Confirmed: Valve will reveal "flagship VR game" Half-Life: Alyx this Thursday

Update: The rumour was true, but the date was wrong. Valve have tweeted that they're going to unveil Half-Life: Alyx, their "flagship VR game", this Thursday at 10am Pacific/6pm GMT. This will be the first official Half-Life game since Half-Life 2: Episode 2 was released twelve years ago, in 2007. And that's all we know for now.

Original story:

Right, time to grab all the salt in your immediately vicinity. Pop to the shops, if you must. Then sit down and read this rumour I don't quite believe about a VR-only Half-Life game that Valve are supposedly going to announce on December 12th.

According to a Pastebin poster who refers to their source as "the same user" who leaked the existence of Dota Underlords, the VR game is called Half-Life: Alyx. No real further details about this game that might or might not exist are known at this time. This fits Valve's announcement from 2017 that they were building 3 VR games, but yunno, so would a good hoax. Make your own mind up why not.

A further document shows screenshots of someone called "Midoriyan" sharing parts of an interview transcript. It's conducted by Geoff Keighley, the host of The Game Awards, interviewing Robin Walker and someone who the document guesses is Gabe Newell. Towards the end, the transcript identities Keighley as going on to say "Speaking of "Half-Life: Alyx", (It will be at) The Game Awards, December 12th. We will have more to share with you on the game there so I hope you get to tune in. I'm excited to show more of it there."

Keighley appears to ask why they've opted for VR-only, to which an ambigous respondent says: "Yeah, I mean we would love to be delivering a version of this that you could play with a mouse and a keyboard, but like as we said, it began as an exploration of VR".

The document also claims that "Midoriyan" has "been confirmed to the same person who leaked Underlords, and they’ve been confirmed by both 'testinglol' and Tyler McVicker to not be lying about their identity."

Tyler McVicker runs a pretty large fan site called the Valve News Network, and he's messing around on Twitter rather than denying his link to this document that I presume he will have seen. I'd prefer a way of confirming the source's identity as a previously proven leaker that didn't involve so many assumptions, but here we are. It's plausible.

Here's the one part in the supposed interview where supposed Gabe Newall talks about the game:

"You can see their whole body-- Respond to the situation. You know, panicking, dropping clips on the ground as they fumble their weapons 'cause a zombie's in front of them, all these things, they're just - it's been really fun watching playtests."

Thoroughly informative, that. Ta maybe Gabe.

It would be a savvy move. Making a VR exclusive Half-Life game would obviously help Valve sell Vives. There are multiple reasons to believe this leak is legit.

I'll believe it when I see it.