Developer Commentary contains significant spoilers.
We highly recommend that you play the game to its conclusion before enabling commentary
As you may recall, the Half-Life: Alyx team was in the process of finishing the game when the COVID-19 lockdown went into effect here in Washington State. In fact, much of the team had already made the decision to work from home prior to that point. Adapting to this new way of collaborating meant that, while were able to get the game out on time, we weren't able complete some work, such as Developer Commentary and Steam Workshop integration.
We later shipped Steam Workshop integration while in quarantine in May and, over the summer, we have had time to reflect on the development of Half-Life: Alyx. We have collected 147 different points of interest from the team and recorded over three hours of audio commentary, covering every aspect of development, including design, art, animation, rendering, sound and more. You can access these points of interest by starting a new game with Developer Commentary enabled. As the commentary contains significant spoilers, we highly recommend that you play the game to its conclusion before playing through with commentary.
Like much of the world, we are all working from home, which means that rather than using our comfortable high-quality recording studio at the office, we have been recording our commentary voice overs in closets and blanket forts around greater Seattle.
When you play in commentary mode, you will see a floating headset at each point of interest. To listen, just grab the headset and put it on your head. A commentary status panel will be displayed above your off hand, showing the playback progress and the name of the speaker. If you like, you can remove the headset to stop playback. When you drop it, it will return to its original location. Commentary subtitles are available in English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Russian, Polish, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.
Additional Changes
Added in-game localization for Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.
Added new convar: hlvr_move_ladder_must_reach_top. When set, players are required to climb all the way to the top of a ladder before they are automatically teleported there when they let go with both hands. This addresses a request made by a number of players to make the ladders more realistic.