Half-Life: Alyx was just released and with it has come a heap of praise from those with VR headsets along with a heap of complaints from those who are against the mere idea of virtual reality. If you are expecting Valve to release a official version of the game that strips out the VR aspect, you are most certainly barking up the wrong tree. Half-Life: Alyx was built around VR, not the other way around. To release a version of the game without VR would be akin to ordering a hamburger without the meat. You lose the very core idea, the pull of why it the game succeeds because of VR.
But, Valve also knows its community. They know that people can and will make a mod for Half-Life: Alyx that attempts to strip out the VR component and make it playable on flat monitors. In speaking with Polygon, Valve's Robin Walker says that he "knows it's going to happen." Polygon asked Walker if he or anyone at Valve are worried about the idea that the game will have VR modded out.
"The answer to this diverges significantly depending on which members of the team you talk to, so this answer is definitely just from me,†Walker explained. “There are a set of people on the team that are concerned about that. Personally, I’m not concerned about it at all.
"It will clearly demonstrate to people why we did this in VR. It will be a very crisp way of seeing all the stuff we got for the move into VR. If people play [a modded version on a standard display] and say this is is just as good, that will teach me a lot. I will realize I’m wrong, and we didn’t get as much as we thought, and I love to know whenever I’m wrong."
"It will clearly demonstrate to people why we did this in VR. It will be a very crisp way of seeing all the stuff we got for the move into VR. If people play [a modded version on a standard display] and say this is is just as good, that will teach me a lot. I will realize I’m wrong, and we didn’t get as much as we thought, and I love to know whenever I’m wrong."
The list can easily go on and on, but it's honestly getting very late here. The idea is that yeah, some of these things can be presented with a non-VR analog, but the experience would not even come close to being comparable. Of course, some people don't care about that. There will be a mod made that finds non-VR solutions for many of these core functions within Alyx. It would be incredibly, incredibly surprising if the two experiences were at all close to being the same.
"Yes, it’s going to happen. I’m fine with it, for the sake of the other members of the team I don’t want to say I encourage you to do it, but it’s going to happen,†Walker said. “I think people will then hopefully have an even greater understanding of why we decided to build the product in VR than they do now."
Some day i might have what i need to play VR, but at the moment that's probably more than 10 years from now, and depends on a lot of factors, so i'm just going to watch someone else play through it on Youtube, which the devs are probably ok with right?
The reason for a mod like this wouldn't be so that people could enjoy it, the story would be intact of course but the gameplay would suffer to the point of tedium, enemy encounters are slower paced to suit VR and simplified or self completing puzzles would likely strip most of the content of the game, the reason for making this mod would be as an experiment.
Not that you can't make interesting 3D interactions without VR, but that's a lot of work.
How it does is incredibly important. I mean, the VR market obviously is constrained. So we're not like, expecting... It's constrained in terms of the number of devices that are out there in the world. So for us, it's much more about 'What are the fans saying? What did the reviewers say? What do other developers tell us about their reactions to it?' There's going to be a consensus that emerges and that matters a huge amount to us because this is how we figure out 'Are we on the right track? Are we moving in the in the direction that we need to?' So it matters incredibly. It's going to affect every conversation we have internally. For the next 18 months, it will be a reference to what worked and what didn't work on the release of Alyx.
So yeah, go ahead and watch a let's play of it. It obviously won't be the same as playing it in VR, but you will still get the story. I would say that watching a YouTube video of a playthrough would actually be better than waiting to play a mod that ends up being some absolute bastardized version of the VR gameplay experience.
And for whatever it's worth, this was the biggest launch of a VR game ever. The concurrent player count surpassed the previous record holder of Boneworks by a factor of over four times (42K vs 8.7K), which is absolutely massive for a VR game. Even moreso when you take into account that Alyx is a full priced game ($60) and Boneworks is half of that at $30. Hell, Alyx almost hit half of the concurrent peak for the more traditional (read "non-VR") game DOOM Eternal, which was 105K concurrent players during the launch day peak.
I believe games are art not just products, so the fact that this game isn't aiming to be available, despite marketing and using the name of a franchise that millions of fans have been craving to see return for 13 years, is totally fine.
Plus, Valve built up most of their portfolio from games that began as mods. CS, TFC, Day of Defeat, DOTA, Alien Swarm (was UT2K4 mod), Dota Underlords (Auto Chess)
It'd be suuuuuuuper hypocritical of them to go "NO, CAN'T MOD THIS!" after all of that. lol