Alyx Fan Gets City 17 Scene Working on Standalone Meta Quest 3

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home April 9, 2025 19 Views 4 Min Read
Alyx Fan Gets City 17 Scene Working on Standalone Meta Quest 3



Summary

  • Fan brought City 17 scene from Half-Life: Alyx to Meta Quest 3
  • Meta Quest 3 is capable of playing VR games wirelessly, with some limitations
  • Developer made Unity version of experience available for Quest 3 owners

A Half-Life: Alyx fan has done something really impressive, bringing the opening City 17 scene of the game to a standalone Meta Quest 3. While a Meta Quest 3 connected to a PC has been able to play Half-Life: Alyx from the get-go, it can’t be used to play it all on its own.

The Meta Quest 3 is an impressive piece of technology, but it has its shortcomings. Due to it being a wireless, standalone device, it’s not capable of playing some graphically advanced VR games unless it’s connected to a PC that’s doing the heavy lifting. However, that doesn’t keep fans from pushing the device to the limit, as one has done now with Valve’s VR hit.

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A developer named Boris Novikov has done something few thought was possible and brought the opening City 17 scene to the Meta Quest 3. It wasn’t a simple matter of just getting the game to work on the device without a PC, though. Instead, Novikov took Half-Life: Alyx‘s assets, including sound, some physics interactions, and models, and put them into Unity. With the scene rebuilt, he then managed to get the opening running on the Meta Quest 3. A brief video demonstrates him walking through City 17 and interacting with objects. While there are some frame rate drops, at some points, the game ran with an FPS as high as 72.

The reason Novikov looked into this concept was because of how technology has progressed since the release of Half-Life: Alyx, as well as the original Oculus Quest. Novikov theorized that the XR2 Gen 2 chipset in the Quest 3 was powerful enough to handle the scene, and it seems his hunch was correct. Meanwhile, Valve is rumored to be releasing a new VR headset that will also function wirelessly, and will have a chip similar in capabilities to the Quest 3. It’s possible that VR gamers could end up playing Half-Life: Alyx and similarly demanding VR games on purely wireless standalone devices in the near future.

There’s good news for those who own a Quest 3 and want to try out the experience for themselves. Novikov has made the APK containing the Unity version of the experience available, so those who are familiar with installing custom APK can give it a try on their headsets. The link can be found in the YouTube demo video. Those with other Meta Quest devices, such as the Quest 2 or the Quest Pro are out of luck on this one, as those devices aren’t as powerful as the Quest 3. However, given the Meta Quest 3S chipset and RAM are the same as the Meta Quest 3, it might work on that device. Regardless, this experiment demonstrates that the phone GPUs the Quest line has relied upon are becoming more capable all the time, and it could spell a strong future for VR.

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