Do you have questions about Half-Life: Alyx—like, maybe, when are we going to get a proper release date? If yes, you'll want to tune into Reddit tomorrow at 9 am PT/12 pm ET for an AMA with the development team.

The presence of the word "some" can't be overlooked, but even so the reaction on the Half-Life subreddit where the AMA will take place is bouncing rapidly between excitement and surprise at Valve's apparent newfound openness. As redditor DaftVortigaunt put it, "If you had told me a year ago Valve would suddenly be openly communicating with their fanbase, I would not have believed it. Looking forward to it!"

Or, as santumerino said more succinctly, "What the fuck, Valve communicating?"

It's not known who from Valve will be attending the AMA, but the moderators are clearly anticipating trouble: They warned that the AMA will be focused on Half-Life: Alyx, and asked all participants to "please limit jokes about Half-Life 3."

We'll be keeping an eye on the AMA, as we do, and we'll let you know what interesting things are said. And in case you missed it, Valve made the entire Half-Life Collection—Half-Life, Half-Life 2, HL2: Episodes 1 and 2—free to play today, until Half-Life: Alyx launches.

In late November, we reported that Valve's Index VR headset was selling out in a hurry, leading to shipping delays on most Index packages—headset-only, controllers-only, and headset and controller bundles—in the US and Canada. Now, according to Road to VR, it's sold out everywhere, and may not be back in time to handle the demand for Half-Life: Alyx.

Alyx, as we all know, is one of the big factors behind the pre-release popularity of the Index. VR hasn't set the world on fire yet, but the opportunity to play the first new Half-Life game in 13 years (and counting) is a whole different beast. That's something people really want to do (some people, anyway), and some of them seem prepared to drop serious bucks to do it.

Horsing around with a VPN confirms the Road to VR report: Instead of a purchase option, the Index page in Canada, the US, the UK, and Finland displays regional pricing and a "notify me" button that will line you up for an FYI when the various components are available again. The one place that apparently still has some Index stock kicking around is Japan, where distribution is handled by Degica. "Full kits" are sold out, as are standalone controllers and base stations, but headsets and headsets bundled with controllers are still available for purchase.

A Valve rep told the site that it is "working hard to build more units and meet the high demand," and that it hopes to have the device back in stock before Half-Life: Alyx ships. That's currently expected to happen sometime in March, although a firm release date hasn't been set yet.

For the first time in 12 years, voice actor Mike Shapiro has taken on the voice of the G-Man in yet another teaser ahead of the release of Half-Life: Alyx. Shapiro posted a short video on Twitter with a monologue as the character, complete with stilted tone, odd speech pattern, and all the other mannerisms that haunted the Half-Life series over the years. 

Here’s what he says:“Should old acquaintances be forgot, then, after so much… time. Some things can prove difficult to remember. See you in the new year. And, do prepare for… consequences, hrm? Mhm.”

Half-Life: Alyx is coming in 2020, and the G-Man will return with it—he features prominently at the end of the Half-Life: Alyx trailer. Perhaps he'll elaborate on his and Alyx's relationship, since we know they met at least once in Half-Life 2. If you’re not all caught up on Alyx, she has a new voice actor and it had to be a VR game. Here’s everything we know about Half-Life: Alyx. Also, PC Gamer staff can’t agree on whether or not Alyx should or should not have arms (in the game).

The YouTube channel Tested went to Valve recently to play a few hours of an early build of Half-Life: Alyx on a variety of different VR setups, from Valve Index to Windows Mixed Reality and the original HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Though they're focused on the headsets rather than the game—which is clearly still in a very early state—they do seem quite impressed by it. 

As Tested cofounder Will Smith (not that Will Smith) says, "The amount and quality of art in this game is outstanding. You can interact with so much stuff, you can force-pull it over to you. The verbs that are accessible to you as a player are amazing, and the sound is spectacular. There's dynamic sound all around you, You can hear things above and below you and the levels are vertical and expansive. I've been thrilled so far."

As well as testing Half-Life: Alyx with a variety of headsets and controllers they tried both teleporting-to-move and push-to-move, as well as playing it standing and seated, and seem impressed by every possible configuration.

The short amount of game footage shown mostly involves explosive barrels being used against barnacles, objects being hurled with gravity gloves, zombies getting shot, and headcrabs being manhandles. Someone has stitched together all the gameplay footage if that's all you're here for, though be warned they've soundtracked it with monologues from Half-Life 2 and the music from Boneworks which is a bit distracting.

