Picture the scene: you’re wading right into a room filled with unaware Combine troopers in Half-Life: Alyx, Valve’s newest VR title. You have the crowbar raised above your head, able to swing down into alien cranium. You stroll via the door and also you’re yanked backwards by the crowbar’s hook which simply caught on the door body.
For some time Valve experimented with giving gamers entry to maybe essentially the most iconic Half-Life weapon in Alyx, however it created a bunch of issues. Among them was gamers getting caught on doorways.
“If I had to think about the things we put significant time into that didn’t make it into the product, there’s only really one I can think of, and that’s the crowbar,” designer and programmer Robin Walker informed me throughout a current interview.
“We spent a bunch of time experimenting with a usable crowbar in the game, and never got it to the point we were very happy with it.”
According to Walker, most of the crowbar’s issues have been solvable, and it did introduce some fascinating interactivity – like having the ability to manipulate issues from afar with the hook, for instance. But there have been too many points.
“We built a map full of little puzzles that you could do just using the crowbar, and that felt really cool,” Walker defined. “And much like how the palms ended up having the ability to do quite a lot of stuff you used to have the ability to do, however simply to a a lot better constancy, there’s much more inventive use of it than you’d had prior to now, and that was thrilling. But there have been an entire bunch of issues.
“The hook itself was actually problematic. Without any actual suggestions, it was very straightforward to have it off-screen and hook it on one thing and never know, so gamers would find yourself hooking it on a door body as they went via the door, after which begin strolling away, and we’re like, ‘Now, what do we do? What’s the purpose?’.”
Valve experimented with having the hook disable, so it didn’t have physics, every time it was off-screen, however that got here with some problems with its personal.
“So, there were a whole bunch of things we didn’t like around that,” he continued. “And then it also encouraged players to do melee combat, and we spent a bunch of time on melee combat, and just never found something we liked. I think that people who have built their whole games around melee combat have done a great job. We couldn’t do that.”
Melee fight has by no means been an enormous a part of Half-Life and Valve felt like its time was higher spent ensuring all the things else was as polished as attainable. There was additionally one other huge subject with the crowbar: individuals forgot who they have been.
“Then we hit what I think was really the catalyst for deciding to jettison it, which was that whenever we talked afterwards, as we always do post-playtest to tell us things like, ‘So, what’s gone on? What are you trying to do right now? What is the plot of the game?’ All of them would think they were Gordon as soon as they had the crowbar,” Walker defined.
“We would start the game with a text scroll, similar to what you’ve got right now, where it’s like, ‘Alyx Vance,’ and everything, and people would, as soon as they get the crowbar, playtesters were telling us, ‘The crowbar is Gordon’s.’ It’s not Alyx’s, and we should stop trying to fight that. So, in the end, we just jettisoned it.”
Read our Half-Life: Alyx review for our impressions.
