Back in February 2017, Valve’s Gabe Newell revealed that the company was working on three ‘full’ VR games. Over three years on, and we finally have one of those games in Half-Life: Alyx, out today (review here!). Are there still two other new Valve VR games on the way?
We put that question to Valve’s Greg Coomer as part of our Half-Life: Alyx interview, which we’ll be publishing in full later this week. His answer seemed to suggest that Valve isn’t working on other VR games, at least not right now.
“All the resource for VR game development later in the cycle, during Alyx’s development, all of those resources got moved onto Alyx,” Coomer explained. “So at the moment, no, there aren’t three other titles in development. But, as for what’s coming, we don’t really have something new or newsworthy for you to say: ‘Once Alyx is out the door here’s what you should expect to have happen.'”
Other parts of our interview did provide a small insight into what’s going on at Valve, though. Jason Mitchell, who also worked on Alyx, told us he had worked on another VR project “aside from The Lab and Half-Life VR internally”, though didn’t provide detail about it.
“We haven’t made actually any plans about [VR],” Coomer said in response to another question. “So I think we’ve– obviously we get that question from many people. Also like, what exactly is coming next for VR? Also what’s coming next for Half-Life? We really– we’ve been working on this for four years and we’re really excited because the reception before the game is out seems to be really quite positive, so far.”
Guarded as these answers may be, it seems like Valve genuinely hasn’t decided on what’s next for VR, then. We definitely have some hopes for the future now that Half-Life: Alyx is in people’s hands, but it will likely be some time before the developer is ready to share anything concrete about its next plans after shipping its first full-length VR game. For now, Half-Life: Alyx will have to do. Fortunately, it’s more than enough.
Half-Life: Alyx is available now on SteamVR. What do you want from new Valve VR games? Let us know in the comments below!
