Somehow between then and now Valve made an entirely new VR game, Half-Life: Alyx, which released in 2020 to widespread acclaim. Unfortunately, despite a blessing from Valve permitting the release of the project on Steam, the revamped version of the mod never got completed, having seemingly fallen into development hell. The mod’s original announcement trailer gives an idea of what they hoped to deliver: The team that had made the original version of the mod (compatible only with older Oculus development kits) planned to update it for modern consumer headsets and remaster the game with VR-specific touches like a made-for-VR UI, multiple locomotion methods, and more. If you’ve been following the VR gaming space for a long while, you probably recall back in 2017 when the Half-Life 2 VR mod was announced to significant fanfare. But now a group of proven VR modders is aiming to finally make it a reality.
In 2017 the project was seemingly reignited with ambitions to not just update it for the latest headsets, but to remaster the game for VR more broadly unfortunately that effort never came to fruition. Unfortunately the mod eventually lost compatibility with newer hardware as the first consumer VR headsets began to hit the market. Many years before the release of Half-Life: Alyx, a group of fans built a rudimentary Half-Life 2 VR mod which allowed the game to be played with early VR headset development kits.
