A brand new Half-Life game has finally been announced just recently, and while it’s not exactly Half-Life 3, it’s still pretty exciting. Here’s everything we know about VR prequel Half-Life: Alyx so far, including the release date, how long it will be, and which famous Half-Life characters will make a return. Graphics are a topic to discuss too.

The release date is March 2020

You can play Half-Life: Alyx in March 2020, although no exact release date has been set yet. The game will retail at $60, but is free to anyone who owns a Valve Index VR headset.

This is Valve. There will be a delay, won’t it?

Yes, a lot of big games get delayed from Spring 2020 until later in the year. Valve recently did an AMA on Reddit where it says that’s not going to happen with Half-Life: Alyx.

“With the exception of some tweaks to the absolute final scene, the game is done. Lots of us at Valve, as well as playtesters, have played through the entire game multiple times,” says the Valve team. They joke that all of the “Valve Time” happened before announcing the game.

You can play the other Half-Life games free on Steam until Alyx launches

“Half-Life: Alyx is coming in March, and we are celebrating early by making all games in the Half-Life Collection FREE to play for Steam users, from now until the day it launches,” Valve said in announcement.

“Half-Life: Alyx is set before the events of Half-Life 2 and the episodes, but the games share characters and story elements. The Half-Life: Alyx team believes that the best way to enjoy the new game is to play through the old ones, especially Half-Life 2 and the episodes, so we want to make that as easy as possible.”

It’s Valve’s biggest project yet

Remarkably, this is the biggest group of people Valve has ever had working on the development of a single game. It’s been in development for a long time, according to Gunpoint creator and former PC Gamer editor Tom Francis. 

“Half-Life: Alyx is the largest game team we’ve had yet,” Valve designer Greg Coomer tells us. “About a third of the people on the project have worked on previous Half-Life games, some all the way back to the first Half-Life.” Coomer adds that new employees, including those from recently acquired Firewatch developer Campo Santo, have “played an important part in bringing fresh perspectives, which has always been a crucial part of our process.”

“We didn’t set out to make a Half-Life game,” Robin Walker, programmer on Half-Life: Alyx told IGN. Valve began experimenting with VR using assets from Half-Life and Portal, though the movement and momentum of the latter wasn’t suitable for VR. Half-Life was.

Initially it was only a brief Half-Life VR experience, but that changed in large part to the reactions of playtesters. “As we started to put people through this 15-minute prototype,” Walker told Geoff Keighley, “they would spend 45 minutes in it doing a bunch of stuff that we’d never really… they exhibited a bunch of behaviors we’d never really seen players exhibit in the sort of flatscreen 2D, desktop environment.”

Here’s the Half-Life: Alyx system requirements

While the Index itself just calls for 8 GB RAM and a GTX 970 at minimum, Alyx’s system requirements are a bit higher, but still pretty modest. MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 10
Processor: Core i5-7500 / Ryzen 5 1600
Memory: 12 GB RAM
Graphics: GTX 1060 / RX 580 – 6GB VRAM

G-Man and other familiar characters return

Maybe it’s not a surprise—it’s hard to imagine a Half-Life game without the mysterious G-Man, who even appeared in the mostly Gordon Freeman-less Half-Life: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. But it’s great to have it confirmed, and once again G-Man will be voiced by Mike Shapiro.

We’ll also see the return of the alien Vortigaunts, once again voiced by Tony Todd. Ellen McClain (the voice of GLaDOS in the Portal series) is returning as the sinister synthesized voice of the Combine Overwatch.

Alyx’s father, Eli Vance, will make an appearance, although he’s been recast after the sad death of his original voice, Robert Guillaume, in 2017. “The new voice of Eli, James Moses Black, has big shoes to fill,” says Coomer. “But we’re all excited about his performance and can’t wait for players to hear it.” Black has appeared in This is Us and 24: Legacy, among many other film and television roles.

Other roles are voiced by Rhys Darby (Flight of the Concords) and Cissy Jones (Firewatch).

Over on Twitter, Mike Shapiro posted a short clip in the voice of the G-Man complete with stilted tone, odd speech pattern, and all the other mannerisms that haunted the Half-Life series over the years.