Half-Life Alyx

[dux]

My headset is a pricey paperweight atm 

Edited May 4, 2020 by dux

[dmu]

Get Beat Saber, it's good exercise and extremely addicting. I play the game almost every day.

[-HP-]

5 hours ago, Radu said:

You'd think so, but maybe people are really not that hungry. If you look at the achievements on Steam, only 30% have managed to finish the game. And that's funny because people couldn't even be bothered to get to the end of the game despite the significant financial investment on their side. I think HL:A is a well made game with some awesome moments to be experienced in VR, but now that the initial hype has died down, I can't say that I want to replay it anytime soon or experience another HL in VR or keep playing in VR. 

There's some people that say VR is the future and are pretty convinced about it, but I just can't see it.

If it's around 30%, it's actually around the average if not above the average. I remember around 2010, the percentage of people that finished the games they bought, hovered around 12%. (I was dumbfounded when I learned about this, specially as someone who finishes the vast majority of the games I start.)

The good news is, way more people play games now than they did back in 2010, and you'd think that would actually bring the statistic down even more as it reached mainstream, but it seems like it went up to around 30%!
This is obviously an average, and it depends a lot on the game genre and specific game, but if 30% of people managed to stay inside a VR Game for a dozen hours and actually finish it, which is way more effort than sitting your ass on your couch with a controller, is actually pretty good for a game that's been out for a month.

Some stats from PS Network:

Quote

Watch Dogs
Completed game (“Log Off”): 27.6%
Platinum: 0.7%

Transistor
Completed game (“Bye()”): 28.5%
Platinum: 7.0%

Entwined
Completed game (“Eternity”): 36.4%
Platinum: 0.5%

Wolfenstein: The New Order
Completed game (“Liberation”): 30.2%
Platinum: 3.4%

Lego: The Hobbit
Completed game (“Think furnace, with wings”): 38.6%
Platinum: 6.1%

Infamous: Second Son
Completed game (“Reconciliation”): 50.3%
Platinum: 9.6%

Mercenary Kings
Completed game (“Coronation”): 0.7%
Platinum: 0.1%

Call of Duty: Ghosts
Completed game (“The Ghost Killer”): 26.6%
Platinum: 0.4%

Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Completed game (A Survivor is Born”): 43.1%
Platinum: 0.7%

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag
Completed game (“Saw That One Coming…”): 33.0%
Platinum: 0.7%

The Lego Movie Videogame
Completed game (You Can Still Change Everything”): 42.7%
Platinum: 5.6%

Battlefield 4
Completed game (“Antediluvian”): 32.4%
Platinum: 1.3%

Thief
Completed game (“The Dawn’s Light”): 15.7%
Platinum: 0.5%

Sound Shapes:
Completed game (“Campaign Complete”): 37.9%
Platinum: 18.0%

Knack
Completed game (“Guardian Badge”): 35.9%
Platinum: 0.9%

UFC
Completed game (“Top of the Mountain”): 38.2%
Platinum: 0.1%

Killzone: Shadow Fall
Completed game (“The Savior”): 22.2%
Platinum: 0.2%

Trine 2: Complete Story
Completed game (“I want more!”): 0.5%
Platinum: 0.1%

Strider
Completed game (“Class-A Ninja”): 4.5%
Platinum: 0.9%

Skylanders: Swap Force
Completed game (“Kaos Quashed”): 28.1%
Platinum: 0.4%

Alien: Isolation – Ripley, Signing Off – 17.7%

Batman: Arkham Knight – Master of Fear – 43.5%

BioShock Infinite – Saw the Elephant – 25.2%

Bloodborne – Yharnam Sunrise (13.9%) Honoring Wishes (18.9%) Childhood’s Beginning (19.9%)

Call of Duty: Black Ops III – Full Circle – 2.4% (Hardened, Veteran, or Realistic)

Danganronpa – All’s Well That Ends… Umm… – 54.2%

Danganronpa 2 – Goodbye Academy of Despair – 58.9% (the highest % of anything in my list. Not surprising, as I assume most folks who dipped into a visual novel sequel are committed to seeing it through)

Dead Space 2 – Made Us Whole – 38%

Dead Space Extraction – Survivor – 13.6%

Demon’s Souls – World Uniter’s Trophy – 19.6%

Devil May Cry 4 SE – Easy Does It – 17.5%

DmC: Devil May Cry – The End? Don’t Bet On It – 39.1%

Doom – Knee-Deep in the Dead – 18.2%

Dragon Age: Inquisition – Doom Upon All the World – 23.8%

Earth Defense Force 4.1 – A Walk in the Park (Ranger, 3.5%), Winging It (Wing Diver, 2.7%), Clearing the Air (Air Raider, 1.1%), Fencing Scholar (Fencer, 0.9%)

