Community MetaSteam | March 2020 - Rise and Shine, Ms. Vance, Until It Is Done!
- Thread starter lashman
- Start date
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I've always wondered about this stuff in particular since it tends to be the one thing that causes very unexpected problems.To be honest, we don't have extensive testing at 480 FPS. We do have at least one complete playthrough of the game at 144 FPS, but everything more than that is just spot-checks.
When a full QA playthrough of a game takes ~120 hours you can't really test every situation with every combination of settings. However, most "systemic" graphics things either break entirely or not at all. (Sadly, framerate isn't really one of those. There are several cutscenes in the game which required scene-specific HFR workarounds. And a few battles at the very end which needed to be limited to 60 FPS)
Generally, if you want to make 100% sure you don't run into anything unexpected, you should probably limit yourself to 144 FPS
I think the new RE2 still has extra knife damage on higher framerates, from what I understand bonus damage is applied to each knife hit based on how many frames it touches the enemy. Reminds me of the Dark Souls 2 durability problems which were similar in function.
I think I also recall Saints Row 3 having an issue where NPC's would traverse real slow on stairs on anything above 30, but I think they fixed it in end.
And recently Vanquish had a lot of issues where the higher framerates would make the enemy bullets hurt you more or something like that.
Just a lot of stuff that you wouldn't think would be affected.
That's true, though all of those are things you can already notice at 60 FPS. It really sucks when e.g. a cutscene just doesn't stop at really high framerates, and you have to go through 10 systems in debugging to finally figure out that the physics-driven camera never arrives at the target location since its smoothed movement is such that in the last few frames speed x deltaT becomes so low that adding it to the position in FP32 doesn't actually change the numbers 
(And the cutscene is scripted to wait for the camera to arrive before continuing)
(And the cutscene is scripted to wait for the camera to arrive before continuing)
It's difficult in a sense that it punishes you for your mistakes harshly where other modern games might give you a slap on the wrist.I've been playing DS Remastered for the last few days, and this game isn't actually THAT hard? I'm at Anor Londo at the moment. I mean, it's not exactly easy either. But, hearing how difficult this game is for all these years, I was expecting something on an entirely different level (not that I'm complaining
Like xxr said, unforgiving is certainly a more apt way to describe it than difficult.
use the aero spell for defence, block, when he does his super attack, jump and glide until it's over. are you underleveled?
Well I just beat him, apparently I didn't know how the ability system worked, so I just activated most of them and it became easy.
Goddamn, you played through most of the whole game without activating them? At least it should be much more better for you nowWell I just beat him, apparently I didn't know how the ability system worked, so I just activated most of them and it became easy.
Spent 3 hours trying to beat this boss and then i got it's HP like this and i died (The blue is the HP)
I almost hurt myself over this
Thankfully i got em after another hour of trying
Or i would just die in my sleep tonight
Also, i have so much coffeein inside of me i might just die in my sleep tonight anyways
I almost hurt myself over this
Thankfully i got em after another hour of trying
Or i would just die in my sleep tonight
Also, i have so much coffeein inside of me i might just die in my sleep tonight anyways
The movie is quite good, I haven't read the book. It's very weirdly paced and not really approachable though, it's sort of sci-fi horror with a tinge of existential dread. Despite my claim of it being good, it is not even remotely for everyone. Kind of reminds me of The Fountain, but less abstract.
After refunding Doom Eternal I'm tempted to pick up the super mega deluxe version of CoD for some shooty goodness but might just go play some other stuff for 2 days until HL:A lets me in
Seems lots of people are selling their cards right now.
The number of 3 cent buyorders that go through for me right now is so much higher than usual.
The number of 3 cent buyorders that go through for me right now is so much higher than usual.
Seems lots of people are selling their cards right now.
Maybe people stock up on Axe coins. :cpc_kappa:
People on Vogons forum started to convert shaders for new Dosbox, looks good (crt-easymode for example, open in fullscreen mode only)
This is the review of HL:A in Edge May issue:
This is the part about Artifact:
Every Half-Life game has had its defining tool. In the original, it was Gordon Freeman's iconic crowbar, as useful for smashing open crates and breaking down obstacles as it was dispatching enemies. Half-Lift 2 had the Gravity Gun, the perfect way to toy with the game's unprecedentedly sophisticated real-time physics. Portal — to stretch the definition of a Half-Life game a little, though Alyx underlines that the two share a universe — introduced the Handheld Portal Device, a space-warping concept so compelling an entire game's worth of puzzles could be built around it.
Half-Life: Alyx has the Gravity Gloves. At first contact, they lack that instant sense of revolution. In fact, the Gloves feel a little underpowered. They don't have much in the way of offensive capabilities, and are fairly ineffective for building steps out of level detritus, try as we might. But during one of these failed barrel-stacking attempts, it finally sinks in: we're thinking of them in entirely the wrong terms. For all the immediate similarities, they're not just a poor man's Gravity Gun. Rather, they're working to an entirely different end.
Here is what the Gloves actually do: they extend out the range of your arms in VR, enabling you to reach any item you can see. Simply point your hand in its general direction and, with a 'get over here' flick of the wrist, bring it tumbling into your palm. The Gloves free you from bending down to investigate every item on the floor, or stretching into weird positions because that one collectible you're trying to grab is sat in a spot of virtual space currently inhabited by the arm of a resolutely non-virtual chair. They're also a neat counter to the inevitable minor inaccuracies of hands reaching for something they can ultimately pass right through.
