Half-Life: Alyx First Post-Launch Update Drops: What's New

After a few months of waiting, Half-Life: Alyx launched on Monday. As the first Half-Life game in more than a decade, there was a lot of anticipation following this release, and it looks like the title is off to strong start. Half-Life: Alyx has received its first post-launch update, but don't expect a massive changelog detailing a litany of additions and fixes.

That's because the update to version 1.1 is a rather small one, but there are still a few things worth noting. As detailed over on the Steam events page for Half-Life: Alyx, some of the biggest changes with this update are centered around turning options. Turning, of course, is a big deal in a first-person VR game, so it's nice to see Valve rolling out these options.

Specifically, Valve says that it has improved the turning options in the preferences menu, adding a Continuous Turn option with accompanying speed settings. It's also renamed the Quick Turn feature to Snap Turn, which should better define its functionality. Finally, Valve has given players the option of disabling controller turning.

Aside from the changes regarding turning, Valve has "improved hand-over-mouth pose usability for Windows MR controllers," improved the "resolution of impact decals on enemies," and improved automatic hardware detection and graphics setting recommendations for some PCs.

Finally, this update ships with a few fixes, specifically one concerning sounds not playing as they normally should and another concerning the main menu becoming unresponsive when players had too many save files. Some crashing issues have also been fixed, but Valve wasn't very specific about those. You can check out the full patch notes in the post linked above, but otherwise, we'll be keeping an eye out for more updates to Half-Life: Alyx.