Half-Life: Alyx has been available to play for nearly eight months, and Valve just released a major update to the game. However, this update doesn’t add any new gameplay, just hours of developer commentary to enjoy.
While commentary may sound a little boring, it’s sure to offer some fascinating insight into a very well-received first foray into virtual reality for the Half-Life franchise. In total, Valve has included 147 different points of interest within the game, accessed by interacting with hologram headsets placed around the virtual world.
The commentary is over three hours in length and covers, “every aspect of development, including design, art, animation, rendering, sound and more.” There will be spoilers, but accessing the commentary is as easy as starting a new game with Developer Commentary enabled. So it’s best to treat this update as a sort of New Game+ for when you’ve finished playing and seen everything there is to experience.
The commentary was recorded by members of the dev team over the summer while they were all stuck at home in lockdown. Valve also took the time to translate the audio into 11 different languages for subtitles, with the options being English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Russian, Polish, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. There’s also additional in-game localization included with the update for Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.
Half-Life: Alyx is available on Steam for $60 and requires a virtual reality headset to play. You can choose between the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or Windows Mixed Reality headsets. Input is handled via tracked motion controllers and the game can be played sitting down, standing up, or at “room-scale” if you have the space.
