Half-Life has finally returned — in VR form.
Developer and publisher Valve’s popular first-person shooter franchise, absent since 2007, is back with a new entry, the VR offering Half-Life: Alyx. While not quite the much-fabled, memed and sought-after Half-Life 3 fans have been clamoring for, the new game is still a return to the world of Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance.
The first trailer for the new game shows protagonist Alyx exploring a futuristic city, battling aliens, scavenging for items and searching for her father. The game is set between the events of the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2.
“Everyone at Valve is excited to be returning to the world of Half-Life,” Valve founder Gabe Newell said in a statement. “VR has energized us. We’ve invested a lot of ourselves in the technology. But we’re also game developers at heart, and to be devoting ourselves to a VR game this ambitious is just as exciting. For that to come in the form of Half-Life feels like the culmination of a lot things we care a lot about: truly great games, cutting-edge technology and open platforms.”
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Game Awards creator and host Geoff Keighley also sat down with the team at Valve to discuss the upcoming game in a new video posted Thursday.
David Speyrer, a lead designer on Half-Life 2, noted that fans were clamoring for Valve’s “next big” VR game after the 2016 release of The Lab. “We settled on Portal or Half-Life as interesting,” said Speyrer, though he admitted that the team moved away from Portal as an option because the game’s mechanics might “make people sick” in VR. “Half-Life is about this cadence of story, combat, puzzle, exploration … and they all seem to be reinvented in interesting ways in VR.”
Since its initial debut in 1998, the Half-Life series has sold more than 18 million copies. Fans eagerly awaiting a third installment in the main series have adopted “Half-Life 3 confirmed” as a rallying cry attached to any cryptic bit of news surrounding Valve or its co-founder Gabe Newell.
More information on the upcoming game will be revealed Dec. 12 at The Game Awards.
