Valve has almost finished making Half-Life: Alyx – CNET

We’re not even a month into 2020 and already two of the year’s most anticipated games, Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Marvel’s Avengers, have suffered delays. One game that you might think would be particularly prone to delay is Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx: The phrase “Valve Time” exists as a reminder of the studio’s tendency to take longer than it promised to do, well, anything. But, according to a team of Valve developers, that’s not going to happen. 

“With the exception of some tweaks to the absolute final scene, the game is done,” wrote a team of Valve developers during a Reddit AMA. “Lots of us at Valve, as well as playtesters, have played through the entire game multiple times.”

The team, which consists of 10 Valve employees who work on design, programming, sound design and animation, said it’s now polishing the game and fixing bugs. “We’re confident we’ll hit our intended release,” they said. We don’t actually know specifically what the release date is yet, just that the VR game will launch in March.

While some gamers expected that March release window to be plagued by delays, others reasoned that the game was almost finished by the time Valve announced it in November. The development team confirmed the latter theory, writing “We let the Valve Time happen before we announced the game.” 

Half-Life: Alyx takes place in between the first and second Half-Life games. It follows Alyx Vance, a character introduced in Half-Life 2. In the original Half-Life, you play as Gordon Freeman, a survivor of an experiment gone wrong that accidentally opens an inter-dimensional portal. By the time Half-Life 2 starts, Earth has already been conquered by an alien race called The Combine. In Half-Life: Alyx, you mount a resistance movement against the inter-dimensional threat. 

If you own Valve’s Index VR headset, you’ll get Half-Life: Alyx for free. Everyone else will have to pay $59 on Steam. Alyx was designed from the ground up for VR and will work on all PC-based VR headsets, Valve said. If you’ve never played a Half-Life game before, you can download them free right now on Steam.