Portal is also tangentially related to the Half Life plot, but isn't too important as it doesn't have much story of its own. If you want to be quick, you can skip everything but Half Life and Half Life 2. Half Life 2: Lost Coast is just a tech demo for graphics options that went into later Source games. Half Life: Decay (skippable - PS2 only).The recommended playing order is pretty much the release order: In this article, Ill walk you through exactly how to play Half. However, you can also play it on the standalone Oculus Quest when you take advantage of Oculus Link, which connects your Quest to your PC like an ordinary Rift headset. Half Life: Source is pretty much identical to Half Life. Half-Life: Alyx can be played on practically every PC VR headset under the sun, from the super expensive Valve Index to entry-level Windows Mixed Reality headsets. The Source versions are a remake of the original games on the engine used by HL2. The same is not true for the Half Life 'One' series, as far as I know.Īs for Portal - it does contain some side references to corporate entities in the Half Life universe, but as it is that's more flavor than actual plot.

The HL2 episodes are not an accessory part of the story, but actual sequels. At the very least HL2 and episode 1 and 2 should be played since they introduce you to Alyx and everything in that world. My advice is to play the original Half-Life 1, then Half-Life 2, and if you'd like to extend the pleasure, sequels Episode 1 and Episode 2 for Half-Life 2 are quite good, but not as good as the two main games. Was reading about it, it's between the events of Half-Life (1998) and Half-Life 2 (2004).

Needless to say it's smoke and mirrors, there's absolutely no significant difference between the two. The Source version of Half-Life 1 is, and I quote:Ī digitally remastered version of the critically acclaimed and best selling PC game Marine, a security guard and two scientists (since Decay is a cooperative multiplayer game), respectively. The expansions and spin-offs for Half-Life 1 which were not developed by Valve are quite skippable Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay return to the setting and events of Half-Life 1, but portray the story through the eyes of a U.S. In 2004, Valve released Half-Life 2 to further success, with a new setting and characters and physics-based gameplay. The must-play Half-Life games are Half-Life 1, then Half-Life 2.

What order to play half life