So the Gloves don't revolutionise interactivity in quite the way their forebears did — they're arguably more solution than invention. But that's all in service of the larger leap in interaction, as Alyx removes the keyboard-and-mouse-shaped barrier between you and Half-Life's world, and lets you get your hands dirty. The hole the Gravity Gun was patching over, we start to realise, was that tapping E to grab a crate and hold it in your hands never quite felt satisfying — so instead HL2 gave you a superpower, the ability to blast objects around as if they were weightless. Alyx goes the other way: you don't need to fling objects because, not only can you pick them up and hold them, you can sweep them aside dramatically or prod with one outstretched finger to see if it'll cause them to topple.
These are the nuances of motion Alyx is interested in — letting you express yourself in the way you open a door or handle a rag-dolled body. Every action comes with added physicality: health is doled out in the form of syringes that you jam into your arm. You must load weapons manually, sliding individual shells into a shotgun, racking the slide atop a pistol to chamber your first bullet. You can steady your aim simply by propping up your gun hand with the other. And in this context, of delicate, almost 1.1 movements, the Gloves are a superpower - one that, emerging from long sessions with Alyx, we are disappointed to remember we lack in the real world.
After a few hours, it becomes second nature to use your real hands and the extended Mr-Tickle reach of the Gloves in concert. We glimpse some pistol ammo off in our peripheral vision, bring it tumbling end-over-end towards us, catch it with our left hand, eject the current clip with our right hand and slam the new one into the base of the pistol — all without looking. We screw ourselves into a tight ball on the carpeted floor so that, inside VR, we're a smaller target than our paltry scrap of cover. We count down the shots as they ping off metal, poke out our head just enough to scoop up that grenade we spotted earlier, prime it, throw it.
The action has a very different rhythm to what you're likely used to as Gordon Freeman. Cover is a much bigger factor, and — if you use the default teleport-based movement system — evasion is a matter of blinking instantly from spot to spot rather than strafing and back-pedalling. In every other way, though, this is unmistakably a Half-Life game. There are head-crabs, supply crates to smash, and red barrels that make a satisfying boom when you put two pistol rounds into them. What's remarkable is how many of these elements feel custom-made for VR. The traditional Half-Life progression of enemies translates perfectly into a training course for fighting with your own hands.
Barnacles, static on the ceiling, provide initial target practice and teach careful spot-to-spot movement as you dodge their lolling tongues. Next, the zombies introduce human-shaped targets that give you time to study them before engaging — and even then, don't move too much, or too fast. By the time head-crabs start launching themselves at your face, you should be proficient enough to pick them out of the air, or at least know how to sidestep. Not that this makes encountering them for the first time any less horrifying. Head-crabs are, after all, essentially a fleshy VR headset so the threat of them enveloping your skull is uncomfortably real. VR is great at scares, and Alyx, frequently dials up the horror elements, a couple of sections that are seemingly waiting to be branded 'the new Ravenholm'.
Like the other Half-Life games before it, the campaign is built out of this kind of set-piece, each introducing a new spin on the formula then riffling on it for half an hour, before dropping it entirely and moving onto the next idea. The whole thing is strung together into a story, but for the most part it just feels like an excuse to move you between set-pieces. You rescue the princess, Eli Vance, who at this point is so accomplished at getting captured you rather suspect he's on a one-man crusade to gender-balance the damsel trope. You make preparations for an attack on your own personal Death Star (the Vault, a floating hunk of angular metal architecture that looms over City 17, home to some kind of Combine super-weapon). The plot beats of Alyx don't stray far from the rails of video-game action storytelling (with the exception of the final movements, which are breathtaking) but what really matters here isn't the story as much as the way it's told.
This is, by far, the chattiest Half-Life game you've ever played. Unlike her predecessor, Alyx Vance is a far from silent protagonist, and she has almost constant company from a voice in her ear — provided by Russell, a would-be Black Mesa scientist and inventor of the Gravity Gloves. Through conversation, the pair fill out their personalities, and the backstory of this world, but most of all they make jokes. Honest-to-god funny jokes. There's a large helping of Portal in Alyx's script — no surprise, given the game shares two-thirds of its writing staff with Portal 2. Russell, played by Rhys 'Murray from Flight Of The Conchords' Darby, recalls Stephen Merchant's role as Wheatley in that game. He's a safe pair of comedy hands that make sure every line lands. Who needs complex plotting when a game can consistently make you laugh?
And then there's the world itself, which is immaculately realised. Alyx, sitting between Half-Life 1 and 2 in the timeline, does a good job of not only updating the visuals of both games but also harmonising their aesthetics by demonstrating the effects of Xen infestation on the world we know from HL2. As you explore, the hard Antonovian lines of City 17 blend smoothly into the buboes of the Quarantine Zone. These spaces, overtaken by otherworldly flora, are the star: The Last Of Us by way of the Upside Down, fungal motes drifting in front of your vision, walls seeming to breathe, the gap between inanimate and alive blurring.
