Half-Life: Alyx is now less than three weeks away from launch, and to further stoke the inevitable hype surrounding the game’s impending release on March 23rd, Valve is releasing some new SteamVR Home environments to Valve Index owners.
Valve says in a recent tweet that two new SteamVR environments will be available starting Wednesday, March 4th, which are inspired by series’ dystopian ‘City 17’.
While you need to own an Index to get unfettered access, you can also connect to a friend who already has an Index, letting you’ll be able to explore together what should be a good preview of some of the fit and finish of the company’s upcoming Half-Life game.
One hitch in all this: Valve Index has been out of stock for some time now, although the company vows its VR headset will return in limited quantities soon, a victim of the disruption caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19).
If you already own a VR headset though but you don’t have an Index-owning friend, you can always hobnob with a stranger by joining the Valve Index Discord channel (invite) organized by the Index subreddit.
SteamVR Home is a platform that not only lets you launch VR games and apps from within the headset, but also customize, share, and download what effectively serves as a virtual home base too.
While there’s loads of free environments on the SteamVR Workshop, a free store of user-generated VR environments and 3D models, Valve has a knack for putting out some of the best, such as Gulping Goat Space Farm, Candy Emporium, and Team Fortress 2 Supervillain Lair. You can check them all out here, which includes Valve-built asset packs, environments, and objects.