Weapon Details
Speaking of commonly used items… it’s time to talk about guns. There’s plenty of shooting in Alyx, so Valve spent lots of time building detailed and interactive weapons. Again, shooting and reloading is something the player will do hundreds of times in the game, so it’s essential to make sure that this part of the gameplay gets lots of attention in the design.
Alyx doesn’t necessarily do anything with weapons that hasn’t been seen in other games, but it nails all of the basics… and stands as the perfect bar for how weapons should work and feel in VR if a developer wants their weapons to have a realistic feel.
So… first thing’s first… each weapon has a unique in-world ammo counter. The pistol has a segmented indicator, the shotgun has a small numeric indicator, and the Combine SMG has a radial indicator. Instead of a floating number next to the gun, these diegetic details encourage players to become intimately familiar with their weapons.
Chambering
Alyx also gets bullet chambering correct, which gives each weapon an opportunity for a feeling of player ‘mastery’ when they understand how it works.
This is a small detail that’s part of how real weapons work, and I’m sure many of you already understand chambering, but we all learned about it at some point, so for anyone who doesn’t already know, here’s how it works.
When you load a magazine into the pistol, the first bullet in the magazine needs to be ‘chambered’—or you’ve probably heard someone say ‘cocking the gun’— meaning that it’s removed from the magazine and put in place ready to fire. Now that the bullet has left the magazine, if you remove the magazine, the bullet is still in the gun and ready to fire.
When the gun is completely empty, the chamber stays open so it’s ready to receive a new bullet. But this means that if you put a new magazine into the gun before shooting the last bullet, you don’t need to cock the gun again because it’s already primed and ready to go.
And if you look at the visuals and even more importantly—listen to the sounds—it’s clear that Valve wanted to subtly convey all of this to the player.
Note: unmute the clip below to hear the sounds
First is the chambering sound so we know the gun is ready to shoot. Then you’ll hear a unique sound when your magazine is empty but the final round is still chambered. If you shoot again, you get a different sound and even lights which tell you that the gun is now completely empty and the chamber has been left open.
So that little opportunity for weapon mastery that I mentioned is for players to listen for that second-to-last shot—that is the ideal moment to reload, because it means you can put a new magazine in without needing to cock the gun again.
The same thing is true for the shotgun… it doesn’t have an ejectable magazine, but the cartridges still need to be chambered. If you shoot all of the rounds before reloading, you’ll need to cock the gun again. But if you reload on your very last shot… then you don’t need to cock the gun.
Combine SMG Reload
The combine SMG, on the other hand, doesn’t have a chambering sequence because it operates purely on sci-fi space magic.
And Valve, this is the one place where I’m gonna call you out… in this particular video. When reloading the SMG, I really want to insert the mag and then rip off that other part with a nice, satisfying sound, rather than see it just fall out of my hand to the ground. It’s just begging for that interaction.
In any case, the bullet chambering is a clever detail because many players will just shoot their weapons until completely empty and then put in a new magazine and cock the gun every time—and functionally that works fine. But those who get really familiar with what their weapon looks and sounds like can pick up on this little shortcut that saves you one extra step in the midst of combat.
Shotgun Reload
While we’re talking about reloading, it’s worth pointing out another little detail with how the game treats shotgun reloading.
If you’ve played shooters then you know the common tradeoff with a shotgun is that it’s slower to reload since it doesn’t have a separate magazine. That’s true in Alyx too, which gives the weapon some character, but Valve wanted to balance that realism with the time and effort that it takes to reload the gun.
The shotgun holds seven cartridges, which means that reloading it from completely empty would require the player to reach over their shoulder and insert a cartridge each time… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. That’s a lot of repetitive movement.
Valve smartly cut’s the reload time in half by having Alyx pull out two shells every time the player reaches for their ammo.
So a full reload happens in four gestures instead of seven… but the player still gets seven rounds. And another tiny detail is that if the shotgun only has room for one more cartridge—or the player only has one cartridge left—Alyx only pulls out a single shell.
And last but not least, when you put that last cartridge into the shotgun it makes a unique noise to let you know that it’s fully reloaded.
People Love Plants
Ok, did I talk enough about guns yet? Let’s talk about something happier. Plants. People. love. Plants. And people also love touching plants.
If you put a plant in a VR game within someone’s reach, they will try to touch it. This is just a fact that we all must accept.
Valve clearly understood this, as the zoo level is absolutely full of plants and you can touch them all. Not only do they react to your touch, which preserves immersion, but they also react to explosions which further makes them feel like they’re responding realistically.
Interestingly this reaction to the player also extends to the game’s alien flora, which reacts to your proximity either with lights or bulging or sometimes… jiggling…
More Than Hands-on
And speaking of touching things that VR players will always want to touch… did you know that it’s actually illegal to put a piano that can’t be played in a VR game? Pretty sure that’s part of the Geneva Conventions…?
I’d be willing to bet that most players, actually, know that the piano in Half-Life: Alyx is playable—it’s kind of set up for you to discover that. But did you know it’s also playable with other objects including your gun? And yes, you can even shoot the keys.
But this point isn’t just about the piano. In Alyx, almost anything you can touch with your hand you can also touch with your weapons.
This seems like a minor detail, but like I talked about in episode #1, with enough time things that we hold start to feel like part of our own body, spatially speaking. We slowly gain an innate sense for where the tool starts and stops so we don’t bang it into the world around us (or into ourselves).
And like I talked about in episode #3, touching the virtual world not with our own hands but something inanimate that’s in our hands, works a bit like an immersion insulator by visually explaining why we can’t feel the things we’re touching.
Having the game reflect this reality—that the thing in our hand is an extension of ourselves—adds a certain realism that’s hard to define. It’s those moments where you don’t even think about it consciously… it just seems like a natural thing to use your gun to push open a door or swat an object out of the way.
Compared to having the weapon clip through objects and walls, like we see in many VR games, this little detail helps maintain the lie that the headset feeds to our eyes.
Vodka Bottles
And last but not least… these vodka bottles. The liquid inside is reactive to your movement which makes it feel that much more real. And yes, this effect has been done in games before and since Half-Life: Alyx, but none have done them this well.
The liquid interacts with light, and even makes little bubbles when shaken up. It’s sort of mesmerizing.
– – — – –
Now a quick note before we wrap up. Half-Life: Alyx is an amazing game, and it’s so cool to see all these little details and the thinking that went into them. But I want to make sure we all understand that while it would be awesome to see this intricate level of detail in more VR games, the reality is that no VR studio has access to the number of people, the timeline, or the budget, that Valve threw at this game. So, it would be unfair to see it as a failure when other VR games don’t reach this level of detail.
Alyx is a distillation of a million game design decisions, big and small, made by many people over the course of years. And if we look at it as a collection of the best ideas that made it through that gauntlet, we get the benefit of learning in just 15 hours of playtime the smart bits of design that took Valve many years to figure out. That’s a lesson we should all want to take.
If you somehow have yet to play this game, you can and should find Half-Life: Alyx exclusively on SteamVR.
Enjoyed this breakdown? Check out the rest of our Inside XR Design series and our Insights & Artwork series.
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