---
RESIN-ANCE CASCADE
One of Alyx's biggest tweaks to the Half-Life formula is the inclusion of collectibles that you can spend to upgrade your weapon. Scattered throughout levels you'll find Resin: squat little cylinders of corroded ore, every chunk swiss-cheesed in a slightly different way, with soft white light leaking out of the holes. It's an immediate contender for the game-collectible hall of fame, worthy of sitting alongside Mario's red coins and power stars. Resin gives off a faint glow, so in darkened rooms you can spot it even at the back of a littered shelf, but collecting every last cylinder means engaging with the game's physics for some neat mini-puzzles. And the upgrades? Oh, yeah, they're pretty good too.
---
Alyx gives you time to take in these environments. For a shooter, the pacing is relatively contemplative, with gunfights portioned out sparingly. It's a long while before you go head-to-head with your first Combine soldier. But once those battles do arrive, they're some of the most thrilling we've ever experienced: a mad dash of ducking shots and unexpected flanking manoeuvres. We learn the true meaning of `blind-fire, squeezing off shots over one shoulder until the clip is dry, then praying for that telltale flatline sound. Using the Gloves, we pull an incoming grenade off its trajectory and toss it right back. We press our spine straight against some imagined cover, waiting with the shotgun at chest level for a Combine to round the corner.
And, once it's all over, we take a moment to catch our breath. In part because fights are physically demanding — at least the way we play — but also because it's an opportunity to admire our handiwork. What the game asks of you might be fairly standard shooter stuff, but the act of playing it out with your own hands lends it a fresh magic. That's Alyx in a nutshell: this is a Half-Life game almost to a fault, the old formula polished to a 2020 shine, made new again by the way you manipulate it. The Gloves aren't the new crowbar or Gravity Gun, the defining tool of Half-Life: Alyx. Your own hands are.
9/10
Half-Life: Alyx has the Gravity Gloves. At first contact, they lack that instant sense of revolution. In fact, the Gloves feel a little underpowered. They don't have much in the way of offensive capabilities, and are fairly ineffective for building steps out of level detritus, try as we might. But during one of these failed barrel-stacking attempts, it finally sinks in: we're thinking of them in entirely the wrong terms. For all the immediate similarities, they're not just a poor man's Gravity Gun. Rather, they're working to an entirely different end.
Here is what the Gloves actually do: they extend out the range of your arms in VR, enabling you to reach any item you can see. Simply point your hand in its general direction and, with a 'get over here' flick of the wrist, bring it tumbling into your palm. The Gloves free you from bending down to investigate every item on the floor, or stretching into weird positions because that one collectible you're trying to grab is sat in a spot of virtual space currently inhabited by the arm of a resolutely non-virtual chair. They're also a neat counter to the inevitable minor inaccuracies of hands reaching for something they can ultimately pass right through.
So the Gloves don't revolutionise interactivity in quite the way their forebears did — they're arguably more solution than invention. But that's all in service of the larger leap in interaction, as Alyx removes the keyboard-and-mouse-shaped barrier between you and Half-Life's world, and lets you get your hands dirty. The hole the Gravity Gun was patching over, we start to realise, was that tapping E to grab a crate and hold it in your hands never quite felt satisfying — so instead HL2 gave you a superpower, the ability to blast objects around as if they were weightless. Alyx goes the other way: you don't need to fling objects because, not only can you pick them up and hold them, you can sweep them aside dramatically or prod with one outstretched finger to see if it'll cause them to topple.
These are the nuances of motion Alyx is interested in — letting you express yourself in the way you open a door or handle a rag-dolled body. Every action comes with added physicality: health is doled out in the form of syringes that you jam into your arm. You must load weapons manually, sliding individual shells into a shotgun, racking the slide atop a pistol to chamber your first bullet. You can steady your aim simply by propping up your gun hand with the other. And in this context, of delicate, almost 1.1 movements, the Gloves are a superpower - one that, emerging from long sessions with Alyx, we are disappointed to remember we lack in the real world.
After a few hours, it becomes second nature to use your real hands and the extended Mr-Tickle reach of the Gloves in concert. We glimpse some pistol ammo off in our peripheral vision, bring it tumbling end-over-end towards us, catch it with our left hand, eject the current clip with our right hand and slam the new one into the base of the pistol — all without looking. We screw ourselves into a tight ball on the carpeted floor so that, inside VR, we're a smaller target than our paltry scrap of cover. We count down the shots as they ping off metal, poke out our head just enough to scoop up that grenade we spotted earlier, prime it, throw it.
The action has a very different rhythm to what you're likely used to as Gordon Freeman. Cover is a much bigger factor, and — if you use the default teleport-based movement system — evasion is a matter of blinking instantly from spot to spot rather than strafing and back-pedalling. In every other way, though, this is unmistakably a Half-Life game. There are head-crabs, supply crates to smash, and red barrels that make a satisfying boom when you put two pistol rounds into them. What's remarkable is how many of these elements feel custom-made for VR. The traditional Half-Life progression of enemies translates perfectly into a training course for fighting with your own hands.
Barnacles, static on the ceiling, provide initial target practice and teach careful spot-to-spot movement as you dodge their lolling tongues. Next, the zombies introduce human-shaped targets that give you time to study them before engaging — and even then, don't move too much, or too fast. By the time head-crabs start launching themselves at your face, you should be proficient enough to pick them out of the air, or at least know how to sidestep. Not that this makes encountering them for the first time any less horrifying. Head-crabs are, after all, essentially a fleshy VR headset so the threat of them enveloping your skull is uncomfortably real. VR is great at scares, and Alyx, frequently dials up the horror elements, a couple of sections that are seemingly waiting to be branded 'the new Ravenholm'.
