Half-Life Steam still shows the game as "scheduled for release in March 2020." Given that we will soon be entering the last week of January, this lack of specificity may not inspire great confidence that the release will not be delayed. Valve, however, has stated that such a thing will not happen, as the game is virtually complete.

"With the exception of some tweaks to the absolute last scene, the game is complete. Many Valve staff members, as well as playtesters, have played the entire game multiple times," said Robin Walker, Jamaal Bradley, David Feise, Greg Coomer, Corey Peters, Erik Wolpaw, Tristan Reidford, Chris Remo, Jake Rodkin, and Kaci Aitchison Boyle, said in an AMA on Reddit today.

"Right now we are primarily polishing and fixing bugs. We are confident we can achieve our intended release. (We made Valve Time happen before we even released the game)."

Not surprisingly, the AMA revealed no deep, dark secrets about Half-Life: While no deep secrets were revealed about Alyx, it did provide some insight into what players can expect in a VR adventure. For example, the weapons in the game require only one hand, but can be held and secured with one hand if the hand is free.

"We wanted to focus on two-handed simultaneous play throughout the game, so we needed to make sure players always had their hands free," the team explains.

The inventory and weapon selection system was also designed to allow players to focus as much as possible on the environment rather than the menus. For example, ammunition is handled by an ""over-the-shoulder" contextual inventory system, and quick-select weapons are made available in the main hand.

The developers also addressed Valve's sudden willingness to talk openly about the new game they are working on, with occasional expressions of surprise, perhaps not always serious Valve has always enjoyed communicating with its fans, but "Half- Life: Alyx is the "first single-player campaign in years," and they wanted to take a different approach than service-based games like Dota 2 or CS:GO.

"That prompted a lot of the work we've done recently on social media and other places like the new HL:A site, which was a great opportunity to expand our outreach as Valve more broadly.

"We didn't talk about Half-Life for a long time because we weren't actively working on a Half-Life game, and once Half-Life: Alyx became a reality within the company, it was already clear that this was something we wanted to get the community involved in. We were," they added in response to a later question. We will be doing more of this in the coming weeks as we prepare for the launch!"

Half-Life: Alyx's protagonist Ozioma Akagha will have a new voice actor to reflect the age of the character in the Half-Life 2 prequel. However, the developer said that Valve actually started the project with Merle Dandridge, the voice actor from the original Alyx, and ultimately decided to "go in a different direction."

"We love Merle and her work on 'Half-Life 2' helped bring Alyx to life."

In case you missed it yesterday, Valve has released the entire Half-Life Collection (Half-Life, HL2, HL2: Half-Life, HL2: Half-Life, HL2: Episodes 1 and 2, Opposing Force, " Blue Shift", and "Team Fortress Classic": until Alyx comes out.