It's been just over a week since Valve announced Half-Life: Alyx, its long-awaited 'flagship VR game' and while there have been some mixed reactions to the Half-Life prequel, it seems that the hype is real—so much so that 'most packages of Index, Valve’s high-end VR headset released earlier this year, were sold out,' according to a post from RoadtoVR. 

The shortage appears to be mainly affecting most packages on the US and Canadian stores, with the UK currently unaffected (at the time of writing). Half-Life: Alyx will retail at full price but will be free to owners of the Valve Index VR headset, so it's perhaps not surprising that there's a shortage, especially if those on the VR fence have been pushed by Valve's reveal.

While the announcement for Half-Life: Alyx certainly wasn't the Half-Life 3 that a lot of players were hoping for, it's still a pretty big deal and something that Valve is taking seriously, not least because of all the work that's going into it.

"Half-Life: Alyx is the largest game team we've had yet. About a third of the people on the project have worked on previous Half-Life games, some all the way back to the first Half-Life." says Valve designer Greg Coomer. 

The VR project didn't start out as a Half-Life game but apparently it seemed to suit the technology Valve was working with. Just don't mention the arms to Chris and James, whatever you do!

There's nothing more immersion-breaking in VR than weird elbows jittering around in my peripheral vision because someone thought it was important to fill the space between my shoulder and the plastic controller that isn't my hand with something vaguely resembling, but certainly not moving like an arm. 

My colleague Chris Livingston believes that Alyx, of the recently announced Half-Life: Alyx, needs arms. He believes that Valve is capable of not only delivering a top-tier, next level VR experience (I agree), but that in order to truly hit that mark, it must also attach virtual arms to Alyx's disembodied hands. Absurd! Why stop at arms, Chris? Why not legs? Toes? Pish!

VR is young. We're still waving around tennis balls so infrared cameras know where our hands are. My fingers are buttons and haptic pads, not gloves that map one-to-one movements. My virtual head is a hot, sweaty, heavy headset that I can't wear for longer than an hour without pressing my glasses permanently into my skin. VR still requires plenty of willful suspension of disbelief. Bad arms looking stupid and bad don't make it easy. 

Above: Wow, sure love it when my big robot arms take up the bulk of my severely limited field of view. 

If I’m constantly looking at two big slabs of meat flailing around like skin streamers hanging from my very nice-looking virtual hands, I’m not going to be immersed. I'm going to be disimmersed. Disgusted. 

Do you ever look at your arm while you’re using your hands? When you pick up a coffee cup for a nice swig of that good morning brew, do you closely monitor your arm to closely track the movement of your body's weird levers to ensure the crane-hand is in the perfect position to clamp the mug and, like some kind of industrial construction equipment powered by blood, make little checks and assurances that everyone on the body machine is communicating, working together? 

No! These are practiced movements. We don't notice the arm. We just do the thing without a second thought. Drinking coffee is a faith-based act, not an opportunity for arm voyeurism. Our arms are invisible to us in the real world until we need them, our brains focusing on the parts and objects in use. We rarely need to focus on our arms anyway. In VR we almost never do.

The only time I look at my arm while I’m doing anything that requires precise manual dexterity is to look at my cool arm tattoo of a whale skull I got at 20 years old when my friend got dumped by her boyfriend and said let’s go get tattoos and I said OK without really thinking about it. And when I had to come up with an idea I thought about the book Moby Dick and I thought about the whale Moby Dick and I thought about what the skull of the whale of Moby Dick might look like and put that on my arm, and that’s the only time I look at my arm: to see that and remember my personal, specific lore. Or to be like, you should go to the gym, man. 

Unless there's some all-important character building or story beat as part of Half-Life: Alyx that can only be communicated via an arm-based medium like a very cool Moby Dick tattoo, then I don't see why we need them there at all. My brain will fill in the blanks by keeping them blank, just as it does when I do anything with my hands or eyes that isn't wholly dependent on what my biceps and forearms and elbows are getting up to right now. 

Above: What's more magical than casting spells in Skyrim VR? Realizing you don't give a damn about your forearms. 

But let's say I'm pro-arm. Let's imagine that fucked up reality. The technology isn't there yet anyway. VR is about immersion, yes, but it’s not ever going to approach realism, or at least not until you can perfectly emulate my specific arm movements as I see them—or 'unsee' them you might say since the point is to stay immersed and avoid any unnatural distractions that break the illusion. Current arm VR tech is just bad puppetry that someone's doing in the corners of my sweaty head goggle vision. Besides, puppets are only good if they're Muppets and if they're not me.