Like the other Half-Life games before it, the campaign is built out of this kind of set-piece, each introducing a new spin on the formula then riffling on it for half an hour, before dropping it entirely and moving onto the next idea. The whole thing is strung together into a story, but for the most part it just feels like an excuse to move you between set-pieces. You rescue the princess, Eli Vance, who at this point is so accomplished at getting captured you rather suspect he's on a one-man crusade to gender-balance the damsel trope. You make preparations for an attack on your own personal Death Star (the Vault, a floating hunk of angular metal architecture that looms over City 17, home to some kind of Combine super-weapon). The plot beats of Alyx don't stray far from the rails of video-game action storytelling (with the exception of the final movements, which are breathtaking) but what really matters here isn't the story as much as the way it's told.
This is, by far, the chattiest Half-Life game you've ever played. Unlike her predecessor, Alyx Vance is a far from silent protagonist, and she has almost constant company from a voice in her ear — provided by Russell, a would-be Black Mesa scientist and inventor of the Gravity Gloves. Through conversation, the pair fill out their personalities, and the backstory of this world, but most of all they make jokes. Honest-to-god funny jokes. There's a large helping of Portal in Alyx's script — no surprise, given the game shares two-thirds of its writing staff with Portal 2. Russell, played by Rhys 'Murray from Flight Of The Conchords' Darby, recalls Stephen Merchant's role as Wheatley in that game. He's a safe pair of comedy hands that make sure every line lands. Who needs complex plotting when a game can consistently make you laugh?
And then there's the world itself, which is immaculately realised. Alyx, sitting between Half-Life 1 and 2 in the timeline, does a good job of not only updating the visuals of both games but also harmonising their aesthetics by demonstrating the effects of Xen infestation on the world we know from HL2. As you explore, the hard Antonovian lines of City 17 blend smoothly into the buboes of the Quarantine Zone. These spaces, overtaken by otherworldly flora, are the star: The Last Of Us by way of the Upside Down, fungal motes drifting in front of your vision, walls seeming to breathe, the gap between inanimate and alive blurring.
---
RESIN-ANCE CASCADE
One of Alyx's biggest tweaks to the Half-Life formula is the inclusion of collectibles that you can spend to upgrade your weapon. Scattered throughout levels you'll find Resin: squat little cylinders of corroded ore, every chunk swiss-cheesed in a slightly different way, with soft white light leaking out of the holes. It's an immediate contender for the game-collectible hall of fame, worthy of sitting alongside Mario's red coins and power stars. Resin gives off a faint glow, so in darkened rooms you can spot it even at the back of a littered shelf, but collecting every last cylinder means engaging with the game's physics for some neat mini-puzzles. And the upgrades? Oh, yeah, they're pretty good too.
---
Alyx gives you time to take in these environments. For a shooter, the pacing is relatively contemplative, with gunfights portioned out sparingly. It's a long while before you go head-to-head with your first Combine soldier. But once those battles do arrive, they're some of the most thrilling we've ever experienced: a mad dash of ducking shots and unexpected flanking manoeuvres. We learn the true meaning of `blind-fire, squeezing off shots over one shoulder until the clip is dry, then praying for that telltale flatline sound. Using the Gloves, we pull an incoming grenade off its trajectory and toss it right back. We press our spine straight against some imagined cover, waiting with the shotgun at chest level for a Combine to round the corner.
And, once it's all over, we take a moment to catch our breath. In part because fights are physically demanding — at least the way we play — but also because it's an opportunity to admire our handiwork. What the game asks of you might be fairly standard shooter stuff, but the act of playing it out with your own hands lends it a fresh magic. That's Alyx in a nutshell: this is a Half-Life game almost to a fault, the old formula polished to a 2020 shine, made new again by the way you manipulate it. The Gloves aren't the new crowbar or Gravity Gun, the defining tool of Half-Life: Alyx. Your own hands are.
9/10
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Can Half-Life: Alyx make the case for consumer VR?
The odd thing about reviewing Half-Life, Alyx is that it isn't just a game. It isn't even a system-seller, in the traditional sense of that term. It has been specifically designed to make the argument for an entire medium, to do for capital-V-virtual capital-R-reality what Super Mario 64 did for 3D. So asking if it's the best VR experience we've ever had isn't quite enough. (For the record, though: allowing for the fact that Tetris Effect is almost as good on a Tv as it is inside a headset, while Alyx is completely VR-native, yes, it is.) The question instead becomes: is that enough?
When Alyx was first revealed, it was accompanied by a sense that even the fans who've spent the last decade clamouring loudly for another Half-Life game were resigning themselves to not being able to play this one — largely due to the sheer cost. Alyx not only has to sell people on the dream of VR, it has to sell them to the tune of almost £1,000 (plus a sufficiently brawny PC to do it justice). This is, admittedly, only if you want the best possible experience. Valve is supporting pretty much every PC VR platform you could possibly name (which for most of us is a pretty short list). We play through Alyx on an Index, but also test it on the considerably cheaper Oculus Quest (linked to a PC) and HTC Vive. While the visual downgrade is noticeable, it doesn't hurt the game too much. The bigger constraint, for our money, isn't a technical one at all. It has to do with space.
