Modders are already working to bring Half-Life 2 into Alyx
Not yet playable
If Black Mesa actually getting finished left you lost without a fan-made refresh of an old Half-Life to cheer on, rejoice: the new hotness is bringing Half-Life 2 into Half-Life: Alyx. Several modders are already showing off their progress in bringing Gordon's adventure to Alyx's shiny new VR game, though it's all hella far from finished. Hey, we all need something to believe in. Come check out these two projects.
"Vect0R!", a modder whose projects include RTX and restoring cut content for the first Half-Life, yesterday showed off this video with part of the City 17 Gordon knew running in Alyx:
Yeah, it doesn't look great, but Valve have not yet released the mod tools. And hey, it exists!
"Things I was able to do was very limited since Valve didn't share SDK with the public yet," Vect0R! explained. "I started this project around 24 March and planned this since around January. You can pretty much say, this is first the Half-Life: Alyx mod."
You can follow along on their Steam Community group.
Also on the go is Half-Life: Quarantine, "a project based around porting elements of Half-Life 2 into Half-Life: Alyx." Over on Twitter, they share some screenshots:
They too are working without official tools for now, bodging old tools together, so they too are limited. "This is just an initial pass of porting HL2 assets to Source 2," they said. "We are going to go back and update lighting, textures and map geo to be more in-line with HLA's quality."
The Quarantine team also call this "the first mod for Half-Life: Alyx."
I wouldn't get too excited just yet for any of these. Hell, Black Mesa only came about after several mod teams merged into one effort, then it took over a decade to be finished. Neither of these projects are on that scale yet, starting with porting rather than fully rebuilding, but it's still the earliest of days.
Other people are working on the opposite of all this: making Alyx work without VR.
I don't know if a mod can count as "the first mod" until it's released. If work-in-progress screens and videos were mods, well, Half-Life would've been awash with untextured Desert Eagle mods.