Rather than focus energy and technology on modeling how an elbow wiggles around when I’m not looking at it in a natural manner that's invisible to me anyway, devs should wait until augmented reality hits the mainstream, if it ever does, and just superimpose my elbow or perfectly track my elbows movements and model them in game. Until my actual arms can enter the virtual realm, virtual arms will remain a virtual dream for the seriously deluded. 

It's just the state of VR in 2019. The man doing the YMCA dance in LA Noire VR is somehow used as a closing statement in Chris's piece, a piece that's arguing for better immersion in a baby medium. Listen, I love the video, but if that's what Livingston wants for VR, then Livingston wants VR to be bad. That detective's wacky, bone-crunching, anatomically impossible dance is why Alyx doesn't have arms. Because to have arms would ruin the first Half-Life game in over 15 years, and you don't want that, do you Chris? Do you?

The best VR games let you forget, if only briefly, that you're in a VR game. It's not an easy feat: you've got a heavy, hot headset strapped onto your face and controllers clutched in both hands. For VR to work its magic, it needs to guide your brain into ignoring all the hardware and letting itself be transported to another world. That's done by making the world highly interactive, by giving you intuitive ways to perform actions, and by avoiding distractions that remind you you're in VR.

So when I saw the floating, disembodied hands featured in the Half-Life: Alyx trailer I was a bit disappointed. Nearly all VR games have disembodied hands, but I was hoping Alyx wouldn't. Floating hands are weird and distracting. They look, frankly, ridiculous. Alyx's grabbity gloves are very cool, but peering inside her empty wrist-sockets every time she reaches for something is too strange to ever feel normal. My eyes can't help but be drawn into those empty glove-holes that somehow lead to human fingers. It's a distraction.

Alyx's hands should be connected to arms, and her arms should be connected to her body. When Gordon Freeman looked down at himself in the Half-Life games, he saw only empty space. Alyx deserves better than that, and I'm a little surprised Valve hasn't done better than that.

Other VR games have been showing players their arms and bodies for a while now, which is why it's so odd to see that Alyx doesn't have her own. Lone Echo (above), Stormland (below), Sariento, and many others render arms and bodies for their players, and they add to the feeling that you've been not just transported into a different world but that you're actually standing (not floating) inside it.

And once you've played a VR game that gives you arms, it's hard to go back to the old floating hand routine. In Creed, the VR boxing game, I can look down at myself, and instead of seeing empty space or my own disappointing torso, I instead see Michael B. Jordan's totally shredded body. (And there's a reason to keep a headset on for 15 hours.) When I start throwing punches, my boxing gloves are connected to arms and I don't have to stare into the void of empty wrist-holes with every jab.

Granted, arms can be occasionally be weird and unconvincing in VR too, as anyone knows who has played a full-bodied game in VR and put their controllers down, or held them in the same hand, or made some sort of movement that briefly confused their virtual elbows. Arms are probably tricky to do well in VR.

But occasional arm and elbow weirdness is preferable to constant floating hand weirdness. Valve has been developing Half-Life: Alyx for four years and it produces its own VR hardware. If anyone can crack the elbow code, shouldn't it be Valve? If Half-Life: Alyx is going to be a next level VR game, that level should include an entirely realized body.

And of course, LA Noire VR wouldn't be the same without the ability to have a full-body YMCA party in the mirror. That VR game came out in 2017. Alyx deserves to have her own dance party in 2020.

A new Half-Life is coming, and while it's not Half-Life 3, or even Episode 3, it feels very good to type that out. Half-Life: Alyx is a VR spin-off set before Half-Life 2, though, so what about the series' future and other platforms? While we probably won't see Alyx appear outside of VR, Valve still has plans for Half-Life beyond the latest outing. 

The Verge asked designer David Speyrer if this was a full return to Half-Life and if we could expect more games in the series now that Valve has finally brought it out of stasis. He confirmed that it was, adding that Valve's found news ways to tell stories and make games through Half-Life: Alyx's development that it wants to continue to explore.

"It’s probably no surprise that many people at Valve have been wanting to get back to the Half-Life universe for a long time, and this experience has only reinforced that," he said. "In the process of creating Half-Life: Alyx, we’ve had to explore new ways to tell stories with these characters and this world, and we’ve discovered a lot of new gameplay experiences that go beyond what we’ve been able to do before. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how people react to Half-Life: Alyx once it’s out, but we’d love to continue pushing forward."

