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Comment by timwaagh | Hacker News Reader

vr is just expensive and requires fairly high end hardware still. There are also are all kinds of software issues with it. like when i was playing a well known racing game, very often the camera would be somewhere other than the driver's seat. And those are the kind of games that really are quite heavy on vr adoption and are the natural fit for this type of control.

many games do not naturally lend themself to vr, and by those i mean the most popular genres, like fps, rpg, action-adventure. Basically every game that requires your feet to move about in a virtual world. I don't think it is suitable for strategy or management games either. So that leaves simulation, racing and some very old genres like on-rails-shooters. which is a sizeable market, but not the mainstream gaming market.

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> requires fairly high end hardware still

Not true with Oculus Quest which completely turned me from a skeptic to a believer. Just put it on and start playing. No external hardware required.

Not exactly sure why you are being downvoted here.

Oculus Quest really does not require an external computer (ie High-End Hardware), and it _is_ a really good experience (it's also really cheap compared to alternatives), specially the "tetherless" part of it. [You can see a lot of people in this exact thread talk about their experiences with it]

While there is still a lot to improve in terms of quality, not every game needs to look realistic (see: Fortinite - cartoon style).

glad you are enjoying your Quest. I did not consider it, but it remains something of a niche platform. not approaching mainstream.

FPS is actually the one amazing genre in VR... when it works right.

Maybe someone will finally revive the First/Third Person RPG/RTS niche (not top down), which I really loved in BattleZone 1/2. I think it will work great in VR.

But yeah, really resource intensive, Pimax says you'll need 2 GPUs (one per eye) to get the most performance out of their 8K headset.

What are the normal controls for player movement in a VR FPS? The WASD equivalent, I mean.

Since we're in the early days theres quite a bit of experimentation. While there is usually traditional move/strafe on the left joystick, some games have options like:

Point-to-teleport (worst option, IMO, but good for people really sensitive to motion sickness)

Arm waving - Basically move your arms back and forth like you would when running.

Head-directed, or hand-directed movement direction.

Physical movement in your room with no artificial movement option. This is typically in genres like wave shooters where you can move to dodge and such but not really expected to navigate a whole level.

Some games combine multiples of the above. From a game design perspective, still very much the wild west in VR.

this is what i meant. to me these feel like somewhat of a hack, breaking the vr promise of natural movement through a game world. but i suppose it could still be enjoyable.

Flight/Driving Sims are another amazing genre for VR.

Counterintuitively, I think large-scale strategy games are pretty awesome candidates for VR.

Third person games are also pretty amazing. If you have VR and haven't tried the free VR mode released for Hellblade, you're missing out.

Oculus Quest is 400$, no additional hardware required.

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