Half-Life: Alyx’s first update mostly just improves turning

It’s all about options

It’s easy to think of an update that’s turning-oriented as boring or insubstantial. But, in virtual reality, the locomotion of your character (and, hopefully, how it keeps you from feeling sick) is super important.

That’s the main focus of Half-Life: Alyx‘s version 1.1 update. You’ll be able to turn better and that should go quite a ways as a quality of life improvement. For people who play on the first-person shooter-style continuous motion setting (that is to say not teleporting around), there’s a new option for fluid, continuous turns without a snap effect. Likewise, there are different speed settings for continuous turn.

This seemingly doubles as a bug fix of sorts because using continuous motion and disabling quick turn didn’t actually work at launch. Now, people will have more options for whatever makes them most comfortable. Again, that’s paramount with VR.

Here’s the full patch notes from Half-Life: Alyx‘s version 1.1 update:

Changes:

• Improved turning options in Preferences:
  – Added “Continuous Turn,” and associated turning speed options
  – Renamed “Quick turn” to “Snap Turn” to make its functionality clearer
  – Added option to disable controller turning
• Improved hand-over-mouth pose usability for Windows MR controllers
• Improved the resolution of impact decals on enemies
• Improved automatic detection of default quality settings for some machine configurations
• Fixed an issue where some sounds didn’t play as intended
• Fixed an issue where the main menu could become less responsive if you had many save games
• Fixed several crashes

Half-Life: Alyx Update 1.1 released [Steam]