Latest news with #Half-Life:Alyx
Metro
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Half-Life 3 could finally be released after 18 year wait says insider
Valve might be in the closing stages of development on Half-Life 3, as speculation continues to snowball around its existence. Half-Life 3 rumours have been a constant part of everyday life since 2007's Half-Life 2: Episode Two, but they've definitely increased over the last 12 months. In 2024, dataminers discovered several files in other Valve games, like Deadlock and Dota 2, for a project codenamed HLX. Several insiders have claimed this is actually Half-Life 3, although Valve has not officially announced any new project. One of these insiders, YouTuber Tyler McVicker, now claims the rumoured Half-Life 3 is 'playable end-to-end' and is in the 'polishing' phase at Valve. McVicker, who has been leaking news about Valve titles for years now, answered various questions about HLX in a livestreamed Q&A, where he reiterated his claims that, unlike 2020'S Half-Life: Alyx, Half Life 3 'is not a VR title'. 'HLX is being playtested so religiously and so widely that there are individuals that will just talk,' McVicker said. 'I personally have a policy of avoiding any story-related questions or information where possible, so I currently have avoided all of them. But I've been offered it by people whom are trustworthy and I know some of my contemporaries have been given it, so there is information out there about the plot.' He added: 'This is the furthest [HLX] has ever been. Period. The game is playable end-to-end. Period. [Other Half-Life 3 projects have] never been that far. And they're optimising, polishing, and they're probably content-locked, or if they're not then they're mechanic locked.' McVicker went on to suggest Half-Life 3 could be announced during the summer and released later this year, but stresses this is entirely speculation on his part. More Trending Valve has cancelled multiple iterations of Half-Life 3 over the past 18 years, and while these more recent rumours suggest a new Half-Life project does exist, there's nothing to guarantee it won't be canned before release as well. Last year, McVicker claimed two Half-Life projects were in development at Valve, with one being the aforementioned HLX. The other is said to be a VR title designed to showcase the company's rumoured new Deckard VR headset, which is tipped to launch this year. Back in 2020, Valve stated Half-Life: Alyx was a 'return to this world, not the end of it', so it's certainly possible we could see another Half-Life entry soon – even if it's unclear exactly what form it will take. Like Nintendo and Rockstar Games, Valve is difficult to predict but, if we're feeling optimistic, it's possible we could see some sort of announcement during Summer Game Fest on June 6. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Call Of Duty 2025 will lock game modes behind battle pass claims insider MORE: How to get Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga for free – but you have to be quick MORE: Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – May 2025 round-up
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Does anyone care about VR anymore? It still doesn't have that "killer" app
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Why are we still chasing the VR dream? Honestly, now. I don't get it. I've been there since the very beginning of the modern virtual hype train, since the initial announcement and launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive headset. I watched as Meta took over. I've been there, and scoffed at the countless millions invested in the field - to what end, I've still yet to understand. I've stood wincing as twin screens glare into my retinas, as my head spins and I inevitably end up motion-sick after mere minutes using awkwardly heavy lumps of lens strapped to my face. And every single time I try a new unit, I'm impressed with the improvements for 30 minutes. I then get bored and set it down, never to use the thing again. VR is such a bizarre field that makes so little sense to me. It almost feels like a nonsensical passion project that's become so big it can't be allowed to fail. The thing is, right now, with the right hardware, you can have a pretty solid VR experience. Grab something like a Meta Quest 3, a decent PC, and virtual reality gaming is a fairly fun time, as long as you can afford it. That is, until you come crashing back to reality as you run out of titles, or the games in question just don't hold up to their traditional console and PC counterparts. The problem lies with the uptake. It's a real catch-22 situation. In short, VR has never had that killer app, that must-play game that's really cemented it in place, unlike consoles or the conventional gaming PC has had. There's no one unique 10/10 title launched on it that anyone can remember, nor any singular app that changes the way we view VR, no massive IP that's changed the game. There have been some excellent outliers, sure, Half-Life: Alyx, for example, but that's about it. Maybe Beat Saber and VR Chat at a push, but it's hardly World of Warcraft, or League of Legends, or Halo, is it? There's just no IP that's blown the barn doors off and had us scuttling over to this new form of entertainment, as we've done with each iterative generation of new consoles. Again, the issue is uptake. As game development becomes increasingly complex, requiring larger investments, bigger publishing houses and developers have to strategically decide what platform they want to create their titles for to get the greatest ROI. Inevitably, that's going to be PC or consoles - platforms that now basically share the same fundamental architectures, allowing for cross-propagation of titles. And yes, that market is just monstrous by comparison. To give you a sense of scale, some estimates put the total VR user base in 2023 at around 171 million users (although the accuracy doesn't seem that great from the sources I've found). By contrast, according to Statista, in 2023 there were 1.827 billion PC gamers, with (admittedly again very rough estimates) suggesting that total console gamers sat at an even larger 2.29 billion. The global gaming population (again thanks to Statista) sat at around 3.32 billion active gamers worldwide, with some overlap between platforms. In other words, VR accounts for a meager 5% of the total audience. It doesn't help that VR headsets are still a pricey investment for gamers, with even the budget-friendly Meta Quest 3s coming in at $299.99 / £289.99 / AU$499.99 for the cheapest configuration. If you're going to invest heavily in developing a game and are looking to make your money back and then some, it doesn't make sense to create a title for VR, which is why so few good titles make it onto the platform. It's a particular problem given that the various virtual reality systems available have wildly different interaction systems, user interfaces, and graphical limitations to boot. It's not like you can easily transition a title over from console to headset. I get the counterargument to that too, "But Zak, indie developers will do it, surely?" Outside of passion projects? They've still gotta put bread on the table too, and again, it's just far more sensible to build your title for PC, grow big there, then pivot to console instead. And then there's this insane obsession with how you interface with it that developers seem to have. This apparent need for motion tracking, special hand grips, gloves, and more to fully immerse yourself in these virtual worlds. Your eyes are glued to two screens, so of course you should feel submerged in your new digital world with your body as well. That's great, until you crash into a wall as you stumble across the room haphazardly, or awkwardly fumble with the controls while screaming as your ship tumbles out of the atmosphere in No Man's Sky. Not only did we reinvent the wheel by introducing VR, but we also thought it was a smart move to introduce gimmicky controllers and interaction systems into the mix as well - something that, to this day, no one has fully settled on a design for. Do you know what would be the best system for VR gaming? A controller. Sat down on a chair, safe from bashing your shin against a coffee table, using the headset as a more advanced screen, with IR tracking to monitor head movement, and that's it. What would that give you? A better, immersive experience in every title you could imagine, with all of the brilliance of control systems we're already used to, that are already well established, with a mass market that's bloody huge. It'd be like noise-canceling headphones for your eyes. Instead, what we've been given is a cacophony of bad ideas merged into a device that has no one app or program to really draw you to it, because it has to deal with these asinine interfaces and systems that are underdeveloped because there simply aren't enough people on the platform to begin with. The hardware might improve, but the systems they run just won't. There's an old design principle that I wholeheartedly believe in. One that has, in my opinion, been massively overlooked with VR, and that's KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. And it seems, apparently, that virtual reality missed the boat on that one. Valve's upcoming Deckard VR headset rumored for release in 2025 - but the price will no doubt upset some gamers Samsung Project Moohan: the latest news for the Android XR headset Apple Intelligence finally arrives on Vision Pro, but it's the new iOS app that might turn heads
