As much as a Half-Life fan I am, VR is a gimmick. It's expensive and will not be a "thing" in the foreseeable future. This is such a wasted opportunity. A normal Half-Life 3 would have brought back a lot of goodwill for Valve.
Note that I did not mention price. It will come down – even more, that is.
Also, they need Half Life 2 Episode III. The series ended in a cliffhanger.
It's a gimmick.
Alyx is a $2000 game for a normal gamer, counting an index and a sizeable PC upgrade.
If you already have a gaming PC, you just need a headset. I got mine for $300 on a Black Friday. Is that 'expensive AF'?
If you are buying a PC for the sole purpose of using it with a VR headset, then fine. But who does that?
> And you need space.
Not that much. And depends on the game. If you are playing flight simulators you need zero additional space. I have a small room and it is enough space.
> And there are so many of them
It's the first time I hear that. There's Vive, there's Rift (and now the Index). Forget about all the Windows reality or whatever it's called. That's not much.
> And the storefronts don't match
Who cares. Get your games from the Steam store. Same storefront.
> And there are no games
Debatable. There's quite a few VR-only games, and even more games that support VR (even the good old Skyrim has VR support).
> And you sweat.
That will never be solved, you are moving after all. If you are talking just around the headpiece, than it's a case of YMMV.
> And they're heavy.
Not really. May be a bit inconvenient, but at least the Rift doesn't seem to weight more than my bike helmet. And, you know, I move much more with the latter.
> And you need a monster PC
No you don't. That's again game dependent. The kid's $600 PC runs all VR titles he cares about just fine. You just have to prioritize the GPU, as you should with any 'gamer' PC.
> And it doesn't work
It works great.
> It's a gimmick.
It's an uninformed opinion. You need to try it, rather than regurgitating opinions you saw somewhere.
A gimmick is something that, even in its best form, is not compelling in the long run. VR sounds like the opposite - it's not compelling to that many people yet because it has known issues, but fix those issues, and it would be.
And even if all that happens: VR takes away a lot by restricting movement to a ridiculous level. And it only adds stuff that is fun for about three times and already looks lame after watching the trailer a second time. You might be right, but I can't see this go anywhere.
As long as the game has you using 'tools', then it's fine. The moment it wants you to use actual hands, then it becomes a problem. Haptic feedback would help immensely, but there's no real way to overcome not feeling resistance if you are, for instance, pushing an object.
> or feel motion when moving.
True. This is why people get motion sickness.
Google Daydream headset and controller are $60, and operate with the smartphone people already own (assuming you've got a decently-beefy smartphone). Price is hitting record lows on this hardware.
Uh...what...
HTC has sold over 1.5 million headsets. Oculus over 2 million, and Sony has been leading the way with over 5 million PSVR headsets sold.
You are incredibly uninformed.
This local maxima of design and hardware may be a fad, but if it is, I expect in my lifetime to see another fad in maybe 10 years. The tech is just getting too cheap for people to not risk throwing a few mil at it every so often.
One day it's going to be great. Probably not soon, but one day!
I think a game like Myst with puzzles that you manipulate with your hands could be pretty interesting.
I think we'd need to see hard numbers to estimate that (and the hard numbers would need to factor in that this generation of hardware---the Rift and later---is much higher-fidelity and responsive than its predecessors and tends to trigger less nausea).
Wow, that is a very pessimistic approach to a problem. What are you even trying to suggest here, that we have a problem right now in this new tech, and no one will ever, ever ever, solve it because... you think so? People are solving way harder problems out there than this. Like going to Mars for example. I'm pretty sure we will solve motion sickness in VR.
2. Movies aren't often filmed from first person perspective for any length of time.
From my very thorough research (googling "3D movie sick", and looking at the dates; all from the period 2010-2015) this doesn't seem to be a big problem any more. Now this could of course also be because people have just accepted that it is not for them, the people who get sick don't talk about it any more, or people in general have just moved on from 3D, but it does make me wonder. Could the motion sickness not also just be a temporary thing for VR?