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Comment by beefsack | Hacker News Reader

It's beginning to appear clear that FPS is VR's pipe dream. The locomotion part seems non-trivial to solve and dissonance between the virtual and real world renders VR FPS completely unplayable for a large amount of gamers (it can make you feel incredibly uncomfortable, can also cause motion sickness.)

HL3 and Portal 3 would be incredibly difficult to implement well in the VR space, and I feel this is something that Valve understands much better than many others.

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What would excite me about VR is a game like Morrowind. While it is first person, it's not exactly a shooter. The only teleportation is fast travel, but that could even use a World of Warcraft style where instead of teleporting you just ride the animal to get there.

Put me in a foreign world with several varied environments. Let me explore it without artificial restrictions. The combat could be minimized with most potential enemies being non-aggressive by default (a change to Morrowind's mud crabs or cliff racers). For this style of game I would even expect to still have to use a controller both for combat but also for inventory management, etc.

> can also cause motion sickness

This is a real issue, and was my exact experience with VR. I know VR devs are aware, and have addressed it in some ways. But, idk. I was ready to plop down the cash for a Vive, but decided against it after a test run.

You know it goes away right? For all the hate in this thread, I am still in love with my vive. The motion sickness is a problem at first, but your body eventually adapts- took about 2 weeks for me, now I never get motion sick what-so-ever.

IMO these franchises have one big advantage: They are in a science fantasy setting that has already introduced the concept of teleportation. So there is already precedent for teleporting around the map, making locomotion unnecessary.

I don't play an FPS to teleport around. I play to run, jump, dodge, etc.

Don't call it FPS then. Have you played Portal?

Portals main mechanic is movement, portals are created to enable new venues of movement. If portals were simply point at somewhere and click to teleport there the game would hardly be portal anymore and probably not fun at all.

Yes, I have played Portal and think that there is still enough movement involved to be problematic for VR as it's done now.

Sure, you could invent a teleportation-specific genre, but I think it'd be quite the niche.

Have Valve/etc gone after the hardcore F1/racing market? I have various friends who follow F1 closely and generally have money to spend. Surely VR works well for seated-racing games.

Teleportation is a garnish, not the main dish. Traversal mechanics are a core part of most action related games.

- Cheap omnidirectional treadmills

- Haptic touch feedback through gloves

These are the final two pieces, in my opinion. Well those and making the hardware smaller.

Can't the locomotion problem be solved by putting the player character in a wheelchair or some sort of mobility assistive device?

Wheelchair Deathmatch. Sounds fun, I would totally play that in VR.

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