A new mod for Valve’s popular VR shooter Half-Life Alyx allows players to enjoy the game on any PC, no VR headset required.
Half-Life Alyx is the most recent game in the Half-Life series, a surprise announcement that took the series in a VR-only direction. It was a significant limiting factor in the games sales — no VR headset, no Half-Life Alyx — and players have been coming up with ways to get the game to run on PC without a headset for some time. One mod in particular, called NoVR by a team that goes by GB_2 Development Team on ModDB, has always been considered the high-watermark for mods attempting to get Alyx running outside of a headset. The mod has just hit a major milestone, releasing its most comprehensive update ever and announcing that, with the mod, Half-Life Alyx can now be played end-to-end, like a traditional first-person shooter, and without a VR headset.
All of the game’s interactive elements, like its gravity-manipulating gloves and Combine fabricators, weapon upgrades and reloading systems, can be worked within the mod for play on a flat screen. For those that don’t have the disposable income required to purchase an expensive digital stackhat, this will come as fantastic news. The first new game in the Half-Life series in 16 years at the time of its 2020 launch, made more easily available to a much larger audience.
Development on the mod is, of course, a long way from complete, but because of the changes that it makes and the breadth of content it finally makes available, its creators are calling this NoVR’s official 1.00 release.
Half-Life Alyx is of course one of the VR space’s greatest games. One of the many reasons that Valve has shied away from any potential Half-Life 3 is that feels any new game in the series should represent a groundbreaking shift to both design and play. With the first-person shooter genre settling into … let’s be charitable and call it a groove rather than a rut, in the decade and a half following Half-Life 2, the genre hadn’t meaningfully evolved to the point where something truly new could be extracted from it. Nothing, at least, until VR came along and, at last, Valve saw a path forward for the franchise. Half-Life Alyx‘s trick was to flip the game’s perspective. Putting the player in direct control of Alyx Vance in the days prior to her fateful meeting with Gordon Freeman, Valve was able to reframe the physics experiments that defined Half-Life 2 but also create new levels of immersion in a first-person shooter. Movements like physical reloading and spatial problem-solving that saw the player moving around in a physical space changed puzzles and shootouts alike in ways that felt totally new.
And now you can try Half-Life Alyx for yourself, even if you have no VR headset handy. Remarkable.
You can download NoVR here.
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