News Half-Life: Alyx gameplay and minimum specs revealed

They're pretty hefty minimum specs considering that the recommended specs for the Rift S are:

Oculus Rift S Recommended VR Specifications:

• Video Card: NVIDIA GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon RX 480 or greater
• CPU: Intel i5-4590 / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or greater
• Memory: 8GB RAM or greater
• Video Output: DisplayPort
• USB Ports: 1x USB 3.0 port
• OS: Windows 10

 

I would scrape by on the CPU and RAM (Ryzen 5 1600, 16GB ram) but my ageing AMD 390 is going to wimper. The cost of an upgrade (arguably overdue) plus a VR headset that is compatible makes this a steep barrier to entry.

Anyone doing a loan on VR headsets business model?

 

Whats with the floating hands? Is that what you actually see when playing?!

 

@lacuna -Seems better than most FPS's where half the screen is covered with gun and arms. I can also imagine issues with players being too lanky for the arm models.
That looked beautiful. I'm praying it isn't a bunch of cutscenes.

 

Really? I would have thought for a medium that is supposed to increase immersion the inclusion of weird floating hands is pretty counter productive. To be honest I'm probably being unfair because I want more of the story but can't have it because of the format

 

You want no hands at all then?
Arms are absent because nobody has motion-tracked elbows, and getting arms in the wrong position because "LOL just guess where they might be IDK" ends up with your arms very obviously in the wrong post. Having 'your' limbs in the wrong pose is FAR worse than just having them not displayed at all.
For VR in general, it's better to not show something at all than to show something that looks wrong. That goes not only for self body pose, but also for things like shadows (better to have no shadows than incorrect screen-space shadows, for example).

 

I loved playing Blood & Truth on PSVR - but when the arms looked odd and unnatural (happened a lot) it was a distraction. I think it’ll be quite easy to get used to only hands - and Valve will have tested ‘with arms’ and ‘without’ and thought it best to go without.

 

I don't want VR at all! I get paranoid if I shut my eyes with headphones on so the sensory deprivation is definitely not for me and that's before we even get to the nausea of actually using it. I'm just idly heckling a design element that, to me, is so odd that it completely breaks the immersion. I appreciate the difficulties in achieving an alternative solution though.

 

I can see a "jazz arms" mod in it's future. Where instead of tethering the elbows downward they were out horizontally away from the body.

 

weird disconnected arms flopping around would be far worse and obstruct the user's vision. Imaging when the physics bug out! I think arm tracking would be required.

 

The game looks promising. That said, I have a couple of issues.

1: Why bother adding to a storyline you have no intention of finishing. Like who cares what happens before HL2, if you aren't ever going to finish the story arc.

2: I don't have VR. Most people don't have VR. It is expensive, it makes many people ill. And honestly, most of the people who wanted HL3 are now beyond caring.

An addendum. Some people think this means HL3 is confirmed and will be a VR exclusive. Maybe they are right. But honestly. This strikes me as a money maker. Get people into buying VR kits for nostalgias sake.

Personally I don't care anymore. HL3 could come out and I wouldn't care. Too much time has passed. It will never be the game I wanted, it will never live up to the hype AND some of the cast members have died since the game released.

 

I'm interested in vr but waiting for better headsets and sufficient gpu performance at a reasonable price, which for me is around £300 each.

Better software will push adoption and bring down prices.

 

Headcrab jumpscares were enough for me in 2D, would probably go insane playing this in VR

 

Good news is you can comfortably come in £50 under budget already: Rift S for £350, and a 1660 Super for ~£200.

 

This is true, but a 1660 Super would be a minor upgrade from a 480x and not enough to sustain a high frame rate (90+) at a resolution which is important for motion sickness.
The technology is getting close to where I would feel comfortable buying in, instead of an early adopter wanting to upgrade a year later.

 

Then even better news: you can stick with your 480X, which already hits the recommended specs. For anything on the Oculus Home store outside the Early Access section (where requirements are relaxed) anything listed can achieve the minimum 90fps (11ms rendertime) with the installed settings on the Recommended devices upwards, or achieve that minimum performance with the aid of ATW & ASW frame synthesis from the minimum spec devices upwards. Steam has no performance enforcement, so that would require checking user reviews and potentially fiddling with settings and watching the performance monitor.

 

That is good news, I figured with dual screens it would be much more taxing.

 

To answer point 1, I think the expectations for a HL3 game were set too high because of the 12 year hiatus and multiple false-starts the game had. Remember when Episode 3 was set to release a year after Ep. 2? I do. And year after year I looked for every hint as Valve grew more and more silent on the subject. A few years ago I gave up hope.

It's been hinted at that those who work at Valve had psyched themselves up about any sort of direct sequel to where the series left off. Expectations had grown too high, fear of failure stopped any team from making decisions.

So HL:A can function as a way to win (or lose if it bombs) in the HL universe and decide based on that whether or not to move back to the main storyline (in VR or not). This video gets into that idea a bit:



To get to point 2, if you have a decent gaming rig, a $250 windows mixed reality headset will get you into VR. That's not cheap, but it's not prohibitively expensive for someone who is likely already willing to pay $250+ for a GPU. Delay one upgrade and get a VR HMD.

I played VR on an i7 2600 paired with a 1050Ti. I had an HTC Vive at the time and the experience was fine. There were definitely dropped frames in some games, but it was good enough. A ton of work has gone into not making people sick. If that system could do it, I'm sure most people's here could as well.

The best experience is going to be had from a Vive or Index paired with the Index controllers. And obviously, the better your hardware is, the better.