You can play the game in seated, standing or room-scale configurations, and each one supports blink (teleport that can rotate), shift (teleport with no rotation), continuous (standard thumbstick movement) and continuous hand, which uses the thumbstick to accelerate and your hand position for direction. In addition to supporting a wide range of controller inputs, Half-Life: Alyx also supports a variety of locomotion methods. We were told the launch-day build of the game includes Cosmos controller profiles. Half-Life: Alyx also supports the HTC Vive Cosmos controllers, but support for those controllers was not ready in time for us to test them to learn the button mapping. On these controllers, the grip button brings up the pause menu-the trigger button doubles as the grab button in this configuration. HTC’s Vive controllers don’t include as many buttons, so Valve had to improvise somewhat. Thumbstick for movement, Y button (in the same place as the left B on Index controllers) and the grip button for grabbing. To pick up objects, you must squeeze the grip.īoth versions of Oculus Touch controllers have the same button mapping as the Index controllers. For the Index controllers, the trigger button interacts with menus and weapons, the thumbstick is used for movement (more on that later) and the B button brings up the game’s pause menu.
The button mapping of each controller type differs slightly, but Valve did its best to stay consistent, despite the dramatic differences in varying controllers’ layouts. The interaction is so natural that I didn’t even realize it was automatic at first. Any time you bring your hand close to a button, your middle, ring and pinky finger will curl in and leave your index finger out to press the button. Interactions, such as pressing the microphone button, are triggered by automatic animations. Even the original Vive controllers work great. However, you don’t lose out on anything practical by going with different controller inputs. Half-Life: Alyx does use some of the hardware features of the Index controllers, such as the capsense capabilities, to help animate your in-game fingers.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon RX 580 (GB)