Valve is trying to solve this by making Alyx as flexible as possible in terms of how it's played. You can play at full room-scale, free to wander as far as your physical walls will allow — but, as long as you've got enough room to swing a head-crab, there's also the option to play it standing up or even sitting at your desk. (In this case, crouching and standing is handled with a button press, and as long as you're not too prone to motion sickness, we'd recommend switching to the stick-based 'continuous motion' mode, which means the whole thing controls more like a traditional FPS.) These are important accessibility considerations, and though it hasn't been implemented in the build we play, Valve is working on a single-handed controller scheme.
But provided you are able to play the game at room-scale, it's clearly the best option. The freedom of movement opens up so much of what makes Half-Life: Alyx great, letting you duck and dive and occasionally lose all sense of your position in the real world. And with that in mind, here's the ugly truth: your enjoyment of this game is going to be directly proportional to the amount of space you have to play it in. Being able to potter around freely without fear of destroying furniture or squashing beloved pets is hugely important.
With VR, physical space becomes an extra system requirement to take into consideration — and even those of us who find the allure of Alyx enough to drop a grand on an Index are unlikely to also shell out for a new living room. And even that might not be enough. We play in optimal conditions — a spacious room, all but cleared of obstacles — and still frequently find ourselves brushing up against the translucent boundary wall in-game.
Some of Alyx's best moments involve you being in the dark, or a tightly enclosed space, and often both. VR is excellent at creating tension in these moments, wrapping you in the absence of light, squeezing on your sense of claustrophobia. But the effect is somewhat marred by the presence, if you happen to be stood in the wrong place, of a gridded cage that cuts through the darkness. It's far from a deal-breaker — clearly, given how much we enjoy Alyx — but they are the kind of things you need to be willing to shrug off as a limitation of the technology. Which, when you're trying to convert people to the joys of virtual reality, is not the greatest sales pitch. Worse, it's a problem we can't see a solution to, at least not from a technical perspective — and warehouse-sized VR arcades, much as we'd love to see them, don't feel like a realistic prospect.
This all gets to the strange contradiction that's right at the heart of VR. The common argument for the technology is immersion: that with this virtual world wrapped all around you, it's easier to convince your brain it's real. But there's also more that can wrench you out of it - the occasional tug of a cable, or the occasional itchiness of foam pressed firmly against your forehead. These are the kinds of problems currently sat at the top of Valve's to-do list, hardware-wise, but the simple fact of simultaneously existing in two overlapping spaces means you're playing not just playing the game itself but often a second metagame, as you try to reason where you are outside of the headset and whether you're about to bump into something.
Occasionally, even with the presence of that gridded wall, we manage to let go of that second layer. The game envelops us entirely, and it's a magical moment - until we bump shin-first into a chair, or punch a wall. Honestly, the experience of playing Alyx is worth these minor battle scars, but VR more broadly? We're not sure whether it ever will be.
The odd thing about reviewing Half-Life, Alyx is that it isn't just a game. It isn't even a system-seller, in the traditional sense of that term. It has been specifically designed to make the argument for an entire medium, to do for capital-V-virtual capital-R-reality what Super Mario 64 did for 3D. So asking if it's the best VR experience we've ever had isn't quite enough. (For the record, though: allowing for the fact that Tetris Effect is almost as good on a Tv as it is inside a headset, while Alyx is completely VR-native, yes, it is.) The question instead becomes: is that enough?
When Alyx was first revealed, it was accompanied by a sense that even the fans who've spent the last decade clamouring loudly for another Half-Life game were resigning themselves to not being able to play this one — largely due to the sheer cost. Alyx not only has to sell people on the dream of VR, it has to sell them to the tune of almost £1,000 (plus a sufficiently brawny PC to do it justice). This is, admittedly, only if you want the best possible experience. Valve is supporting pretty much every PC VR platform you could possibly name (which for most of us is a pretty short list). We play through Alyx on an Index, but also test it on the considerably cheaper Oculus Quest (linked to a PC) and HTC Vive. While the visual downgrade is noticeable, it doesn't hurt the game too much. The bigger constraint, for our money, isn't a technical one at all. It has to do with space.
Valve is trying to solve this by making Alyx as flexible as possible in terms of how it's played. You can play at full room-scale, free to wander as far as your physical walls will allow — but, as long as you've got enough room to swing a head-crab, there's also the option to play it standing up or even sitting at your desk. (In this case, crouching and standing is handled with a button press, and as long as you're not too prone to motion sickness, we'd recommend switching to the stick-based 'continuous motion' mode, which means the whole thing controls more like a traditional FPS.) These are important accessibility considerations, and though it hasn't been implemented in the build we play, Valve is working on a single-handed controller scheme.
But provided you are able to play the game at room-scale, it's clearly the best option. The freedom of movement opens up so much of what makes Half-Life: Alyx great, letting you duck and dive and occasionally lose all sense of your position in the real world. And with that in mind, here's the ugly truth: your enjoyment of this game is going to be directly proportional to the amount of space you have to play it in. Being able to potter around freely without fear of destroying furniture or squashing beloved pets is hugely important.
With VR, physical space becomes an extra system requirement to take into consideration — and even those of us who find the allure of Alyx enough to drop a grand on an Index are unlikely to also shell out for a new living room. And even that might not be enough. We play in optimal conditions — a spacious room, all but cleared of obstacles — and still frequently find ourselves brushing up against the translucent boundary wall in-game.
