Do you guys feel a HL3 could work as both a pancake and VR experience? While I really loved and enjoyed HL: Alyx, I do feel like it compromised more than I'm comfortable with as far as the gameplay is concerned.
Maybe it was the limited of scope of the project, but I feel like HL2 was quite a bit more ambitious in terms of level design and gameplay. Looking at the early areas of HL2 in the sewers/canals section, you already get quite a bit of action in the game. There's a pretty big onslaught of enemies for a good while before you reach the air boat.
In HL: Alyx, you generally face about 3 combine and that's basically it before you continue on to the next section of the level where it's back to just zombies, headcrabs, and barnacles. I'm not exactly asking for endless waves of combine, but there should definitely be extended sections where you fight combine soldiers from area to area, room to room. I feel like the action the series is known for is all but gone. You see a little bit of it in the last few chapters, but that's it.
There's also the missing variety of environments and gameplay variations you get from using the air boat and muscle car. How cool would it have been to drive one of these in VR? Or at least sit in an AI driven vehicle on a mounted gun and defend against combine soldiers, striders, and a combine helicopter or something.
And even smaller little touches like the scripted events where the combine drop flaming barrels at you in the sewers or where you have to set up the turrets to defend against the combine counter attack in Nova Prospekt.
HL2 took us from the sewers, to the canals, to the coastline, a prison complex, to the city, a combine palace, and then to the citadel. We fought combine helicopters, spaceships, striders, and elite combine military soldiers. And we used a wide variety of weapons too.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I feel like scope of the game was far more limited than I was expecting. If the next game is be in VR, they would need to be far more ambitious with the game or just keep it pancake style. If they could successfully make it great with a 2D mode and a VR mode, that would be ideal. I just don't want to have to compromise so much in the next HL game to make it work in VR, despite all the amazing benefits VR brings.
