The rumors are true: Valve finally confirmed it’s creating a standalone port of Half-Life: Alyx (2020) for Steam Frame, although it won’t be ready at launch.
Valve finally announced Steam Frame’s price and release date, starting at $1,060 with shipping beginning as early as September 18th.
Amid the avalanche of news, Valve has also confirmed it’s officially developing a standalone port of the award-winning ‘AAA’ VR game, meaning you won’t need a VR-ready PC to play.
It’s not going to be ready for Steam Frame’s launch though, as Valve says it’s “intended to ship to customers soon.”
It may also come for free like it does with Valve Index, although the company hasn’t confirmed as much at the time of this writing.
Notably, to bring HLA to Frame, Valve says the headset’s eye-tracking and foveated rendering turned out to be “a silver bullet,” which is a rendering method that allows the headset to only render in high detail where the user is actively looking.
Frame’s 16GB VRAM was also a critical piece, Valve says, which allowed them to avoid the messy task of changing assets or needing to degrade the gameplay experience. That said, the porting process still required over a year of extra software work within the Vulkan drivers and SteamVR.
By avoiding any content changes, Valve says all the existing Half-Life: Alyx Workshop items that players have created will automatically work on the Steam Frame native version. That includes many hours of high quality content, featuring new enemies, weapons, levels, and campaigns.
“The vast majority of that work was not HL:A specific, so it benefits every other game that runs on Steam Frame. Those bug fixes, optimizations, and extra features were all made easier by the open-source nature of the drivers, allowing our team to iterate quickly without having to wait for a third party,” Valve says.
Valve notes that it’s also done some optimization work on Half-Life: Alyx itself, which is set to automatically carry over to the Windows PC version.
Six years since release, Half-Life: Alyx is still largely considered the benchmark for ‘AAA’ VR gaming, garnering a rare [10/10] review from Road to VR in addition to winning PC VR Game of the Year in 2020 among many other industry accolades.
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