After years of waiting, it feels like we're closer than ever to Half-Life 3, but for all the anticipation I'm increasingly glad that Valve's return to the series is something a bit different, rather than the sequel we've been hungering for. While some might rankle at the thought of shelling out £300 for a headset, at the low end, it's about time VR had a system-selling game.  

We got our first glimpse at Half-Life: Alyx today, Valve's full-length VR-only Half-Life game due in March. We've already learned a lot about Half-Life: Alyx, most notably that the game takes place between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, while Gordon Freeman is still in stasis and a younger Alyx Vance is trying to fight off the occupation of Earth by the alien Combine.

But what does the reveal trailer tell us about this earlier version of City 17? Here are the most interesting things to be gleaned from the footage.

Dr. Breen isn't in charge of City 17 yet

Markedly absent from the reveal trailer is the iconic presence of Dr. Breen's face on a giant video screen, which introduced us to City 17 in Half-Life 2. The actor who played Wallace Breen, Robert Culp, died back in 2010, but while Eli Vance (voiced by the late Robert Guillaume) is being played by a new actor (James Moses Black) there was no mention of a replacement actor for Breen when designer Greg Coomer gave us the lowdown on the cast.

It looks like Breen might not yet have arrived at City 17, or at the very least hasn't been appointed administrator yet. Note: I initially thought the deep and menacing voice saying "You will not save him" and "Alyx Vance alone cannot prevent his fate" might be a new bad guy, though it's been pointed out it's most likely a Vortigaunt.

Dog? Here, boy!

So, where the hell is Dog? Alyx says in Half-Life 2 that her father Eli built Dog "to protect me when I was a kid." The Alyx of this game is clearly an adult, so Dog must have already been built. But he doesn't show up in the trailer.

I wouldn't worry. The relationship between Alyx and Dog is too strong to not bring into this experience, especially in a VR game. As in Half-Life 2, it makes sense for Dog to be missing from action for most of the game. If you had a giant protective robot capable of knocking over armored Combine personnel carriers and ripping the brains out of Striders, that wouldn't give you very much to do. It's likely a decision on Valve's part to hold a big moment back as a surprise.

A helpful New Zealander fills in for Dr. Kleiner 

Alyx is assisted by a guy with an accent that makes the words "Combine chatter" sound like "Combine cheddar," but who is this helpful New Zealander? He comically throws Alyx a loaded gun and speaks to her constantly throughout the trailer, talking about acquiring a weapon and providing commentary on the plot. I'm getting the strong feeling he's going to be filling in for Dr. Kleiner, our resident bumbling scientist slash comic relief, who doesn't make an appearance in the trailer.

All we might know about this newcomer is his name, which could be Russel—a screenshot given to us by Valve is titled 'Russel's Lab', so this could be his sanctuary for tinkering and giving you instructions over the radio.

There are plenty of familiar monsters, plus—is that a sacktick? 

Headcrabs were confirmed immediately in the trailer, and we also see rampaging antlions, neck-snaring barnacles, and a variety of zombies, including one who seems to have some sort of electrical attack. But we also see a small, glowing, skittering creature with a long tail very briefly in the beginning of the trailer that doesn't look quite like any of the aliens we've seen before in Half-Life.

It's possible it could be a sacktick, a critter that was planned but ultimately cut from Half-Life 2. They were intended to be delivered by the Combine in pods the way headcrabs were, to bombard and weaken human forces in advance of an assault. The Half-Life 2 beta sound files also contained a reference to sackticks, which were going to be launched at the Borealis—the ship from Episode 3 we never got to visit.

I'm not positive, but sackticks could finally have made it into the game. Maybe they were an early invasion tactic that the Combine abandoned before the events of Half-Life 2, and that's why Gordon never met one. In any case, sacktick has gotta be an all-time best-worst enemy name. 

Half-Life: Alyx has Pipe Mania 

Remember the first time you hacked a robot or vending machine in BioShock? And you were like, oh, this is a Pipe Mania minigame? (Or Pipe Dream, or just Pipes). Well, the instance of hacking we see in the trailer is Pipe Mania. Yet again. Alyx is trying to hack some sort of power transformer, and you can see the sections of bent 'pipes' she needs to align so the power can flow freely to complete a circuit.

