Valve is working on three full-length virtual reality games, company founder Gabe Newell has confirmed to press, spread across its own Source 2 and third-party Unity game engines.
That Valve is interested in virtual reality should be no secret: The company worked heavily with HTC for the launch of the Vive VR headset, has its own virtual reality platform dubbed SteamVR which it has been
steadily enhancing, and not only worked to
add VR support to its Steam Controller but is
working on grasp-sensitive controllers specific to VR - not even mentioning its earlier work on augmented reality hardware, which spun off into
CastAR when the company opted to concentrate on virtual reality instead.
With first-party Valve game launches being few and far between these days, though - and feel free to insert your own Half-Life 3 joke here - the news that Valve is working on not one but three VR-specific titles is of considerable interest. '
Right now we're building three VR games,' Valve's Gabe Newell told press in a roundtable attended by
Eurogamer this week. '
When I say we're building three games, we're building three full games, not experiments,' he further clarified - positioning the work his teams are doing apart from The Lab, a collection of what the company describes as '
room-scale VR experiments set in a pocket universe within Aperture Science,' the latter a reference to the fictional company at the heart of the company's Portal franchise.
Further in the same discussion, Newell explained that the company has experimented with porting earlier games, including Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress, into VR, but that '
there was absolutely nothing compelling about it' - suggesting that its current projects are being built from the ground up.
Naturally, no release dates for the games were given.
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