Half Life: Alyx is considered by more than one as the best game for virtual reality ever created, however, this orientation has motivated the creation of a third party mod, called Half-Life Alyx NoVRwith the purpose of offering a “traditional” experience with the Valve title, although such a change might not be entirely convenient considering the focus of the game.
Despite the doubts that it may generate, the mod seems to have achieved, at least in a good percentage, their goal of providing a “traditional” experience throughout the Half-Life: Alyx campaignso this should already be able to be played with a keyboard and mouse and without the need to purchase virtual reality headsets that, at general levels, are still not taking off in the mass market, especially considering the low demand for PlayStation VR2 and the failure of the Metaverse (although in the case of the second there is much more than just the lack of interest in virtual reality).
The Half-Life Alyx NoVR mod is being developed by a team called the GB_2 Development Team, which has worked over the course of the past year to optimize the gameplay and align it with a traditional experience. The launch of the mod that we are talking about is the sixth update, but it is the first that allows, at least on paper, to play the entire campaign from start to finish. The mod is officially still in development, but the developers hope to release an officially stable version over the course of the next few months.
The last update of the mod takes care of updating the support for gravity gloves to be able to grab any object from afaras well as including the ability to break wooden planks and doors by pressing the ‘E’ key, the selection of a total of three upgrades for the three weapons, the introduction of more achievements and the reduced Alyx’s travel speed, adding in the process chordal step sounds. As usual in software development, a good handful of fixes and modifications have also been introduced to improve stability and resolve bugs that have been detected.
GB_2 Development Team, which has asked for patience in the development of the mod, has posted a long video on their YouTube channel to show the progress of Half-Life Alyx NoVR. The video is thirty frames and in video games it is not the same to see content than to play it, but at least it looks good from what you can see.