The Evil Within – Another Day on the Job – 10.3%

Fallout 4 – Prepared for the Future – 27.6%

Final Fantasy XIII – Instrument of Change – 27.9%

Infamous – Good Finish (23.1%), Evil Finish (15.2%)

infamous First Light – She’s Ready – 33.2%

LA Noire – Moth to a Flame – 24.3%

The Last of Us – No Matter What – 31.1%

Life is Strange – Polarized – 40.4%

Mega Man 10 – WHOMP WILY! – 15.3%

Mega Man Legacy Collection – Rock and Roll (13%) The Mystery of Dr Wily (16.4%) The End of Dr Wily?! (9.7%) A New Ambition! (7.2%) Proto Man’s Trap (5.9%) The Greatest Battle Ever! (5.4%)

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor – The Hand is Severed – 37%

Persona 4 Golden – Breaking Through the Fog – 12.5%

Resident Evil 6 PS4 – Normal is Good – 9.1%

Shadow of the Colossus – Final Colossus – 19.7%

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time – Home Sick – 32.1%

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – Win – 2.9%

Tearaway – You Have 1 New Message – 38.2%

Titan Souls – Titan Soul – 18.3%

Transformers: War for Cybertron – Autobot Commander (15.1%) Deception Seeker (20.3%)

Uncharted 2 – Charted! Normal – 35.5%

Uncharted 3 – Charted! Normal – 27%

Uncharted 4 – Charted! Moderate – 30.9%

Velocity 2X – Mind Over Matter – 2.3%

Witcher 3 – Passed the Trial – 27.4%

 

[Radu]

[-HP-]

[Pampers]

20% finished The Witcher 3 on xbox, and that is a much higher amount than I would have expected.

If only people knew how many % of players boot up the multiplayer component of the game once, then never tries it again. That number is crazy high

[blackdog]

23 hours ago, [HP] said:

https://www.pcgamer.com/almost-1-million-new-people-had-a-vr-headset-after-half-life-alyx-launched/

1 mil, not bad at all. Specially considering it's nearly impossible to buy a VR headset right now, in normal times that number could easily be double.

Now the ball is on the side of all the other VR devs, after playing and finishing Alyx, people will be hungry for more games to play on their headsets. 

I think it’sa great result. We were expecting Valve to deliver the VR killer app and they did… I wonder if they have the second bullet in the chamber, because if you bought a headset now for HL, certainly you regard what’s available not good enough to spend time and money on. Sure people will try something, but what’s the next big thing?

Regarding sales, I doubt numbers would be much different without the virus: we are still in very early adopter/enthusiast territory, the average gamer can’t afford the headset alone, but let’s not forget the machine you also need. Plus all the inconvenience of setup, necessary space…

dunno if is too many jumps of speculations, but to compare with a product that everybody needs and are more inclined to spend money on, phones: the OnePlus 8 and Samsung S20 released around the same time of HLA; the 1+ (enthusiast audience) sold out, the S20 (much wider audience) not so much (Samsung not releasing numbers, projections say they are selling way less than last year and they are even offering to buy back the phones after couple years(!)).

[FMPONE]

Most games =/= HL:A

Most games are developed by a studio that has sunk their future into a gamble on the success of the game. Most games depend on hype and buzz and a hot take economy for the first few weeks after launch.

HL:A is pretty evidently a future-looking endeavor by a studio that isn’t relying on it to do anything financially, that is going to be re-released every single time VR hardware improves (which it will do a lot over the next few years).

There is just no point trying to apply traditional game sensibilities to what is pretty obviously an industry outlier product that is basically 10 years ahead of its time.

HL:A did well enough with critics that Valve likely achieved everything they wanted to do with it and more. I intend on completing it soon, it’s just hard to play VR games right now because the hardware still feels stiflingly primitive, even the Index. Ironically, it feels a lot like trying to play a video game with a headcrab attached to your face.

[blackdog]

BTW did you know that the OST had been released?

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3GqdTxzG5hGIKKXAGS078O?si=eznenCFeT_6STJhvH89lPA

you can even buy it

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1310460/HalfLife_Alyx_Soundtrack/

 

[dux]

If I can be honest I dont really remember any of the music from the game other than the old hl1 tracks they added for nostalgia.

[Radu]

So what now? What's next? Any of you guys waiting for the SDK to make levels?

[dux]

Nah see you guys again in 13 years

[blackdog]

On 5/9/2020 at 2:34 PM, dux said:

If I can be honest I dont really remember any of the music from the game other than the old hl1 tracks they added for nostalgia.

In his video about future HL stuff, from which I found about the OST, Tyler was saying this is a new mix/master as in-game the music is adjusted depending on pace and what's happening... is this true? I'm curious because Valve has been doing this "play track XY" even when other games before or that came out at same time as HL2 and Episodes were featuring an adaptive soundtrack.

