look at it, how a headcrab jumping at your actual face hits different than one jumping at a character on a screen. I believe all of it. I'm just going to be reading about it for a while instead of doing it.
There's something a little on-the-nose about the timing too. California told everyone to stay home starting last Thursday, and New York's stay-at-home order kicks in tonight at 8pm. So the exact week the entire idea of "leaving your house" got put on pause for a huge chunk of the country, Valve released the single most immersive, most physically-present game maybe ever made, and it requires equipment most of us don't have sitting around. If there was ever a moment for a killer VR app to actually move hardware, this feels like it, except the hardware isn't there to move. I keep picturing a version of this year where the Index wasn't sold out and everyone stuck inside just disappeared into City 17 for a month.
I did the math on just buying in properly, and it's not pretty. An Index headset plus controllers plus base stations runs about 999 dollars when it's actually in stock, which is more than I've spent on a graphics card in my life. Alyx itself is only sixty bucks and honestly cheap for what people are describing, it's the entry fee to get there that's brutal. I might just wait this one out and hope the price comes down once the initial wave of hype-driven scarcity settles, whenever that ends up being.
Anyway. If you've got a headset, I'm jealous, and I want a full report on the headcrabs. If you don't, welcome to my club, we meet nowhere because there's nowhere to meet anymore.