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Penny Arcade - Comic - Landjaeger
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Landjaeger
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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With HL2 you already had everything at hand and you needed to add a free piece of software to run a game bought on CD, here you need to have a high end PC plus 400$ (or more) of VR equipment plus a dedicated space in your home where you can move around without smashing something or hurting yourself.
HL:Alyx cannot be a killer application for VR simply because the killer application can arrive only after all the other problems of VR get resolved, mainly VR sets being completely useless outside a few hours of gaming with a very small subset of games.
A gaming mouse is still a mouse, a gaming keyboard is still a keybord, a high end video card is still a video card... a VR set is expensive garbage while not playing.
They wanted to make a cool Half Life game in VR. They wouldn't have made a Half Life game if not for this.
To most non-gamers these days, a home PC is an expensive piece of garbage. They have phones now. Tablets when they want a "big screen" experience.
tl;dr: Don't yuck my yum just because a company catered to me.
I'm not a VR hater. I love the idea of it. I'm just in the camp that's waiting for technology to improve a bit more before I jump on board. I fully plan to get in on this technology, just not as an early adopter.
Reading about its origins as an experiment that used Half-Life assets because those were readily available at Valve, I'm pretty sure this was originally some devs fiddling around in an attempt to solve problems of VR but from a software side. I can't think of any longform games VR games that have caught people's attention. It's mostly been indie games that dial in on a specific mechanic or some sort of simulator that relies on the clunkiness of the play experience for entertainment like a VR QWOP. Even if all the hardware and physical issues of VR were dealt with there wouldn't really be much incentive for people to buy it without decent software and since programmers aren't about to go building hardware this was a natural thing for some to mess with instead. It just turned out to be interesting enough to turn into a real game.
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Agreed, but while I might be giving the internet too much credit, I think the people saying, "hold your horses this isn't Half Life 3" aren't so much saying it's going to be terrible, as much as they are cautioning people to manage their expectations. If this game gets judged on the merits of whether it's a suitable HL3 it's going to fail, but that's not a fair curve to grade it on.
I have not seen anyone say that it's the same as requiring you to install Steam, and I've looked at a lot of discussions. A better comparison would have been the hardware system requirements; I recall HL2 having really punishing requirements at the time, or at least I was not able to run it at release (it was 12 years ago, so my memory is understandably blurry). Hell, compensating for inflation it probably costs less for a rig that can run Alyx than one that could run HL2 on release.
I'm not sure I quite follow the idea that "A VR headset is useless since you only use it for gaming". I'm pretty sure I don't use my graphics card for anything besides gaming, and it costs more than a low end VR headset does.
Until Valve makes another well made, popular game that the majority of people can at least have the chance to enjoy I am uninterested.
DotA2 is a well made, immensely popular game that is enjoyed by a massive amount of people. And it is made by Valve.
My thought has been that Valve wasn't willing to make a Half-Life game that was just a generic sequel that didn't contribute anything to the genre, especially when the rest of the industry had already been spitting out generic Half-Life sequels like crazy. Unfortunately for them, they couldn't figure out a way to innovate further, and gradually had their talent shift in directions that weren't first person shooters. To be fair to them, no one else was really able to innovate that much either, with most of the industry's progress involving adding open-world and/or rpg aspects. I doubt that that Valve was interested in taking their games in that direction, especially considering Half-Life's themes.
The VR game finally offered them an opportunity to do something innovative that hasn't been done before, so they decided to jump on it.
Ironically UnIronically I have been watching others play games regularly for the last few years
(Something I would never do in my younger days of gaming)
I don't own VR yet, but I would not think I would have any issue watching a twitch streamer give it a whirl
They get huge goodwill from me for being instrumental in helping me to be able to play literally thousands of games. Whether they do or do not make yet another FPS is pretty trivial compared to that.