Some of Alyx's best moments involve you being in the dark, or a tightly enclosed space, and often both. VR is excellent at creating tension in these moments, wrapping you in the absence of light, squeezing on your sense of claustrophobia. But the effect is somewhat marred by the presence, if you happen to be stood in the wrong place, of a gridded cage that cuts through the darkness. It's far from a deal-breaker — clearly, given how much we enjoy Alyx — but they are the kind of things you need to be willing to shrug off as a limitation of the technology. Which, when you're trying to convert people to the joys of virtual reality, is not the greatest sales pitch. Worse, it's a problem we can't see a solution to, at least not from a technical perspective — and warehouse-sized VR arcades, much as we'd love to see them, don't feel like a realistic prospect.
This all gets to the strange contradiction that's right at the heart of VR. The common argument for the technology is immersion: that with this virtual world wrapped all around you, it's easier to convince your brain it's real. But there's also more that can wrench you out of it - the occasional tug of a cable, or the occasional itchiness of foam pressed firmly against your forehead. These are the kinds of problems currently sat at the top of Valve's to-do list, hardware-wise, but the simple fact of simultaneously existing in two overlapping spaces means you're playing not just playing the game itself but often a second metagame, as you try to reason where you are outside of the headset and whether you're about to bump into something.
Occasionally, even with the presence of that gridded wall, we manage to let go of that second layer. The game envelops us entirely, and it's a magical moment - until we bump shin-first into a chair, or punch a wall. Honestly, the experience of playing Alyx is worth these minor battle scars, but VR more broadly? We're not sure whether it ever will be.
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This is the part about Artifact:
CS:GO, Dota Underlords, Half-Life:Alyx - these are the games Valve is most keen on to discuss during our visit, but they're not the only games being worked on across those nine floors. There's also Dota 2, the former heavyweight champion of Steam, recently knocked off its perch by the rise of CS:GO - but when you own both competitors and the platform they're duking it out on, you're probably not too bothered. Of greater concern is Artifact, a digital card game spinning out of Dota 2 that launched in November 2018 and, within a few months, had all but disappeared.
On paper, the game had a lot going for it. There was the Dota connection; the popularity of similar games such as Hearthstone and Gwent; the involvement of legendary card game designer, Mr Magic: The Gathering himself, Richard Garfield. And yet, less than a year-and-a-half from launch, the game's concurrent player count peaks at around 160. No, we're not missing a zero. For all the talk we've heard during our visit about numbers not mattering, Artifact has been a disaster for a studio that's used to pumping out hits - and Valve hasn't been shy to admit it.
"Artifact was an interesting failure in its first go-round," Valve CEO and president Gabe Newell tells us. "We were surprised. We thought that it was a really strong product." The question now, as Newell puts it, is: "What the hell. Where did we go wrong?" That's what the studio is currently trying to find out. Last March, after a few months of updates that failed to turn things around, Valve announced it was taking Artifact back behind closed doors. It hasn't been updated since while Valve, as Newell puts it, "does some soul-searching" and works on a revamped version.
"We ran an experiment, we got a negative result, and now we need to see if we've learned anything from that, so let's try again," he says. "And that's what [the Artifact team] have been doing and that's what they're getting ready to release. Based on the reaction to it, what was wrong with the product? How did we get there? Let's fix those things and take another run at it."
The problem is, with a lot of variables at play, it's hard to isolate the exact reasons Artifact failed. Perhaps it was the game's reputation for being overly complex — you don't play just one game of cards in Artifact but three, simultaneously, across Dota-style lanes. Or it could have been down to the business model: unlike the aforementioned Hearthstone and Gwent, it's not free-to-play, but players still had to buy extra cards, whether in random booster packs, through ticketed events or individually on the Steam Marketplace. Valve's love of free-market economics meant that single sought-after cards soon rose to prices higher than the game itself. (That's no longer the case - you can now pick up a full set for just over £30.)
"That was the biggest source of arguments: what went wrong?" Newell says. "You have a list of 50 different things, so let's say you change 20 of those things. What are you going to learn? Not much - you could have made both positive and negative changes to the design." Those initial updates were an attempt at more controlled experiments, but it became clear that wasn't going to be enough. "With Artifact, we have to do a larger reboot in order to justify its existence to customers and to markets," Newell says. This second go-around is referred to internally as Artifact 2, he says, though it's not clear yet (even to Valve itself, apparently) whether this will be presented as a full-blown sequel, an expansion, or just a big update after a long gap.
Valve isn't talking about what exactly this reinvention will involve, but given the cross-pollination at the company, a good bet is to look at what its other games are doing. Free-to-play seems likely, given what it's done for the fortunes of CS:GO. Following Gwent and Hearthstone onto mobile is possible, since the Underlords team have shown that Source 2 (the engine that also powers Artifact) can be squeezed onto the smaller screen. For a studio whose development process tends towards the scientific method, this would be a lot of variables to change at once - but it seems like that's the way Valve is leaning. "It's a lot easier to make small experiments than big experiments," Newell says. "But occasionally, you're in a situation where you have no choice, the experiment you're running has to be really big - and then you just hope you're right."
