HTC unveiled its first Virtual Reality headset in collaboration with Valve at the Mobile World Congress this week. Valve"s involvement in the wearable left a nagging question in every fan"s mind: "Will there finally be a Half Life 3 - in VR?" Quite surprisingly, the company does have an answer to this intriguing question.
Talking in an interview to Kotaku, Valve programmer Jeep Barnett says:
We"re not saying, "no,"but we don"t know what the right thing is [yet]. Our most precious resource is time, and we don"t have enough time for people to do everything. Would we like to make all of our franchises in VR? Absolutely. But we don"t have enough time or people. So we have to figure out what"s the best fit, what plays to the strengths of VR.
Barnett also emphasized how the project was completely experimental and how his statement didn"t indicate that Half Life 3 in Virtual Reality was on its way. He also noted that just as the original Portal was developed from the assets of Half Life, the experiments with VR could result in an entirely different game. He explained that Portal, which was demoed behind closed doors at GDC, was just an example of things working perfectly at the right time, stating that:
The modular things, these concepts of containment and giving you rules you have to follow in Portal—all of those things fit the type of demo we wanted to make.
He also detailed how the Virtual Reality was being experimented with by saying:
We"ve said, "Let"s take some existing art and see how it fits," so yeah, we"ll grab some headcrabs, we"ll grab the machine guns from Half-Life, the rocket launcher—all those different fun things—and see how they play in VR. But right now, it"s a tool for exploring the different kind of game designs we want to do.
Barnett said that various game series were being tested for their suitability as VR games including Left 4 Dead and DOTA 2. Interestingly, he also mentioned that Valve is working on a first-person shooter inspired by the critically acclaimed Time Crisis, but nothing can be said for certain at the moment.