Half-Life: Alyx appeared on March 23, 2020 and can convince all along the line – as we also found in our test. But it would have happened almost differently: Valve thought about it instead of a new half-life to ship the portal series in VR. Designer Robin Walker explained this in an interview with website VG247.
After Valve's first virtual reality experience with The Lab, they first considered a complete game within the virtual environment. You wanted to use an existing franchise
The first thought: portal (not half-life)
Walker states that a lot of people would think of Portal first when it came to a Valve VR title. Because when solving puzzles "you can take your time". When they examined the possibility more closely and at all Prototypes created for portal in virtual reality, they said: It won't work.
Because the later levels of Portal are based heavily on to keep moving and use the portals for long jumps. A concept that, according to Valve, is very difficult to implement in VR. The susceptibility of many players to motion sickness should not have been innocent either. Other concepts such as a multiplayer shooter were excluded from the outset, since according to the studio there simply wasn't a target group large enough for it.
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Half-Life "worked best"
Eventually Half-Life was chosen because the series always focused on Shooter gameplay to add more elements such as puzzles and pathfinding and then reward the players with a great view. As the team found, this is an "ideal concept for VR". And as Gabe Newell explained in an earlier interview, the series is always about "solving interesting problems" anyway.
This created a short prototype that was very well received by the team internally. Although it only took 15 minutes to complete, the testers spent 45 minutes in the virtual world and then shared their ideas on how to do it expand the principle even further could. The result of this work finally became Half-Life: Alyx.