Half Life Alyx: A Game Uninterested in Friction.
VR has been available to us for several years now, but 2020 could quite fairly be described as the year VR finally “arrived”. Between the debut of cheaper, better hardware in the Oculus Quest 2, and tentpole game releases such as Half Life Alyx and Star Wars Squadrons, the stars aligned to make VR more appealing and accessible than ever.
As a developer and newly converted VR enthusiast myself, what fascinates me the most is the ongoing development of the medium. Much of the standard wisdoms of modern game design simply don’t carry over, so the industry is largely still working out the basics, with mixed results. Many of the very best games get one specific thing right and lean into it, like Beat Saber or The Climb. While excellent in their own right, the scope of those kinds of experiences is very limited.
So it’s a rare joy to see a behemoth developer as widely acclaimed as Valve definitively step into the ring with Half Life Alyx. With the near-infinite resources afforded to them from running the biggest PC game storefront on earth, Valve get to be innovative and daring, they get to break new ground and set new standards.
That deal is only sweetened by the recent release of Valve’s signature commentary track, detailing the design process for Half Life Alyx. You would think that this would cement the game as a trove of knowledge in the ongoing development of VR as a medium, but what it reveals is a little underwhelming.
Half Life Alyx, declared the best VR game of 2020 by almost everyone ever, is a game that’s fundamentally uninterested in friction.
In Chapter 3 of the game’s commentary, when detailing the design of the glove-mounted flashlight, developer Jason Mitchell had this to say:
“Implementing the flashlight as an object the players had to hold prevented them from holding something else in that hand, which was tedious to manage and simply too punishing a trade off. In particular it meant that weapon reloading was a nightmare, because the player no longer had a free off-hand to perform the reload actions.”
The commentary itself is scripted, not conversational nor anecdotal like you find on DVDs (or Bungie’s brutal Halo 2 commentary). Valve’s approach to this is very much a reflection and extension of the design ideals the commentary itself speaks to: meticulously authored, optimised, frictionless. In these recordings, implemented into the game, Valve’s developers detail years of iterative design and playtesting to control for every player deviation, enabling or discouraging behaviours selectively. Though scripted, it’s also very honest, speaking frankly about cut content and features, and it’s very telling what they decided to focus their considerable resources on and what they didn’t.
The above quote, for example, discusses how managing multiple needs such as reloading while using a flashlight was “a nightmare” and “tedious to manage”. While this is fair justification for gluing a flashlight to the back of the player’s hand, it’s also a pretty flippant dismissal of the kinds of frictions that make The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners tick. Skydance Interactive’s take on the colossal zombie franchise is fundamentally a game about having two hands and three needs, and while it isn’t winning any VR Game of the Year awards (entirely thanks to Alyx), it’s comfortably nominated alongside Valve’s efforts across the board.
Hearing Valve broadly dismiss this approach as “tedious” betrays the limitations of their design ideals — and this is a pattern the commentary holds to throughout. Later in the commentary, developer Matt Boone explains the exclusion of melee combat in Alyx:
“We felt it was really important that the crowbar was solid to the world and enemies, and that resulted in some tricky physics challenges. Players could easily push the crowbar into an enemy in front of them, because nothing in the real world could stop it. … Faced with a potentially significant R&D problem in melee combat, we chose to refocus our efforts on ranged combat.”
Physical and convincing melee combat is another design challenge that Valve walked away from and Skydance did not. In Saints and Sinners you’re regularly tasked with grabbing zombies and holding them in position while you stab them with enough precision and force to break through their undead skull to kill their brains without your knife getting stuck.
Every stage of this interaction risks bumping up against that same problem Valve identified: weight — or rather, a lack of weight. There is no way to maintain 1:1 parity between the player’s real life actions and in-game actions without portraying the player character as infinitely strong. No struggle to hold a zombie in place, no zombie skull to resist a killing blow, just dead air to flail through.
But The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, declared second or third best VR game of 2020 by almost everyone ever, is a game that’s fundamentally interested in friction.
Skydance broke from conventional VR wisdom to solve this problem, and introduced a subtle latency to actions as a means of approximating weight. This is pretty imperceptible when using single handed weapons like pistols or knives, but becomes less subtle as you start wielding bats, swords, and larger guns, necessitating you to dedicate another invaluable hand to getting the desired results. Square your hips and slice.
It’s pretty astonishing how effective this is, and how quickly it ages games that predate Saints and Sinners by mere months. 2019’s VR darling Asgard’s Wrath is a game about slashing and stabbing guys with swords and axes, yet it feels a generation behind Skydance’s efforts with its completely weightless weapons born from its well-intentioned insistence on maintaining 1:1 parity of movement.
Asgard’s Wrath effectively proves Valve right: melee combat without weight, without friction, feels wrong. Valve were perhaps correct to sidestep this problem by removing melee entirely and sticking exclusively to single-handed guns, but The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners proves that solutions to these problems do exist. Valve certainly weren’t short of resources to land on these same solutions if they wanted to, but they decided not to.
Valve’s commentary continues in this rhythm. For every clever trick they pull to keep the experience fresh and inventive, there’s an admission of something discarded on the cutting room floor. While I appreciate the honesty they exhibit in pulling back the curtain this far, I can’t help but get the impression that Valve spent 50 million dollars and thousands of hours of QA on solving all the things that VR was already good at before they arrived, and the result is a game that is only truly impressive in scope rather than ambition.
Much like the original Half Life before it, Alyx is a curated exhibit of games industry values. It’s a flex of all the things the new medium has become, doubling as a technological showcase. While it brings very few of its own ideas to the table, it does everything it attempts with uncommon consistency of competence, and it’s certain to popularise many of its own approaches to VR for many years to come.
And that’s precisely my concern.
Over the years, Valve’s developer commentaries have served to convert their largely secretive design process into common game design wisdoms amongst developers and audiences alike. For example, their Portal 2 commentary detailed how they carefully utilise light sources to draw the player’s gaze to destinations or objectives, to avoid them ever being lost. Valve didn’t invent this method, but they’ve certainly had a hand in popularising this approach, to the point where games have arguably forgotten the innate value of being lost, designing games that eliminate aimless moments entirely.
So to hear the Half Life Alyx developer commentary so often disregard lessons that have successfully been learned elsewhere is a little concerning. Valve are one of the few developers in the industry with the power to shape the mainstream ideal of what is considered good game design. While VR has been in need of a beacon of basic standards for a while now, I believe it’s important that the industry challenge Valve’s approaches rather than imitate them wholesale, to make sure we’re not leaving anything valuable behind in following their lead.
Hi, I’m Gary. I make games sometimes, write games sometimes, and make trailers for games sometimes. You can find those games I make right here. And if you enjoyed these game thoughts enough you can throw me a dollar or three via ko-fi. Thanks for reading. ❤