On paper, the game had a lot going for it. There was the Dota connection; the popularity of similar games such as Hearthstone and Gwent; the involvement of legendary card game designer, Mr Magic: The Gathering himself, Richard Garfield. And yet, less than a year-and-a-half from launch, the game's concurrent player count peaks at around 160. No, we're not missing a zero. For all the talk we've heard during our visit about numbers not mattering, Artifact has been a disaster for a studio that's used to pumping out hits - and Valve hasn't been shy to admit it.
"Artifact was an interesting failure in its first go-round," Valve CEO and president Gabe Newell tells us. "We were surprised. We thought that it was a really strong product." The question now, as Newell puts it, is: "What the hell. Where did we go wrong?" That's what the studio is currently trying to find out. Last March, after a few months of updates that failed to turn things around, Valve announced it was taking Artifact back behind closed doors. It hasn't been updated since while Valve, as Newell puts it, "does some soul-searching" and works on a revamped version.
"We ran an experiment, we got a negative result, and now we need to see if we've learned anything from that, so let's try again," he says. "And that's what [the Artifact team] have been doing and that's what they're getting ready to release. Based on the reaction to it, what was wrong with the product? How did we get there? Let's fix those things and take another run at it."
The problem is, with a lot of variables at play, it's hard to isolate the exact reasons Artifact failed. Perhaps it was the game's reputation for being overly complex — you don't play just one game of cards in Artifact but three, simultaneously, across Dota-style lanes. Or it could have been down to the business model: unlike the aforementioned Hearthstone and Gwent, it's not free-to-play, but players still had to buy extra cards, whether in random booster packs, through ticketed events or individually on the Steam Marketplace. Valve's love of free-market economics meant that single sought-after cards soon rose to prices higher than the game itself. (That's no longer the case - you can now pick up a full set for just over £30.)
"That was the biggest source of arguments: what went wrong?" Newell says. "You have a list of 50 different things, so let's say you change 20 of those things. What are you going to learn? Not much - you could have made both positive and negative changes to the design." Those initial updates were an attempt at more controlled experiments, but it became clear that wasn't going to be enough. "With Artifact, we have to do a larger reboot in order to justify its existence to customers and to markets," Newell says. This second go-around is referred to internally as Artifact 2, he says, though it's not clear yet (even to Valve itself, apparently) whether this will be presented as a full-blown sequel, an expansion, or just a big update after a long gap.
Valve isn't talking about what exactly this reinvention will involve, but given the cross-pollination at the company, a good bet is to look at what its other games are doing. Free-to-play seems likely, given what it's done for the fortunes of CS:GO. Following Gwent and Hearthstone onto mobile is possible, since the Underlords team have shown that Source 2 (the engine that also powers Artifact) can be squeezed onto the smaller screen. For a studio whose development process tends towards the scientific method, this would be a lot of variables to change at once - but it seems like that's the way Valve is leaning. "It's a lot easier to make small experiments than big experiments," Newell says. "But occasionally, you're in a situation where you have no choice, the experiment you're running has to be really big - and then you just hope you're right."
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Shit, I have barely touched Doom, Ori 2 and Blands 3 and Alyx is out tommorrow.
I HAVE RIPPED AND TEARED UNTIL IT WAS DONE AHAHAHAHA IVE FUCKING DONE IT IVE FUCKING DONE IT!!
A FULL PLAYTHROUGH IN NIGHTMARE MODE
I also got every. single. collectible.
OP
OP
Finished up Will of the Wisps.
Its so great that they spent 5 years working on this sequel. There is nothing like their games. Both Blind Forest and this just has such incredible moment to moment platforming + escape sequences. All the different locales and boss fights. A masterpiece. The dark and water sections were my faves. And that whole ending sequence was amazing too.
Moon Studios
2 for 2
Someone like Microsoft needs to throw a lot of money their way and let them make a AAA 3D platformer. Its gotta be their next thing because I don't even what more they can do in the 2D space.
Its so great that they spent 5 years working on this sequel. There is nothing like their games. Both Blind Forest and this just has such incredible moment to moment platforming + escape sequences. All the different locales and boss fights. A masterpiece. The dark and water sections were my faves. And that whole ending sequence was amazing too.
Moon Studios
2 for 2
Someone like Microsoft needs to throw a lot of money their way and let them make a AAA 3D platformer. Its gotta be their next thing because I don't even what more they can do in the 2D space.
Finished Arkham Knight. Really enjoyed it. There's definitely way too much of shooting drones with the batmobile but other than that the game is fantastic. No way I'm doing the 100% ending because it implies getting all the riddler trophies (though I did
, but getting the normal ending only forces you to do the interesting side stories and not the busy work. The game really goes into Batman's psyche and the toll it takes both on him and his allies. Spiderman is still my favorite superhero game though.
save Catwoman
Deleted member 113
Guest
It seems Warner removed Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition from Steam:
Most stores still have it for sale (Humble, GMG, Gamersgate, WinGameStore, Fanatical, Voidu, 2Game, ...), so if anyone wants to own it, you better buy it quickly.
Code:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/237110/Mortal_Kombat_Komplete_Edition/Most stores still have it for sale (Humble, GMG, Gamersgate, WinGameStore, Fanatical, Voidu, 2Game, ...), so if anyone wants to own it, you better buy it quickly.
OP
OP
i got it ages ago, but yeah - really weird
they could've at least explained why they did it
It was rated a new Komplete edition not so long ago as prudis said, so, it might be related to that, maybe a complete rework with net things? we will see.
