And two, the physical space in the room required to wave your arms around in virtual reality without breaking something. A video comparing the options puts the lowest end of the spectrum at 500 dollars American, and concludes that this cheapest setup isn’t up to snuff for Alyx’s requirements. There are two reasons for this: one, the cost of the additional hardware on top of the game itself.
This, in fact, is my broad thrust here, that VR gaming as a whole and Alyx in particular simply isn’t as accessible to a mass audience. Let me preface this all by saying I haven’t played Alyx personally. Given that Alyx is a prequel of sorts, it’s as if the Combine had sucked a lot of the life and movement out of the world by the time 2 rolled around. City 17 is so much more richly drawn and rendered in Alyx as opposed to 2 that looking back, its original outing seems like an unfinished, unpolished beta version. But now, in the light of Half-Life: Alyx, which lets you do that with your own hands rather than a mouse and a button, in retrospect it feels like a dry run. It was one of the first first-person shooters to let you screw around with physics objects and chuck bits of detritus around, even integrating this into the puzzles – and of course letting you stack up explosive barrels and see what happens. When Half-Life 2 came out sixteen years ago, it was a revolution – in level design, in storytelling, but perhaps most of all the physics engine.
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