Half-Life: Alyx now has the best-looking booze in video games

Valve rolled out an update for its virtual reality shooter, Half-Life: Alyx, on Wednesday, which added subtitles in eight new languages, various UI improvements, and yadda yadda yadda. Look, the most important thing here is this line:

Bottles now appear to have liquid inside them that sloshes around as you shake them.

That bullet point doesn’t do a great job of selling the sloshing mechanics now present in Half-Life: Alyx. Valve has taken bottles filled with booze to a new level of realism, as displayed in the following GIF that the company released with Wednesday’s patch notes:

Image: Valve

That very convincing liquid is the work of Valve visual effects developer Matthew Wilde, who notes on Twitter that he “spent a good chunk of lock-down doing this important work” on what he calls the “boozy liquid shader.”

Here’s Wilde showing off the shader in various bottles (with a bonus anecdote about a gravitational gotcha that popped up during development):

Players have noticed that the shader — which is also used in non-booze liquid containers, like water cooler tanks — even appears to create foam in liquids if the bottle is shaken hard enough.

You can read the rest of Wednesday’s update to Half-Life: Alyx on Steam for more, and check out Polygon’s review of the Half-Life spinoff, which called Valve’s flagship virtual reality title “likely the best VR game released to date” — and that was before this new booze innovation.

Valve Index VR Kit

• $999

Prices taken at time of publishing.

The full Valve Index VR Kit includes the headset, two controllers, two base stations, and a download code for Half Life: Alyx.

• $999 at Valve

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.