/v/ - Here's the deleted Half-Life: Alyx leak from reddi - Video Games - 4chan
Here's the deleted Half-Life: Alyx leak from reddit. - "/v/ - Video Games" is 4chan's imageboard dedicated to the discussion of PC and console video games.
boards.4channel.org
Please don't talk about leaks/spoilers without using spoiler tags. Even if it's just something as vague as it is in this case.
Thanks. I would have preferred a Reddit thread, but I am going to try to find a way to open your link without getting a virus or flagged by the police.
Edit: Okay, I found a way to get the pic in the OP. Do not click here.
Don’t believe this for a second. The leaker’s other comments directly contradict EDGE’s review of the actual game./v/ - Here's the deleted Half-Life: Alyx leak from reddi - Video Games - 4chan
Here's the deleted Half-Life: Alyx leak from reddit. - "/v/ - Video Games" is 4chan's imageboard dedicated to the discussion of PC and console video games.
Edge review states Russel is a “would-be black mesa scientist” But the leaker claims he was an actual black mesa scientist who invented the HEV suit. Bullshit
Maniac
As the name suggests. The OG Maniac.
If you're on about the 4chan leaks etc; shit be fake.
Which most folks should probably be told to their face as to not fear leaks; currently there are no real leaks on the internet as far as anyone in the know has been able to ascertain. (At least as of about 12 hours ago when I last looked into all this extensively)
4Chan is full of shit, Tyler McVicker is a lil' shitnugget who consistently (at least used to) make shit up for attention & gets fed false information (once upon a time very deliberately set-up bullshit fed by Valve devs to troll him, in fact.)
VNN is as reliable a source as 4chan. That is to say, not a very reliable source.
The FacePunch forums were a better source of legitimate info; the dataminers residing there were the folks whose work he mostly relied & still rely upon anyhow.
It's also entirely fake.
Both. Valve were making Alyx long before Campo Santo joined the company. Then Campo Santo joined and began working on Alyx because it was an exciting project, and their skills were needed.
Also, Campo Santo are "Valve proper" now.
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Both. I think all of Campo Santo (12? employees) worked on it but the team had over 80 people. The game was in development since at least 2016 so they likely only got involved mid-late in development
GTAV mods (I believe FiveM)
Fuckity fuck fuck my PS4 somehow shat all over my KH 1 save file and I was at the last boss yesterday. The save went to shit. And because I don't have PS Plus (lapsed in january so haven't touched my PS4 since 2 days ago when I started KH 1), the save yesterday didn't upload to the cloud.
Goddammit, never touching the game again unless it releases on PC. Fucking bullshit puttign cloud saves behind the paywall.
Not sure I even wanna play the rest of the games in the collection either.
Goddammit, never touching the game again unless it releases on PC. Fucking bullshit puttign cloud saves behind the paywall.
Not sure I even wanna play the rest of the games in the collection either.
Maniac
As the name suggests. The OG Maniac.
Living up to yer' name.
Out of all of Campo Santo everyone has worked on Alyx at one point in time, but some jumped off to other projects (Remo went off and did both scripting & music for Underlords for ~6 months but hopped back onto Alyx for the last few months of dev) - AFAIK around 9~ Santo'ers have been on Alyx at all times. A lot of their writing talent has been put to use with the branching & contextually-based 'dynamic' dialogue, though the story itself is mainly the work of Wolpaw & Pinkerton.
And it's not a none-canon entry, a retcon or any such nonsense. Don't worry.
What, you don't like paying for your internet twice?
Come on, be a good capitalist slave, darn it!
Maniac
As the name suggests. The OG Maniac.
That's true, though all of those are things you can already notice at 60 FPS. It really sucks when e.g. a cutscene just doesn't stop at really high framerates, and you have to go through 10 systems in debugging to finally figure out that the physics-driven camera never arrives at the target location since its smoothed movement is such that in the last few frames speed x deltaT becomes so low that adding it to the position in FP32 doesn't actually change the numbers
(And the cutscene is scripted to wait for the camera to arrive before continuing)
I always enjoy hearing anecdotes revolving around fixing duct-tape & ziptie programming, especially within gamedev lol
Keep it up.
I did quite like the idea of the two planes with different playstyles in each. It's not as tight a game as D2, TQ, Wolcen or Grim Dawn, but it's still a really fun game in its own right & definitely worth picking up.
(Thanks to our Queen for throwing it my way <3 )
People are speculating it's due to the guest characters, Warner just lost rights to (either Jason or Freddy, don't remember ATM).
Yeah it was freddy I believe.
you’d think they would want to put it on sale a squeeze out a last few bucks though
Maniac
As the name suggests. The OG Maniac.
Go fist yourself with a wooden mannequin hand, pls.
My Index kit keeps getting delayed :'(
Have some sympathy, man.
Or I'm gonna walk up there to you god damn Norwegians & steal an Index from one of you six lads with a kit
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how has borderlands 3 been? is it still pretty soloable? gmg has the super deluxe for $45 that is getting my attention
Deleted member 113
Guest
WB, through New Line, lost the rights to ANOES in the US a few months ago (I believe it was September).
If that's the reason, it took them long to remove the character from the game.
Could the Dead by Daylight A Nightmare on Elm Street DLC be next?
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