Half Life: Alyx is often considered the best virtual reality game ever made, however, this orientation motivated the creation and a third-party mod called Half-Life Alyx NoVRwith the aim of offering a “traditional” experience with a Valve title, although such a change might not be entirely comfortable given the focus of the game.

Despite the doubts it may generate, the mod seems to have achieved, at least in a good percentage, they aim to provide a “traditional” experience during Half-Life: Alyx’s campaignso it should now be possible to play with a keyboard and mouse and without having to buy virtual reality headsets, which are still not catching on at a general mass market level, especially given the low demand for the PlayStation VR2 and the failure of Metaverse (although in the case of twos is about much more than just a lack of interest in virtual reality).

The Half-Life Alyx NoVR mod is being developed by a team called the GB_2 Development Team, who have been working over the past year to optimize the game and align it with the traditional experience. The launch of the mod we’re talking about is the sixth update, but it’s the first to allow, at least on paper, the entire campaign to be played from start to finish. The mod is officially still in development, but the developers hope to release an official stable version within the next few months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytw8emezThis

The latest mod update takes care of the update support for gravity gloves to be able to grab any object from a distanceincluding the ability to break wooden boards and doors by pressing the “E” key, choosing a total of three upgrades for three weapons, introducing more achievements and decreased Alyx’s travel speed, adds chordal step sounds to the process. As usual in software development, several fixes and adjustments have also been introduced to improve stability and resolve bugs found.

The GB_2 development team, who asked for patience while developing the mod, posted a long video on their YouTube channel showing the progress of Half-Life Alyx NoVR. The video is thirty frames long, and in video games, seeing content isn’t the same as playing it, but from what you can see, at least it looks good.