A third-party mod that lets you play through Valve’s Half-life 2 in room-scale virtual reality will be available in public beta starting about 12 noon ET. The developers, Source VR Mod Team, offer it for free; you just need to own the base game which currently costs $9.99 (spotted thanks to TechRadar).
The Steam listing for the mod is here, and it claims to be broadly compatible with wired VR headsets with tracked motion controllers, such as Valve’s Index and the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality models. It will probably work just fine if, like me, you connect your Meta Quest 2 to your PC via USB cable or wirelessly. I’m going to give it a try this weekend.
The developers seem to have come up with clever ways to let you interact with the environment, vehicles and weapons. The details for controls and must-have disclaimers about the VR experience are listed here. I’m excited to give melee attacks a try, something that was missing in Half-life: Alyx. The team says that since it’s in beta, you’ll likely run into some “rough edges” and be able to file bugs here if you want.
Whether you’ve played Half-life: Alyx but (you absolutely should), checking out this mod can be a fun way to pass a few hours. Be warned, though, that if you mostly use teleport mode to travel around in VR games, there isn’t one at the moment, and the developers say they don’t know if it will get the feature in the future. Also be warned that vehicle rides “require strong VR legs”, so be prepared to pace yourself for those parts of the game or you could end up feeling nauseous.
