Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was never meant to be the end of the popular shooter series. A third episode was due to be released shortly after, taking us to the Arctic to find the interdimensional time traveler Borealis after Eli Vance’s death at the hands of the Combine, followed by the Arkane-developed Return to Ravenholm. Valve was bursting at the seams with ideas about where to take this world, but then everything went quiet.

Episode 3 was eventually canceled in favor of Half-Life 3, but that too was quickly and quietly abandoned. Years passed without a word from Valve, and fans were left in the lurch, wondering what happened to Gordon Freeman. And then, in 2020, the silence was finally broken with Half-Life: Alyx, a prequel that follows the titular Alyx Vance in City 17, months before Gordon awoke from stasis.

It’s an incredible game that not only highlights the versatility of VR, but also shows that top-notch, narrative-driven shooters can succeed in the medium.. However, after a 13-year wait, hiding a new game behind expensive, inaccessible technology was understandably a controversial move that alienated a large portion of fans. Thankfully, the team behind Half-Life: Alyx NoVR has worked tirelessly to ensure that everyone can experience this amazing, long-overdue comeback.

“GB_2 started the project after they first played (Alyx) in early 2023 and wanted as many people as possible to have the opportunity to experience it, especially those who will never be able to use VR,” project manager Anthony “Spider-Man-Dev” Marrelli tells me. “Circumstances may change for people who have limited space for full-body VR or can’t afford it. But unfortunately, for people with health limitations, those circumstances may never change.”

For many, the idea of ​​copying Alyx from VR is sacrilegious. The game was meant to be played with a virtual reality headset that immerses you in the totalitarian Combine regime like never before, but as Marrelli says, it’s an incredibly demanding medium that some people just don’t have access to. If you’ve waited over a decade for a new entry in a game series you love and then it’s completely closed to you, that’s going to hurt. This mod simply opens the doors for those fans, it’s not meant to replace Alyx.

Playing the game in ultrawide format on a high-resolution monitor with a lightning-fast frame rate is also an experience in itself. If you can play it in VR and NoVR, do both!

“We’ll never say NoVR is as good as playing in VR. It never will be. Valve designed this game with every VR interaction in mind,” says Marrelli. “It’s truly the ultimate VR game that still feels like it’s from the future. Our team will do their best to translate everything we can to a flat screen, but it will never be better than experiencing it in VR.”

“We founded NoVR to bring the game to even more Half-Life fans around the world. The rest of us joined shortly after as huge Half-Life fans, from programmers, animators, community managers and more. Our team all has one thing in common: a love of Half-Life.”

Meet the team

The project has now been active for 16.5 months and in this short time enormous Progress despite maintaining a “lean” team; “We kept a small number to ensure we didn’t create the bloat and poor management that many teams experience,” explains Marrelli. “Our core team has remained the same for some time, we’ve turned to animators to add more flourishes to the game (…) We’re really proud of how much we’ve accomplished.”

Working closely with Alyx has resulted in some exciting discoveries, such as removing Dr. Kleiner from the game to integrate him into unused Combine troop types, or developing a backpack system that was ultimately replaced with wrist pouches.

Marrelli tells me he feels “spoiled” as NoVR has completely avoided crunch despite the small membership, while still getting along and working together well. He praises some of the key contributors who managed to bring this defining VR classic to a whole new audience: “Withoutaface has been a great animation lead and helped with a lot of programming tasks. Tarek is a fantastic community manager. GB_2 is of course the one who got everything rolling and the main programmer and lead. LiLPiF, kz, Seal and many other animators have helped us and they have all been fun to work with!

Recently, a team member left the project due to time constraints. They started work on getting workshop campaigns up and running in NoVR and we’re continuing their work. Thank you, HyperCycle! We’ve also worked with several great key people in the Half-Life community, such as (YouTuber) Half-Peeps and (Valve social network site) LambdaGeneration! The Half-Life community is an incredible place!”

