Update: Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t taken Half-Life 2 VR long to be approved on Steam Greenlight. The mod was greenlit this morning.
“The whole team offers their heartfelt thanks to the ~15,769 wonderful people who have voted for us at the time of writing!” the team wrote in an update. “The 95% yes rate and all the positive comments have given us many warm fuzzies over the last couple of days and kept us on the front page of the Steam community and the Half-Life 2 page.”
No date has been given just yet.
Original story: If there were ever a Steam Greenlight project that deserved the entire internet’s collective power of clicking on a “Yes” button, then this Half-Life 2 VR mod would be that project. We originally reported on the mod last month when a short teaser trailer was released by the SourceVR Mod Team on YouTube, but one of the mod’s chief creators, Worm Slayer, has now released a full features trailer, along with an actual Greenlight campaign. You can watch the new footage below:
With this new information we now know for sure that motion-tracked controllers will be fully supported, instead of just keyboard and mouse controls, and both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive will be able to enjoy the mod in perfect platform parity. It’s been in development since 2013 and will require that players own Half-Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1, and Half Life 2: Episode 2 all on Steam. The mod will purportedly pull from those files for assets.
In addition to the motion controller support the mod will have updated effects and textures so it looks good up close in VR, a remade GUI that’s in 3D and designed specifically for VR, realistic weapon interactions like manual reloading, and a multitude of locomotion options to fit all playstyles. All of those enhancements seem to make great sense considering the game originally released 13 years ago.
To be clear, this is not created by Valve. Since this is a mod its release will likely be very similar to the Portal Stories: VR mod created by Prism Studios. It is free to download for owners of Portal 2, but does include new content. This Half-Life 2 VR mod is expected to follow that sort of release as well more than likely.
An exact release date is unknown, but the Greenlight page does indicate it should release “soon”. In the meantime, enjoy some gorgeous new screenshots below and both trailers embedded above. Which games do you hope Valve is working on for its VR projects? Do you think one of them will be Half-Life related? Let us know down in the comments below!
