The First Thing Many Players Did in Half-Life: Before painting windows or putting traffic cones on their heads, the first thing many players did in Alyx was dive into the settings menu to adjust VR movement options. These included blink motion (which allows teleportation with a short screen fade), shift motion (which allows teleportation without a fade), continuous (which moves based on head orientation), and continuous hand (which moves based on hand orientation).

Rotation, however, was limited to either physically rotating the head or body or "quick turns," in which the body was rotated at a set angle using the controller's pad or stick. If you nudged the stick or clicked the pad, bingo, you had made an immediate turn.

Some players, however, wanted to use the controller to rotate their bodies in a smooth, continuous motion. This option was added in the first update to Half-Life: Alyx since its launch on Monday.

In addition to the continuous turning option, quick turns continue to be available (but are now referred to as "snap turns" for clarity). It is also possible to completely disable turns on the controller if desired, so that turns are not accidentally triggered when using the controller's pad or sticks.

Personally, I prefer to use a combination of quick turns (or snap turns) and physically rotating my body and head when playing VR games. However, the downside of actually turning around is that the headset cables get tangled up, so it's nice to be able to add continuous controller turns to the mix as well.

Full patch notes for Half-Life here: Alyx 1.1:

If Half-Life: Half-Life:Alyx has inspired you to try VR, read about the best GPUs and VR headsets for Half-Life:Alyx Let's take a look: about Alyx.