The challenges of making a VR game work without VR

We have seen many fan-led and even official projects that have produced games in VR, like Half-Life 2 and its episodes, but not the other way around. That alone brings a whole host of challenges, like translating tricky puzzles and wild combat encounters into a medium where they would be nauseating, but it’s just as difficult to do the opposite.

For one thing, it’s “lonely” – since there are no other major projects of this scope, Half-Life: Alyx NoVR has no one to bounce ideas off of or share the workload with. Usually, fan projects work together, much like the teams for the Fallout 1 and 2 remakes share assets. Marrelli and the rest of the NoVR team, however, are on their own. But perhaps the biggest hurdle they have to overcome is getting the feel of Alyx in a completely new medium.

I mention the moment where you’re running from a Strider and fighting Combine soldiers through parking garages. You’re much more vulnerable than Gordon since you don’t have a super-powered exosuit, meaning you have to physically take cover and dodge attacks while simultaneously running from this three-legged behemoth. How do you keep such a thrilling moment exciting without physical action?

“There’s no doubt that you won’t sweat as much with NoVR,” says Marrelli. “But we tried to make sure we kept the same parameters that Valve set to make the gameplay thoughtful and strategic, as in VR.”

“For example, Alyx’s inventory hasn’t changed, you can still only carry one item per wrist pouch and grenades can’t be hoarded. This, among other inventory limitations, forces the player to really think about how and when to use their more limited items. Alyx also wears regular clothes and not a HEV suit, so her health is lower than Gordon’s and can be reduced to zero in a matter of seconds. Our playtests have shown that players still proceed more cautiously, use cover and strategize item use, which is very similar to the game in VR.”

Marrelli tells me the team would love to meet with Valve to bring NoVR to Steam either in an official capacity or “maybe for some work”—come on, Gabe, give them a call.

The other big obstacle the NoVR team has encountered is working with Source 2, as Valve hasn’t shared the Software Development Kit with the community yet: “With Half-Life: Alyx, a few months after release, they gave us the Steam Workshop tools, which mainly allowed us to change things in VR… but nothing for flat screens. One example is viewmodels, the model of Alyx with her gun. There’s no real system to implement a normal 2D flat screen model like this with those tools, but there’s a lot more control to do these things for a VR project, like Gunman Contracts, which has tons of custom weapon viewmodels.”

“With the release of Counter-Strike 2 came the Source 2 Hammer Editor, which is fantastic for creating and editing Source 2 maps, but not helpful for modifying code, creating your own custom menus, proper model and animation pipelines, and much more that we need for Half-Life: Alyx NoVR. On top of that, of course, we’re trying to translate gameplay, which is intended to be full-body and interactive unlike any other VR game, into a 2D flat-screen experience.”

A big help was being able to go back to previous games and use previous Half-Life titles to their advantage to create a framework in Alyx that allows for comfortable 2D play. “We used the leftover code from Half-Life 2 and Source 1 in Half-Life: Alyx and Source 2 to base our shooting, movement and locomotion on. So, aside from the adjustments we made to make the game more strategic and thoughtful, like in VR, the controls and feel are very similar to Half-Life 2.

“This benefits us in two ways: it allows us to push the Source 2 engine for Alyx even further in 2D, and it gives players a control method that feels familiar and easy to use.”

You can now even play Half-Life: Alyx on your Steam Deck.

Contrary to expectations, you can now play Alyx entirely without a VR headset, making the game more accessible and widespread than ever before. With leaks and rumors mounting about a new Half-Life game codenamed “HLX” and “Project White Sands,” a project like this vital, This will ensure that everyone is kept up to date before Valve’s latest entry is released. Thankfully, it looks like we won’t have to wait 13 years for it.

“We would like to thank all of our fans who have supported us for over a year now. We started this project in March 2023, so we have just passed the one-year mark and thanks to their support, positive words, feedback, etc., we have achieved a lot in such a short time, which gives us the motivation and energy to continue with it.”