It's not the only puzzle—there's a very brief glimpse of another one I tacked onto the gif above that looks like she's trying to align some nodes in some sort of 3D spatial puzzle. Hopefully it doesn't have anything to do with a plumbing game from 1989.

You heal through your hand, and there's a slug involved 

I've watched this clip about 20 times and I think I'm parsing what's going on. To heal you'll need to stick your hand in the health charger—it makes the same wonderful sound it's made since the original Half-Life. ALyx's gravity gloves show her health status: during the clip it goes from zero hearts to one heart. Note that healing keeps you standing in one place, but you may still need to defend yourself. Get ready for some multitasking.

And it appears the health charger is feeding from some kind of alien slug or grub that's been crammed in the tube on the right. As Alyx heals, the slug is slowly absorbed by the machine. Is that what health and HEV chargers have been running off of all this time in Half-Life universe? Weird alien slug juice? Guh-ross.

There are some fun new weapons available 

You're gonna have to scrounge for ammo, though. Rather than leave bullets lying around in plain sight, we see Alyx having to clear off a shelf of crap to find a shell to load into one of the new guns, which appears to be a futuristic sawed-off shotgun. We also get the briefest of glimpses of Alyx firing an orange burst from another new gun—a gauss pistol, maybe? And the Combine seem to be armed with some new-looking SMGs that I assume we'll also get our virtual hands on.

Plus, Alyx's gravity gloves come in handy for pick-pocketing a Combine soldier from a distance, and hurling a crate full of foam popcorn at another. We'll have lots of new toys to play with.

He's back 

I knew it, you knew it, everyone knew it. But it's good to really know it.

With Half-Life: Alyx officially revealed and set to arrive next year, Game Awards host Geoff Keighly shared a 22-minute video chat with members of the development team that digs into how it all got started, and why there won't be a non-VR version released down the road.

Interestingly, the project didn't begin as a new Half-Life game: Valve's David Speyrer explains in the video that after the release of The Lab in 2016, Valve committed to making a "big VR game," but didn't settle on getting back into the Half-Life universe until later.

"It was definitely, 'Let's do a big VR game,' and then we explored different franchises," he said. "We kind of ruled out multiplayer just because of the small audience for VR, and other issues as well with VR, avatars and things like that. And we kind of settled on Portal or Half-Life as interesting, and Portal is so much about flinging yourself through space and through portals that we thought, well, we're gonna make a bunch of people sick with this game."

"And then we looked at Half-Life and kind of the DNA of that product, and a bunch of elements seemed really enhanced by VR. Half-Life is about this cadence of story, combat, puzzle, exploration, interaction, environmental art, vistas, things like that. And they all seemed to be enhanced or reinvented in interesting ways by VR."

While VR exclusivity locks out the vast majority of the Half-Life fan base without buying a headset, Dario Casali said that as Valve pushed forward with its experiments, it found that it was able to do all kinds of things that normal games don't allow—which, unfortunately, is also why you won't see Half-Life: Alyx appear on conventional PCs.

"[Half-Life: Alyx] began as an exploration of VR, and the more we used the controllers and the headset, we realized the amount of interactions this gives, the amount of possibilities these things give us, the more we explored it and the more we realized that there's so much opportunity that we can't really translate back to the keyboard," Casali said. 

"When you can track your hands separately from your head, they're all 3D space, all simultaneously tracking and moving, you just can't really get that with a mouse and keyboard. And when you put that into game mechanics, the kinds of interactions that we can do now, we couldn't possibly do with a mouse and keyboard."

He cited the complexity of doors as an example: Players can crack open doors and put their guns through, open a door, drop a grenade, and pull it shut, knock doors open, or open them just a crack for a peek at what's behind: "The more we explored those mechanics, the more we realized that In order for us to deliver a keyboard and mouse experience we'd have to ship a game that's missing a lot of those interactions, and they were playtesting so well that we didn't feel like that was a good idea."

The good news is that Half-Life: Alyx will run on a variety of headsets, including the Index, Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, and Windows Mixed Reality rigs—so while there's an unavoidable cost of entry, there's at least some degree of flexibility to it. Half-Life: Alyx is set to come out in March 2020; Keighley's in-depth report on its development, The Final Hours of Half-Life: Alyx, will presumably show up around the same time. 

More information about the game will be revealed at The Game Awards, which begin at 5:30 pm PT/8:30 pm ET on December 12.