Back in March, we wrote about the launch of Return to Rapture, a full Half-Life: Alyx VR mod from Wim Buytaert.
If you played the experience then you might know that a second part is on the way, and it’s sounding even more ambitious than the first.
Wim Buytaert — now backed by a team of eight people working on the project — shared a first look at Return to Rapture: Chapter II with us today, and you can see the trailer below. The second installment will add around 20 more levels to the experience and is arriving later in 2021.
Whereas the first chapter featured a decent amount of assets from the original BioShock, Chapter II bumps it up to 3,000. More importantly, though, iconic enemies like Splicers and, yes, Big Daddies will be fully animated enemies in this installment. You’ll no longer just be fighting Alyx’s usual enemies; this mod will give AI to Splicers that can either shoot at you or use melee attacks, whereas Big Daddies will have certain weak spots to exploit. Little Sisters will feature too.
Interactive elements like usable slot machines are also being added, as are new voice actors and even a crafting system for ammo. Resin is gone, instead swapped out with the coin system to bring the game closer to an authentic experience. Finally there are upscaled textures, cloth physics added to assets from both BioShock and Alyx and, perhaps most interesting of all, new custom weapons. Details on how this will work are yet to be revealed but the developer did tease that Bioshock: Infinite’s Broadsider Pistol would be included.
No date for when the full mod will launch just yet but, given the quality of the first part of Return to Rapture, there’s reason to be hopeful. We’ll let you know more as soon as we have it.
