Выжимка основной инфы из АМА с разработчиками на Реддите:

- Valve is currently not planning on shipping the full Source 2 SDK, but they might release it in the future.

- The game is done and is currently in the bugfixing stage.

- Kaci likes the black licorce the most out of all the snacks in the Valve Snack room. Wolpaw likes the pink cookie, while Chris' favorite is the secret stash of British chocolates.

- Valve worked with Merle during the beginning of HL:A's development, but decided to go in a different direction later on.

- Valve plans on releasing gameplay and VR-feature videos during the leadup to launch.

- Wolpaw does not think Half-Life: Alyx has changed too much from the originals, and says that having the player character speak feels liberating; "I personally prefer writing games where the viewpoint character speaks. We made the silence of the protagonist into a joke in the Portals, but you only get to pull that gag once."

- The game will be subtitled in 10 different languages: English, French, German, Spanish-Spain, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish-Latin America, and Traditional Chinese. The game currently has no VO for other languages, but it's something the team is considering.

- Chell was confirmed to refuse to speak instead of being mute, in their words: "Yeah, in our head, she could talk and just chose not to."

- The dev team is currently around 80 people, the largest team ever at Valve.

- Valve opened up out of a desire to communicate with the community in a different way than they do for their "service games" (CS:GO, Dota 2)

- Music is being done by Mike Morasky, the Portal 2 and TF2 composer, and he has been talking with Kelly Bailey, the composer for previous Half-Life games, about the style of Half-Life music.

- All of the locomotion features are done, and they will be showing them in future videos. This is the only question out of Tyler McVicker's that they have answered.

- There is a train ride in the game. From the team: "It's actually illegal to ship a Half-Life game if you don't spend at least a little time riding in a train."

- "Does Half-Life: Alyx use a dynamic soundtrack? Dave here (Sound Designer) - I'm unsure what you mean by 'dynamic soundtrack'. If you mean 'Do the music and sound effects react or change in some way in regards to what's going on in-game?' then the answer is absolutely yes."

- Development commentary is unlikely to be in the game at launch, but is planned to be introduced in the future.

- Barnacles "are a threat in VR", do not kill players instantly, but also no longer move players. Apparently, they work similarly to before.

- "Combine soldiers definitely return, both in the form you’ve previously seen them as well as with new variations to keep players busy and take advantage of VR."

- "Some creatures respond to audio more than others. We don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s an example of this we’re particularly excited about. As with audio, limb dismemberment is not a factor in most combat encounters—but there is a very notable exception."

- The game includes the ability to mantle in continuous motion, so jumping is usually not required except for small gaps.

- Valve has deliberately invoked horror in the game, but playtesters and the devteam are able to deal with it; except for Tristan, who freaks out from headcrabs to the point of having to remove the headset when in headcrab-infested areas.

- Creatures from the previous games are in "with some interesting twists", but the developers won't elaborate past that.

- Valve's relationship with Marc Laidlaw is good, and the team has regularly questioned him while developing the game.

- Many of the HL:A developers worked on HL1, and they have closely looked at the AI of the HL1 soldiers for inspiration while developing the Combine soldiers in HL:A.

- HL:A uses Steam Audio HRTF, DSP, and occlusion.

- We will be seeing some familiar faces in the game that haven't been seen in the trailers yet.

- Q: "When are you going to show Gordon's ponytail again?" A: "It was 1998, we all had bad haircuts. I don't think we need to continue punishing Gordon for all our hairstyle sins."

- "Half-Life isn't like Fight Club- there was never a first rule of 'we must never speak of it!' over the last decade or so. The real answer is super simple: We didn't talk about Half-Life for a long time because we weren't actively working on a Half-Life game. Once Half-Life: Alyx became a reality internally, it was already clear to us that this was something we wanted to involve the community in. We're going to be doing more of this in the next few weeks as we prepare to launch it!"

- Hammer was reworked from the ground up for Source 2, and the team talks about a new system of "layers", where individual map files from multiple team members get combined into a single map. This is likely a rework of the instances system found in later Source 1 games.

- "Our weapons all require only one hand, but they can be optionally grabbed and steadied by your offhand. We really wanted to focus on simultaneous two handed play throughout the game, so we needed the player to always be able to easily have a free hand. We keep that hand pretty busy with gravity gloves, movement, world interactions, flashlight, and so on."

- "We have a few systems for inventory and weapon selection, all designed with the goal of keeping the players eyes on the environment as much as possible. We have an 'over the shoulder' contextual inventory system for ammo on your off hand, Your weapon hand has a quick weapon select feature, and we have a couple of wrist bags for some of the other items."

- The soundscape system has been improved, there's a new music system, Steam Audio has been improved for the game, and there are new tools for mixing and implementing sounds. The sound design team tried to make environments sound "sonically interesting" for more explorative players.

- Valve continues to hire cavemen as playtesters. "You can put a bucket on a headcrab, and it'll move the bucket as it crawls around. Playtesters all keep reporting it as a bug."

- Q: "How did you create some of the more gruesome sounds of the game?" A: "Most of the gore is based on meat and vegetable recordings, with some condiment recordings as well. We've also killed a lot of Zombies."

- The game was tested with all the major PC VR headsets to ensure full compatibility with the game's mechanics.

- The game does not render arms, because Valve found that players don't like them obscuring their version, and hardly notice their absence while playing. However, the game does simulate "invisible arms" from the hands to the HMD, to "detect impossible things, like completely closing a drawer over your wrist."

- "For the Citadel, The fiction we went with involved the citadel's full height core being teleported in place, like a giant spear in the ground. The combine then build around this core fleshing it out from gathered resources, which is how you see it in the trailer. An under construction citadel was useful visual cliche that helped establish an earlier timeline than HL2."

- Valve doesn't know where Half-Life will be headed after HL:A.

- Another confirmation that the game is roughly the same length as Half-Life 2.

- A soundtrack is planned to release, though no time was given for when.

- Physical merch is planned to release, some before the game's launch.

- Valve confirmed that HL:A started off from an internal gunplay demo from The Lab. Geoff will attempt to cover this and other prototypes in the Final Hours of HL:A.

- Many of the game's assets are higher-detail conversions of existing HL2 assets.