XR Daily: Half-Life 2 Episode 3 Leaks
A 12TB Steam Leak Just Surfaced Half-Life 2: Episode 3 Assets
Valve did not get hacked, but it did just suffer what may be its biggest data leak in history. The company left an endpoint on its legacy infrastructure open to the public, and archivists pulled down 12 to 13TB of old game content before anyone noticed. The dump spans Steam content-server data from 2003 to 2013, the Steam2 era of NCF and GCF file formats that ended when Valve moved to the SteamPipe system around March 2013.
The headline find is a weapon model from the canceled Half-Life 2: Episode 3: the Weaponizer, a concept gun that turns objects into ammo. It has leaked in screenshots for years, and Valve showed it off officially, but never in build form. Here it sits inside an early Portal 2 beta as a placeholder for the handheld Paint Gun before the team switched to gel drops. That Portal 2 build dates to July 2009, the scrapped Core Hub era, and modders have already reconstructed it into something playable, complete with a different GLaDOS, new voice lines, and assets borrowed from Team Fortress and Half-Life.
The rest is a time capsule of Valve at its most prolific. There is a June 2008 Left 4 Dead build with a different HUD, cut voice lines, and assets recycled from the Terror Strike mod for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. There is the F-Stop prequel with its camera mechanics, and an early look at CS:GO. None of it ships to consumers, but for modders and game historians this is a rare, unvarnished look at how Valve actually built things.
GTA 6’s Showcase Had VR, Just Not the VR You Wanted
Rockstar finally showed 26 minutes of GTA 6 gameplay this week, and it pulled 1.5 million views in two hours. The fidelity jump over GTA 5 is substantial, and a dense, reactive city simulation like that is practically begging for a headset. Rockstar clearly knows it, because the showcase hid a joke at VR players’ expense.
At 17:27 in the extended look, a character wearing a headset unmistakably modeled on the original Oculus Quest (2019) takes part in a very different kind of simulation. It is a gag, not an announcement. GTA 6 shows no sign of official VR support.
That is not the end of the story. GTA 5 spawned a long line of unofficial VR mods, and GTA 6 will get the same treatment. The catch is timing: the game hits PlayStation and Xbox on November 19, but the PC version is unconfirmed and unlikely to arrive before 2027, which is where most VR modding happens.
Nvidia and Cerebras Are Marketing Numbers You Will Never See
The inference speed war got loud at Hot Chips this week. Nvidia announced its Groq-3-based LPX racks entered production, citing 3,400 tokens per second on Gemma 4 31B, which it says is four times faster than Cerebras. A day later Cerebras fired back with near-equivalent numbers from its next-gen CS-4 accelerators.
The Register’s point is sharp and worth reading: neither company is lying, but these are batch-of-one benchmarks no inference operator would run in production. It is the top speed of a race car, great for a brochure and useless at the pump. The math is concrete. Each Groq-3 accelerator holds 500MB of on-chip SRAM, so a 31B model at 8-bit precision needs about 31GB of memory, roughly 64 LPUs, just to hold the weights. A 100,000-token input sequence then adds about 8GB of KV cache per sequence. A single 256-LPU rack tops out around batch size 12 at that context length.
For real-time graphics and AI inference alike, the lesson holds: the number that matters is throughput under load, not latency at a batch of one.
Dragon Quest’s 40th Birthday Is a 5-Minute VR Attraction
Dragon Quest turned 40 this year, and rather than a dry retrospective, the series celebrated with Dragon Quest: The Dive, a three-part exhibition built around a VR ride. The VR centerpiece is a five-minute on-rails, non-interactive sequence rendered on Quest 3 headsets, with audiences strapped into a 4DX-style chair that jolts through every duck and dive.
You play the hero helping a healslime named Homita, riding a killer panther through woods, cliffs, and river rapids before a showdown with Estark, lord of the Underworld. It is intense, closer to a theme park rollercoaster than a museum piece, and the steep drops are not for the faint of heart. The other two sections are analog and lovely: original design documents in glass, including Akira Toriyama’s early Slime sketches and handwritten dungeon maps, plus life-size statues and inflatable slimes you can squish. As a way to make fans feel 40 years of history, it beats a placard.
→ UploadVR
Vertigo Rush Is Charming Parkour Racing That Needs a Tune-Up
Vertigo Rush, now in Early Access, is a parkour racing game built on arm-swinging locomotion, and UploadVR’s early take is that the core idea is solid but the execution is fussy. The arm movements demand more precision than feels necessary, and a small misstep kills your momentum. Compared to Orion Drift, which makes the same movement feel fluid, Vertigo Rush reads as clunky, though climbing and boosting work well and the level design makes good use of verticality and branching paths.
The content is thin so far: a time trial mode and three cups of three tracks each, with AI opponents weak enough to beat by a minute or more. The playable characters are purely cosmetic with no stat differences, a missed opportunity for depth, and multiplayer currently requires room codes with no open lobbies. There is plenty to like, and family-sharing support is a welcome touch, but this one needs a few Early Access patches to find its rhythm.
→ UploadVR
Quick Bites
- Hell Let Loose: Vietnam: a 50v50 simulation FPS with six real-world maps and 17 specialized roles, from the Hell Let Loose series. → 80 Level
- Blender boiling water: a tutorial on creating believable boiling water in Blender. → 80 Level
- Facial anatomy: a beginner-to-advanced course on drawing and sculpting facial anatomy. → 80 Level
- Investigation games: a roundup of indie detective games for fans of The Case of the Golden Idol. → 80 Level