Any VR shooter game campaign that wants to have remotely realistic firearms has to grapple with a single core design problem:

Even if your game is one long tutorial, you can't teach someone to be good at gun fighting in 10 hours, much less combine that with tactical acumen.

Pancake FPSes leverage (and assume) 1000s of user contact hours with a mouse.

VR shooters have no prior kinesthetic experience to leverage from the average user. In a 10 hour campaign, you can't reasonably ask anything of a user beyond a mid-difficulty arcade light gun game.

This is why you will only end up getting high-level VR Gunplay in three cats:

- Multiplayer games (though actual ux/systemic complexity will often be kept lower for accessibility and player retention)

- Pure Sandboxes

- Rogue-likes (and lites) built for 100s of hours of play

Anyway, this is a round-about way of saying OF COURSE Half Life Alyx's shooting gameplay was shallow, fairly easy, and emphasized the resource and sequencing-puzzle aspects of its fighting.

That's the palette of options you have to work with for a mass-appeal game like this.

This is one of the things I've discovered working on H3 over the years. I'm in a position of EXCEPTIONAL privilege as a game designer.

I got to tack a Roguelite ONTO a sandbox game. I could actually count of a non-trivial portion of my users being trained enough to excel.

Same thing with our Return of the Rotwieners mode. I got to tack a survival rpg thing ONTO a sandbox game.

Because these are adjuncts to a detailed sandbox sim, there's integrated expectation that a user has to actually practice to be able to even play parts of the game.

Which, turns out, there IS a big audience for that. Certainly not HL:Alyx big. But there are folks willing and interested in that sort of experience.

I just don't think it's really transportable to a 'normal' FPS campaign release approach.