A Recap of the Reddit AMA with Half-Life: Alyx Developers

The upcoming release of Half-Life: Alyx is a historic moment for the gaming community. So, on Wednesday Valve had their own AMA hour on Reddit answering fans’ questions and revealing a lot of interesting details.

Really quickly, here’s the most important thing: the game is done and there’s no need to reschedule anything. For those who want to know a bit more, here’s a rundown of the most interesting answers:

Barnacles are still a threat in VR, and there will be some new forms of interaction with them using VR possibilities.

“Combine soldiers definitely return, both in the form you’ve previously seen them as well as with new variations to keep players busy and take advantage of VR.”

“Some creatures respond to audio more than others. We don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s an example of this we’re particularly excited about.”

The Citadel had been teleported to Earth and then it was fleshed out from resources gathered on Earth. This is the canonic explanation now.

“We have a few systems for inventory and weapon selection, all designed with the goal of keeping the players’ eyes on the environment as much as possible.”

As far as horror being part of the franchise, Valve has handled the scarier parts pretty well in terms of making the game accessible for VR.

“We will be doing subtitles at launch for ten total languages: English, French, German, Spanish-Spain, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish-Latin America, and Traditional Chinese. VO in other languages is something we’re still considering.”

The game is done, lots of people at Valve have played through the entire game multiple times.

There will be a train in the game. One of developers made a joke that it is illegal to make a HL game without a train ride.

“You can put a bucket on a headcrab, and it’ll move the bucket as it crawls around. Playtesters all keep reporting it as a bug.”

And here’s a fun fact revealed for those who read the whole article: Chell, Portal’s main protagonist, could talk and just chose not to. Just like that.

“Having the viewpoint character speak is mostly liberating. It certainly makes writing scenes easier when you don’t have to write around the fact that the main character is mute,” Valve Writer Eric Wolpaw said. “In Portal we got around it a little by actually acknowledging the main character is mute. I think it’s a lot more tricky when you have to maintain a fragile fiction that the player character can talk but simply isn’t for some reason.”