Back in 2017, head honcho Gabe Newell revealed Valve were working on “three full VR games”. We received certainly one of them final evening. Half-Life: Alyx is superb, in response to Graham’s Half-Life: Alyx review, but it surely appears the opposite two have gone lacking. According to Valve designer Greg Coomer, “there aren’t three other titles in development.” We solely wished two, Greg.
The information comes from an interview with UploadVR, the place Coomer was instantly requested whether or not the opposite games have been on their approach.
“All the resources for VR game development later in the cycle, during Alyx’s development, all of those resources got moved onto Alyx,” Coomer defined. “So at the moment, no, there aren’t three other titles in development. But, as for what’s coming, we don’t really have something new or newsworthy for you to say: [no] ‘Once Alyx is out the door here’s what you should expect to have happen.’”
UploadVR do word that elsewhere of their currently-unpublished full interview, one other Valve designer, Jason Mitchell, informed them he’d labored on a VR undertaking “aside from The Lab and Half-Life VR internally”. He didn’t go on to say something about it although, and it may effectively have been an early undertaking that received deserted.
Still, Valve are being uncharacteristically chatty, and our Katharine lately received an opportunity to sit down down with Valve’s Robin Walker and Jim Hughes. You can learn that interview in full later this week, however for now let’s zoom in on a clue about what Mitchell may or won’t have been speaking about. Robin Walker informed Katharine:
“There were a lot of people who, in that first year or so – we started this shortly after that first year of VR – there was an enormous amount of super creative work done to explore what kind of mechanics work in VR and what mechanics don’t, and in a lot of cases, that work was done by very small dev teams who could explore a mechanic heavily, but weren’t necessarily able to invest heavily in building a large-scale gaming experience around that mechanic. So we felt that our job, since we could do that, was to really build that large-scale experience around the mechanics, and so that was our focus here.”
What’s been left on Valve’s slicing room flooring, and what’s subsequent? It appears Valve are nonetheless figuring that out.
