Half Life is the Tom Hanks of gaming: unextraordinary, inoffensive, with enough polish to be almost universally agreeable. Being good in the eyes of everyone gets you a LOT further than being great in the eyes of experts.

Valve doesn't make bad games any more than Blizzard does, and this won't be bad. But I'll never know because it's vr-only, with the justification that the ability to gateway open a door and toss a grenade inside can't possibly be mapped to a keyboard. No, really.

If you’re being reasonable then you’d agree that having a key-mappable action available for ‘a lot’ of the freeform actions you can do with realistic VR would lead to 1000+ keybind options.

If you were being reasonable you wouldn't pretend that context-sensitive keybindings haven't been a thing for over a decade. The Hitman games don't require 1000+ buttons for open door, grab guy, use fire extinguisher, poison drink, disguise as snooty banker, climb drainpipe, blend in with crowd, rewire camera, unscrew gas cap, push toilet down the stairs, botch surgery, and on and on -- it's handled by three buttons and context.

Heck, I'm pretty sure Splinter Cell Chaos Theory let you partially open a door and toss in a flashbang. And that was 2005.

The fantasy Valve is pushing here is that VR will let players "do anything" in a videogame environment, and that's not true. Every interaction still needs to be predicted and programmed by the developers. A silly headset and two wiimotes won't get around that.

Even the current Resident Evil games, which are a pretty good reference-point for what a modern Half-Life could be like, let you partially push open a door, peek/shoot in, and then close it again. And how do they manage this virtuoso act of game design? You push your character against the door a wee bit to crack it open, then push a wee bit more to open it all the way. Those wily Capcom devs are so bright, they didn't even need to map a button to that interaction, let alone develop a $1000 headset for it. This is truly the "Russians just used a pencil" of our time.

What gets me is not the VR game. Valve, make a VR half-life game if that's what you want to do. I hope people who can afford the headset get a great experience, and you certainly don't "owe" me any half-life game of any kind. But don't pretend this COULDN'T be done on a traditional set-up. Just say, "We wanted to do this one in VR because it's cool to develop for VR, it's a pain in the ass to think about porting it to non-VR, and we're far too rich to do anything that's a pain in the ass," or else say, "We wanted to do this one in VR to sell more $1000 peripherals."

Don't con me, Biff.