Valve knows fans will mod VR out of Half-Life: Alyx

There are dozens of great VR games on the market, but it's not even a question that Half-Life: Alyx is the first truly huge VR game. But it's not going to stay a VR game, and Valve knows it. After Valve released the original Half-Life, people built up mods around it, including Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike, both of which Valve eventually turned into official products. This week, Polygon talked to someone who worked on both of those projects and on Half-Life: Alyx.

"I know it's going to happen," said Robin Walker of Valve. Walker said that depending on who you ask at the company, some are concerned about the notion, while others seem to accept it as an inevitability.

Walker thinks that a no-VR mod for Half-Life: Alyx will make the case for the platform.

"It will clearly demonstrate to people why we did this in VR," Walker told Polygon. "It will be a very crisp way of seeing all the stuff we got for the move into VR." Walker hopes that people will gain a greater understanding of why the company decided to build the game specifically for virtual reality.

Walker concedes, though, that there's a chance that modders could successfully pull a fun traditional game out of Half-Life: Alyx.

What if Half-Life: Alyx is good without VR?

"If people play [a non-VR version of Half-Life: Alyx] and say this is just as good, that will teach me a lot. I'll realize I'm wrong, and we didn't get as much as we thought, and I love to know whenever I'm wrong," Walker said.

There's something about Valve games that seems to attract modders, and the response to Half-Life: Alyx has been divisive on social media. VR owners, of course, were excited, while many Half-Life fans have expressed disappointment at being left out by virtue of the format's small audience. Considering both of these, it seems likely that Alyx will be modded sooner rather than later.

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