Valve have sometimes – if perhaps not often enough to call it a grand old tradition – massaged interest in their hardware by pairing the kit with a new game. For the Steam Deck it was Aperture Desk Job, and for 2019’s jammy sod of a VR headset, the Valve Index, it was Half-Life: Alyx, a full-length City 17 adventure that reviewer Graham (RPS in peace) called “a masterclass of first-person shooter design.”
Still, people rarely want to take the same class twice, hence why padding-compacted eyebrows have been raised by Alyx again being a tentpole of the new <a href="https://comicvibe.com/steam-frame-pricing-and-release-date-revealed-by-valve/" title="Steam Frame pricing and release date revealed by Valve”>Steam Frame headset – this time, to showcase the game running in PC-less, standalone VR. Why not make something new, even a smaller tech demo like ADJ or the Index’s own The Lab collection of Portal-themed minigames?
According to Valve staff, several of whom I spoke to prior to the Frame’s Monday night launch, there were several reasons why a return to Alyx was considered more valuable – even though a brand new VR game was, at least briefly, on the table.
“We had talked about things like that,” said SteamOS developer Pierre-Loup Griffais. “We decided to focus on just making sure the Steam catalogue as a whole would be a good experience, and trying to put most of our efforts into that compatibility. Because there’s a tonne of existing experiences I think that can intro you to whatever side of the devices you’re more interested in, right?”
Griffais refers to a key Steam Frame party trick: the ability to run both VR and flat games, from an existing Steam library, in the manner of your choosing, be it over conventional PC VR wireless streaming or standalone via the headset’s own internal hardware. “I mean, I can’t speak for everyone here, but if I’m showing the headset to someone, something like SuperHot VR or Beat Saber or one of those OG titles is gonna get on there,” he contined. “Because they’re still so good, right? And I think there’s a tonne of that catalogue that can actually serve as a good launch experience for most people because they maybe haven’t played them yet.”
Robin Walker, a Valve programmer and co-creator of Team Fortress 2, offers a different view: that the process of re-developing Alyx to both run and perform well on the Frame’s dinky processing parts, with all the software rejiggery that entailed, provided Valve with invaluable knowledge on how to get Frame games working better in general.
“When you’re building a new piece of hardware and there’s a whole bunch of new software in that software stack, and there’s drivers and all that sort of stuff, having a clear target is incredibly useful for you to make the tradeoffs,” Walker explained. “To be able to test, to experiment, try different approaches, and Alyx was a far, far more useful target for us there than The Lab would have been, just because of the goals of the product.”
“It was so worth it,” added engineer Autumn Aston, “to just do that work anyway because we found so much stuff. So many, y’know, bugs, performance things in the driver. It was like a great way to get everything like up to scratch for the whole [Frame] project.”
“All the fixes we got in for Alyx, the vast majority of them are applicable to basically anything that’s running on the Frame,” said Walker. Valve have since been sharing this knowledge with other VR game developers as part of Steam Frame Verified programme: a system, practically identical to previous schemes for the Steam Deck and Steam Machine, where developers can get their games rated for compatibility with the Frame’s standalone mode, and receive help from Valve directly on getting their games more playable on the headset.
Ironically, there was a time – likely the same as when Valve were considering a new VR game – when Alyx’s own developers didn’t think it possible that such a game could run adequately on a Snapdragon smartphone CPU. It was, so says Walker, the Frame’s own developments in performance-saving tracking tech – and a healthy supply of RAM – that made standalone Alyx a possibility.
“I think at the outset, as a team, when we thought about… it’s maybe going back a year and a half, two years ago, when we started thinking about Alyx running natively on the Steam Frame. It just seemed faintly ludicrous to us,” he recalled. “Alyx was not a product that was designed with really any compromises around performance or anything.
“But then, about a year and a half ago, Autumn started doing prototyping. And the specific things that gave us hope there, I guess, or the things that made us think, ‘Hey, maybe there’s something interesting here’ was the foveated rendering and the eye tracking, because that seemed like potentially a silver bullet that could allow us to run this thing natively on the headset. And then the other bit also was the 16GB of RAM, which meant we felt like there was a chance there. If that had been 12GB or 8GB, there was not even really. It was just it would be much less interesting to us.”
Also ironic: that memory, which is partly why the £889-plus Frame costs as much as it does, was allegedly also instrumental in making one of its best available games run using one of its most unique features. Would I rather trade all of that an new Valve game? Probably yes, because Valve games are good. But if that’s not happening, I suppose at least Frame owners will get better standalone games out of it.
