Valve had promised to restock the Index ahead of Alyx‘s March 23rd debut. This will help drive sales of both the headset and the game, of course, but there’s also little doubt that the Index will provide one of the better experiences for the game, full stop. In our experience, it offers great image quality and motion tracking in a comfortable design with immersive controllers.

The catch, as usual, is that it’s expensive. You’re looking at $999 for a full kit if you’re starting from scratch, and that’s assuming you have a PC fast enough to handle the Index. You can buy considerably less expensive hardware if you just want a reasonably good experience. Don’t despair if you can’t get an Index, then, as there will be other headsets if your budget (or a shortage) rules out a top-range model like this.

You won’t want to count on these invitations leaving the web, either. A WhatsApp spokesperson asserted these links were shared in “searchable, public channels,” and that people who want to keep links private shouldn’t share them on publicly reachable sites. Google’s public search liaison, Danny Sullivan, reiterated this by saying it was “no different” than any other situation where sites allow links to be publicly listed. He added that Google offers tools to block content from being listed. A Google spokesperson didn’t have more to add following an inquiry from Engadget.

Concerns appear to have been circulating since at least November 2019, when a Facebook representative told one user that this was an “intentional product decision.”

This should mean that it’s possible to keep private chats truly closed off by asking members to avoid sharing invitations in public spaces. The problem, of course, is that it only takes one not-so-careful participant to make a link public, and users might not always understand when sharing a link makes it visible in search engines. It also undermines Facebook’s assertion that its future is private — it’s hard to maintain privacy if a link shared in one place is visible to anyone with a knack for Google searches.

We’re just about a month out from the launch of Half Life: Alyx on March 23rd, and like so many other things, it is seeing some impact from the coronavirus outbreak. According to a statement given to RoadtoVR and UploadVR, Valve still plans to restock its Index VR headsets ahead of the game’s release. However, over the next few months the company says “we will have far fewer units for sale during the coming months compared to the volumes we originally planned.”

You can still sign up for a notification when more headsets are available on the Index’s Steam page, which has listed the headsets as out of stock for several weeks.

It wouldn’t be Valve if there wasn’t some sort of catch, though. As many predicted, Alyx doesn’t pick up where Episode Two left off. Instead, it’s a Half-Life 2 prequel, which means there’s still no end in sight to the story that Valve was telling between 2004 and 2007.

Like anyone who’s been following this franchise for the better part of two decades now, I’ve gone through all kinds of emotional highs and lows in the last few days. It started with Tuesday’s announcement, which sent me into stupefied excitement at the idea of Valve finally returning to the series. The title, which refers to silent protagonist Gordon Freeman’s sidekick Alyx Vance, indicated this new game would have a different focus — something that is probably warranted after 12 years. Of course, that gave me the sinking feeling that we weren’t going to get the next chapter in the story we’ve been waiting on for so long.

Thursday’s news drop confirmed it and disappointed me on several levels. Besides there being no hints of resolution to the series, prequels often suffer from a lack of stakes — we generally know that, at the end of Alyx Vance’s turn as the main protagonist, she’ll have connected with the newly-reawakened Freeman to help take on the invading Combine alien forces.

But watching that trailer pretty much blew away my lingering doubts. The world looks familiar, but more intricately detailed and terrifying than ever. I had forgotten about the game’s signature headcrab enemies, and the idea of them hurtling towards me in virtual reality is, frankly, quite disconcerting — Half-Life can get pretty freaky even without the immersiveness of VR.

And while the trailer unsurprisingly doesn’t give much away in terms of story, the first comments coming from Valve’s team about the game make me think we’re in for more than just a linear prequel storyline that wraps up just before Half-Life 2 begins. Speaking to The Verge, Valve’s David Speyrer dropped this intriguing tease: “While it does take place before the events of Half-Life 2, we actually recommend that you play through Half-Life 2: Episode 2 before you play Half-Life: Alyx, for reasons that will become clear as you progress.”

Pair that statement with a key line of dialog from the trailer: “Close your eyes, honey!” It’s spoken by Alyx’s father Eli as a headcrab comes flying towards the camera and the shot cuts to black. It works as a dramatic stinger at the climax of the trailer, but there’s more to dissect here. That’s the last thing Eli says before (spoiler alert) being killed by a horrific Combine Advisor at the end of Episode Two, the cliffhanger we’ve all been waiting to move on from. Sure, Valve could just be screwing with obsessive fans like me with this callback — but maybe there’s more. In a game universe with dimensional tears, heroes put into stasis to be awakened years later, and time-bending Vortigaunt aliens, it’s not hard to imagine Valve has a lot more in store for us than a simple, linear prequel. Sure, the company hasn’t had an in-depth, single-player campaign for a long time, but its track record when it does choose to do so is pretty excellent.

You’ll need a reasonably powerful Windows PC to handle the Index. You’ll want a dual-core processor with hyperthreading, 8GB of RAM and either a GeForce GTX 970 or a Radeon RX480 for graphics, although Valve really wants you to have a quad-core CPU and GTX 1070-class video.

There are certain reasonably safe expectations for Index beyond what’s shown here. The cameras on the outside indicate that it’ll feature “inside-out” tracking similar to the Oculus Rift S and other recent headsets, giving you position detection that doesn’t explicitly require a base station. The controllers, meanwhile, are straightforward designs with analog sticks and a plethora of buttons. Index isn’t particularly revolutionary on the outside (we’ll find out what else it can do on May 1st), but that’s not necessarily the point — this is a showcase for Valve’s goals for VR, and one that doesn’t depend on a third party like HTC.

While Valve worked closely for years with HTC on Vive VR hardware, it’s about to introduce a virtual reality headset of its own. A teaser page on the Steam website shows off this image of the Index, with the tagline “Upgrade your experience” and a May 2019 date. This occurs despite layoffs of some employees on its hardware team, which Valve said would not mean major changes to its plans.

The development of Steam VR gives some ideas of what Valve would like to do, but there are no details or specs on the Index itself. Hints of the device have appeared with trademark filings and even a logo, but we don’t even know if it will use the “Knuckles” finger tracking controllers we’ve seen from Valve a few times over the years. Whatever it is, we’ll know more about it soon.