Half-Life: Alyx Update Adds Developer Commentary

An update is now available for all Half-Life: Alyx owners, which adds three hours of developer commentary straight from Valve itself.

Valve has been known to have commentary in its games since the feature’s introduction in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, a removed level from the 2004 original game.

Players would play the game as normal until interacting with a floating speech bubble, where a member of the development team would speak about playtesting or would take over gameplay to show a demonstration of development tools or tactics.

Since Half-Life: Alyx is a virtual reality game, the developer commentary nodes are floating holographic radio headphones and the player must physically grab them and put it on their heads to start playing.

The update adds three hours of commentary tracks, though Valve released a trailer showing some of it posted below. Some interesting tidbits from the trailer include enemy tracking movements, character performances, game mechanics, headcrab antics, liquid surfaces inside full bottles, and a note that “players did not like to be shot at.”

The free update is now available for Half-Life: Alyx, which released on PC last March for most virtual reality headsets and is free with a purchase of Valve’s own Index VR headset.