How to Play Half Life : Alyx Without VR

You want to play Half Life : Alyx without having a virtual reality viewer? 

Yes, we know, Half Life : Alyx is an incredible stuff but it's also incredibly expensive to set up a virtual reality station to play it. Luckily you're not alone in facing this problem since there are already talented programmers who are working on a very specific challenge: playing the new Valve video game without needing virtual reality.

There is a project specifically that is still in its most embryonic phase that allows geeks to do something similar; play on Alyx maps using gameplay very similar to that Half Life of 2; a project that greatly reduces the idea of Valve but that is definitely a great way to save a few hundred euros without any particular problems.

How does this mod work?

Specifically, the mod basically allows the player to control the protagonist Alyx using mouse and keyboard, replacing the view with a more classic viewer's aim linked to the mouse pointer. Unfortunately the gameplay appears impoverished in several cases, given the absence of the physical reload of weapons and the absence of some of them.

With this Half Life Alyx mod the game's weapons will be replaced with their counterparts taken from 2 Half Life , resulting in a downgrade of the graphics quality. At the moment, in this embryonic state, the mod still has some problems with the mechanics of the jump, full of bugs in all its forms; in essence the jump is only contextual and the player will have the opportunity to climb over objects only if he is particularly close to them.

The embryonic state of the mod unfortunately forces the player to load from time to time the game maps using the internal console, not exactly the easiest of the procedures to perform for those not accustomed to things like that.

How to install mod.

In order to play Half Life : Alyx using mouse and keyboard the player will need to download some files and extract them into the game folder where the executable is located.

Once done it will be necessary to start the player with a series of specific commands, which can be inserted from within the properties of the launcher icon

"-novr -console -nocrashdialog -retail -allowdebug -vconport 29000 -vcon -dev -w 1920 -h 1080 -sv_autojump 1"

Remember that only the text between the quotes will be inserted within the special commands to be given. This set of commands in any case will hide the hands from the game view; these will be reintroduced by adding the command vr_enable_fake_vr_test 1 but in doing so you will find yourself in a world without collisions, unable to walk on the ground.

Weapons can be enabled through the use of the impulse command 101

For more information we refer you to the video that made us discover this wonderful amateur work to make Half Life Alyx playable even without VR viewer! For all the others, all you have to do is start eating bread and mortadella in the hope of saving the money needed to purchase the components.