@Radu from the same video mentioned above, he was saying no real SDK is being released? That there will be an editor, but every content created will be for HLA, so no total conversions and standalone VR games on Source 2 (just yet).
Personally I'd love to be able to play with the editor I've never stopped thinking of new and old ideas for HL2 content, and just looking at some gameplay from HLA was already inspiring...  but there wouldn't be any point not being able to test what you build? (that's ignoring the logistics that don't allow me to do pretty much anything atm)

Edited May 10, 2020 by blackdog

[FMPONE]

The puzzles in this game are dreadful. Really rough, awkward momentum killers.

 

Pretty sure I just played what will be the worst level of this game, level 8 Containment. It starts off pretty dark and pitch-black and just kind of unwelcoming, so it's off to a bad start. Then you fight antlions which end up being pretty underwhelming enemies, potentially quite fun to fight but not really particularly challenging or interesting in the end, and totally indistinguishable from every other enemy in terms of combat approach. They run at you. You run back. You shoot at them. They die. This is where melee would have been a welcome alternative to shooting in this game, if every enemy is just going to run at me like an idiot, let me hack at them.

Then the game throws probably the biggest disaster of a puzzle I've ever seen at the player, where you're supposed to toggle some switches that are in the ceiling (?!?), really annoying. It's a truly confusing experience trying to figure that the game is expecting you to interact with the ceiling, that'll take you a good 15 minutes. Then you have to determine if it's a physics stacking puzzle, that took me quite a while, because the game really seemed to be indicating that it was. Turns out it was not! Great.

Physics stacking puzzles are NOT pleasant in this game, because physics in this game is totally inconsistent. Some big things can be picked up, some cannot, some are moveable, some are not, the controls feel sticky and unresponsive grabbing things. But, then it turns out, you're supposed to just... reach for the ceiling? What the? Reaching for things in VR in general is so unpleasant. Reaching for the ceiling is like ultimate mind-fuck and feels terrible because there is no sense of depth to the environment that you feel intuitively enough. Then MORE switches in wall puzzles. Like, ten of them... endless with the wall puzzles.

Digression: a version of this game with every single puzzle or puzzle-like element removed, would have been far better to play (but would have been about 1/10th the length...)

This level was maximally awkward in terms of staring at walls trying to figure out how to solve what is obviously a time-sink. Then at the end it throws in a close-quarters Combine combat beat, which are some of the fastest killing enemies and with no room to maneuver around them, so you're virtually guaranteed to die the first time as you scope out the environment. All of this as if to punish the player for solving the puzzle mess. Honestly bewildering pacing...

[dux]

12 hours ago, FMPONE said:

The puzzles in this game are dreadful. Really rough, awkward momentum killers.

  Hide contents

Pretty sure I just played what will be the worst level of this game, level 8 Containment. It starts off pretty dark and pitch-black and just kind of unwelcoming, so it's off to a bad start. Then you fight antlions which end up being pretty underwhelming enemies, potentially quite fun to fight but not really particularly challenging or interesting in the end, and totally indistinguishable from every other enemy in terms of combat approach. They run at you. You run back. You shoot at them. They die. This is where melee would have been a welcome alternative to shooting in this game, if every enemy is just going to run at me like an idiot, let me hack at them.

Then the game throws probably the biggest disaster of a puzzle I've ever seen at the player, where you're supposed to toggle some switches that are in the ceiling (?!?), really annoying. It's a truly confusing experience trying to figure that the game is expecting you to interact with the ceiling, that'll take you a good 15 minutes. Then you have to determine if it's a physics stacking puzzle, that took me quite a while, because the game really seemed to be indicating that it was. Turns out it was not! Great.

Physics stacking puzzles are NOT pleasant in this game, because physics in this game is totally inconsistent. Some big things can be picked up, some cannot, some are moveable, some are not, the controls feel sticky and unresponsive grabbing things. But, then it turns out, you're supposed to just... reach for the ceiling? What the? Reaching for things in VR in general is so unpleasant. Reaching for the ceiling is like ultimate mind-fuck and feels terrible because there is no sense of depth to the environment that you feel intuitively enough. Then MORE switches in wall puzzles. Like, ten of them... endless with the wall puzzles.

Digression: a version of this game with every single puzzle or puzzle-like element removed, would have been far better to play (but would have been about 1/10th the length...)

This level was maximally awkward in terms of staring at walls trying to figure out how to solve what is obviously a time-sink. Then at the end it throws in a close-quarters Combine combat beat, which are some of the fastest killing enemies and with no room to maneuver around them, so you're virtually guaranteed to die the first time as you scope out the environment. All of this as if to punish the player for solving the puzzle mess. Honestly bewildering pacing...

What is this bit? I genuinely do not recall this at all. Come to think of it, I can't recall a lot of my play through. I remember all the big set pieces, but bits in between I'm a bit hazy.

Edited May 12, 2020 by dux