About 22 years ago, a monorail, a rusted lever, and the pasta glasses of an ordinary scientist made the video game world hold its breath. Those with titles about to be published looked at each other with distrust and those whose games were already in the hands of users, felt their illusion diminish at the same rate as their sales. It was 1998 and thanks to Gordon Freeman, many of us discovered that games could be a strange mix of genres between a John Carpenter movie, a platformer, puzzle mechanics, an H.P. Lovecraft and the wildest shooter since Carmack opened the gates of hell itself just a few years earlier.
Half Life lives in the hiatus as we breathe. It comes, revolutionizes, and then returns to a plane reserved for those who can afford to spend years viewing the universe from beyond. Because Gabe Newell, god and lord over us all, is, in addition to being almighty (and richer than some small country), a peculiar type. Valve is its studio and, like its owner, it is not accountable to anyone. The freedom of not having a group of shareholders glued to the back of your neck makes it possible for you to allow yourself the audacity to give users a comb whenever you want. Do you want third parties? Ask the master gunsmith, because in more than 12 years the only thing you will know about me is that I am going to build the largest video game platform on the planet. In the meantime, and so that you don't feel abandoned, I leave you out there a couple of Left 4 Dead, another couple of Portal, some DOTA 2 and if that, I already give you discounts from time to time to buy games that many of you you won't even install.
Newell says in the thousand interviews that he usually gives (he can live in the heights but the man does not miss a journalist), that what worried him most about Half Life 2 was meeting expectations. If Half Life 1 was born in a study of Microsoft renegades learning to make a video game, five years later, the eyes of millions of players and the articles of all the dedicated press expected Half Life 2 to redefine a standard. Great hopes that too often lead to huge disasters.
Against all odds, Half Life 2 was born, and as they said themselves, with it came the physics of Sir Isaac Newton embedded in C ++ code. The wooden boxes were made of real wooden slats. The metal was heavy. The pixel stopped being a luminous point on the screen to become the atom of an object that behaved as the player expected it to behave in their room at home. Everything exploded. Whatever had to float would float. Whatever had to bleed would bleed. And so then, as happened with Half Life 1, any game that wanted to be called Shooter, had to be governed by the same universal rules that Valve had written at the box office of that unusual hero that was Gordon Freeman.
12 million copies of that time made Source, the motor engine, a new standard and by the way, they sent a very clear message to the developers: put the kinematics and the loading of the levels through the same hole that Freeman puts it to the head-crabs its lever. Better a good script and an empathetic character, than a hundred billion pieces dismembered everywhere. We want a story and hit shots while jumping on platforms that depend on a puzzle. Thus, throughout three somewhat unequal titles that took us from 2004 to 2007, the heroine who would ultimately take over in the franchise also grew: Alyx Vance. Daughter of the scientist with the most morals in the entire secret complex and the only character with the same DNA as the hero who until then had carried the weight of the entire saga. "The more normal the person who faces the abnormal, the scarier the story," said Stephen King, idol of Marc Laidlaw, writer of the franchise.
12 years is a lot of summers. An entire generation of gamers does not know by hearsay who those mad scientists were who let a legion of nightmares escape during a secret experiment deep inside a desert plain called Black Mesa. Doom, instead, followed its particular dropper by keeping the franchise alive by jumping from PC to consoles and even mobile phones. Killing demons at large has always given that inner taste. ¿But why did Valve abandon us in an industrial warehouse at the foot of a bloodstained helicopter for more than a decade? ¿Why was what should have been the icing on the cake to one of the best stories the video game has given interrupted?
Looking back, having already played Alyx from start to finish, it's clear to me. Half Life defines platforms and therefore Valve will only leave its private Olympus when it has something with which to expand what the rest of the mortal world calls Video Game. To make industry that the rest of the studios are in charge through Steam. Valve just sticks its head out to make history. And for the umpteenth time in the last quarter of a century, today is presented what its developers have been brooding over for longer than we will ever know.
In the same way that image standards called SD what there was at the time and then prepare the jump to an improved HD (then UHD and beyond), in Virtual Reality we have to start looking for a different way of calling experiences VR based on the evolution of the medium. Not everything can already fit under the same umbrella that today we call VR just as we cannot compare a BluRay with a VHS tape. Half Life ALYX is something new, light years away from many other proposals, and as such, it cannot-and should not-coexist with the rest under the same term.
Because the 'core' of VR is PRESENCE, that elusive -almost mystical- goblin that only appears when the interactions, proprioceptive mechanics, the design of their worlds, their stories, the gestures of the characters, in short , when all the ingredients are conjured with the technique to create a parallel reality that for an instant replaces the real one. And when this is achieved, you should be able to put a tag on the banner that announces it.
Half Life ALYX defines the magic of VR like no title has yet. It drags it into its universe of boxes, corridors, monsters, recognizable mechanics and puzzles integrated into its ecosystem and from there, it invites us to a superior, complete reality, unbeatable from the current technique. That is why we need a term that puts everything in its place. If the HD surpassed the SD and this to the VHS, even when we always speak of "video" we all know what to expect from the quality that accompanies each of those acronyms. ¿What do we call the new more complete VR, with more experience, more refined? ¿Full VR? ¿High VR? ¿Ultra VR? We need linguistic tools to define what was unthinkable until today and thus be able to differentiate.
In Real or Virtual we are virtual activists. While in other media they will stop at the obvious and praise (or not) the plot, the success (or not) of Alyx's personality, the ironic humor so difficult to achieve, the advanced graphic construction of a certain level or they will fall into the infinite loop of whether VR is the right platform to take Half Life for a walk after 12 years in the fridge, here we prefer to stop at the true nature that makes ALYX the best example that VR, well made, well thought out and well transmitted, it is an insurmountable experience today.
Many of us believe that VR is the logical evolution of an entire industry dedicated to content consumption and although there are still a significant number of reluctant to change, we are beginning to have both hardware and software tools to sit down and discuss it with solvency. Half Life ALYX will be our headliner in front of them.
What I think of the game after playing
Valve returns to the development world to define the virtual platform with such overwhelming quality in any section of the modern video game -VR and not VR- that it raises serious doubts about the development of other nearby titles. For that reason, it would be unfair to call a title as simple VR that today is unmatched in any viewer catalog.
On a personal basis, I was concerned that a game of such exquisite quality would detract from the rest. Unfortunately, those who seek the excellence of Half Life ALYX in other titles will be somewhat disappointed. It is what has to go beyond the rest in terms of mechanics, knowledge of the environment, millions of dollars invested, a saga expected for thirteen years and above all, time to program, test and reprogram for the sake of virtual perfection . That, Rovians, we know that very few companies in the world could - or would - allow it.
ALYX is a showcase of what can be achieved in VR today at the presence level, the true value of Virtual Reality with capital letters, and from here I hope that the echo of its hours of gameplay will reach the offices of other major studios and beyond , resonates in each of the houses of the players still reluctant to try this technology that transports you beyond a monitor and places you directly into the imagination of its creators.
I leave here my hopes that the imminent Medal of Honor and Lone Echo 2 can be classified in this new UVR (ultra VR) that we need and deserve. Long live ALYX, Gordon Freeman and thanks to Valve for all the good this Half Life is going to do to VR. It only remains to ask that another thirteen years do not pass before we can get back into the skin of this strange universe with such unforeseen consequences.
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