Half-Life: Alyx has a lot going for it – it’s part of the storied Half-Life franchise, it’s considered one of the best VR apps around, and it’s generally very, very good. But you also need a VR headset to play it, which puts it out of reach of a lot (most?) gamers. Until now.
That’s right. There’s now a mod that lets you play Half-Life:Alyx on your gaming PC – no expensive VR headset needed. The ‘Source 2 Pancake FPS Starter Kit’ is available on GitHub, and the someone’s also put up a video on YouTube that shows you how the gameplay will look like if you’re playing on a monitor instead of a headset – with a conventional, FPS-style point-of-view and the floating arms of the original Half-Life:Alyx replaced by weapons from Half-Life 2: MMod. (You might also want to thank Valve for launching a set of modding tools for Half-Life: Alyx, without which this might not have been possible.)
It’s not perfect as you can see, but for those of you (and we bet there’ll be plenty) who’ve wanted to try the latest Half-Life title without having to buy a VR headset, this just might do the trick. The developers behind this themselves caution against having too many expectations: “Please don’t use this to play Half-Life: Alyx and then complain about the game being bad!!! This was NOT intended to be used to play Half-Life: Alyx with!!! It is intended to be a base for non-VR supporting add-ons for the Source 2 Engine to use!!!” But we wager that’s not going to stop a lot of people. After all, perfect or not, it’s still Half-Life!
Reading your article helped me a lot and I agree with you. But I still have some doubts, can you clarify for me? I’ll keep an eye out for your answers.