Yeah but have you played beat saber?
I'm dead serious though the experience you get in a good immersive VR rig is completely unrivaled. Well worth the hassle and overhead. This will get better as costs come down and developers continue to innovate.
I'm dead serious though the experience you get in a good immersive VR rig is completely unrivaled. Well worth the hassle and overhead. This will get better as costs come down and developers continue to innovate.
My basic take is that the technology is really impressive; I agree with proponents that the Quest finally nails it technically. However, I don't think it's enough better than other options to make it worth the significant drawbacks. Something being immersive is ultimately a function of the player experience, not the hardware. And as is demonstrated to me whenever I try to get the kids to turn off almost any game, non-VR hardware is definitely immersive.
If anything, facehugger VR seems less immersive, because the stuff is way less comfortable than other gaming hardware. The kid who loved rhythm games would play Beat Saber less than non-VR games because of neck discomfort and face irritation. Battery life was also lower than the Switch, and of course infinitely lower than the Playstation. Which also cut into immersion.
I did really appreciate the new 6-axis controllers; they were very cool, and gave a great sense of spatial freedom. But unfortunately, that freedom is a lie; my sense of immersion quickly ended every time I hit a virtual boundary. To successfully play Superhot, I found I had to continuously maintain two spatial frames of reference: VR and reality. So it ultimately felt less immersive to me than a console game, where I could just plop down on the couch and forget my body entirely.
Same experience (Vive Pro) with niece, nephew and their friends. They tried Beat Saber and all other age-appropriate VR games. After those few times, not once did they ask to try again. They would much rather play Fortnite and The Sims, with a mouse and keyboard.
I often said ‘when 3D TV’s don’t require glasses, I’ll buy one.’ I guess that was the general opinion, and when that didn’t happen quickly enough, it died.
The entire concept of the game (time only progresses while you're moving) fits _so well_ with VR. It makes you feel like a complete badass as you're able to perform ninja-like feats of dexterity and dodge bullets all the while being a just challenging-enough puzzle and providing a decent workout.
Everything else I've played was either basically a tech demo or felt like our old games built within the limitations of VR (what really differentiates Beat Saber from DDR, Guitar Hero, etc?). SUPERHOT was one of the few games I played that really felt like a proper VR game.
Beat Saber is the most fun game I have ever played. No qualifiers. No shifty language. Nothing else is even in the same order of magnitude as Beat Saber. I dare to even call it a video game, because very few other games even possess the language to compete with it. The combat in FF7R is visceral, but you're not actually swinging Cloud's sword. The loop in Animal Crossing is entrancing, but it doesn't become your entire world like when you put a headset on. Even other VR games, which have that language they can use to tell their gameplay, often feel like the VR experience is bolted onto something which could, and maybe should, be non-VR. You often fight with the game; the game transplants you into a world, not just on a screen, but every degree surrounding you, yet you're limited in how you move, you're limited in how the game allows you to interact, nothing feels natural, and you soon adapt your actions with what the game wants.
I am solidly in the camp that, honestly, VR will not become a household item like a game console is. Even with headsets priced about at the level of a game console, like the Rift, the platform has too many downfalls.
Startlingly few games work well in VR. Even an experience like Half Life Alyx, the pinnacle of VR technology, feels like a shell of a game like Half Life 2. Its different. It can't tell a strong story, because players don't generally spend more than 30-90 minutes in VR at a time. It can't really innovate in puzzle design, because movement and viewport control is so heavy that it becomes tiring if you ask the player to do too much. The mechanics feel incredible. No one enters HL:A for the first time, loads that pistol, and doesn't have this HUGE GRIN on their face. But, its also a novelty; it wears off far too quickly once you begin realizing how many fundamentally core things Valve had to sacrifice to make the game work at all.
Nearly every game in VR is, bluntly, a tech demo. The platform is still figuring out if it is viable. Of the top selling VR games on Steam, #7 is a sim game which models a hyper-realistic anime girl, allowing you to mess with her clothes in a predictable anime way, and #10 is Skyrim. Of course, HL:A and Beat Saber are #1 and #2, but roughly this state is where VR was six years ago. It hasn't really evolved, and I'm not convinced HL:A was the catalyst I think Valve is hoping it is.
But, maybe I'm wrong. I will say this: There is no price you can pay for a VR headset that does not make Beat Saber worth it (within your means, of course). It is that good. I have an Index ($1000); beyond spending an hour or two in as many games as I can, 100% of my time is spent in Beat Saber, and I do not regret the purchase. Everything else VR has to offer is just icing. But this, a platform, does not make.
Space Pirate Trainer is another game that did a really good job of this. Before Beat Saber, that was easily my favorite, though wow Beat Saber is _so good_. Blarp is another game that did a great job of immersing you into a single room and making the most of the mechanics.
More "full" games don't work as well, because they have to figure out some way to transport you around the world without breaking immersion or causing nausea. And I don't think anyone has pulled it off well.
I am confident we will have more games that stand up to Beat Saber. It's a platform that requires discarding a lot of the strengths that video games have in order to work well, and developers have to re-learn a lot more from scratch than I think anyone realized when the platforms started.
I haven't tried the new Half Life, so I'm wondering if you're right.
(low-level spoilers)
There's one moment early on where you're asked to solve a vorgon puzzle in a drainage ditch. Every person I've asked who has been through this area disliked it, and I haven't found anyone who solved it legitimately. Its confusing. It has parallax/perspective elements which ask you to move around a large area, position yourself perfectly, and possibly even crane your neck in the right way to get an angle on what is the intended solution.
But, movement sucks in any non-room-style VR game. You can't use the joystick to just move your character, like you would in a non-VR game, because it causes unreal motion sickness in, like, 100% of users (this is available as option. its an experience that i think everyone should try; I had no idea I could get motion sickness until I did, but I was literally falling over). Instead, you press the joystick in the direction you want, a targeting beam pops up, and you "teleport" to the desired location. This sucks. Its imprecise, its slow, and it makes you feel, to some degree, like you're actually watching a powerpoint presentation of the game.
And, head yaw can also suck in VR. This may be surprising; its the entire point of VR. But, depending on whether your headset has a tether, and how big your play area is, many VR players are stuck stationary and with, maybe, 180 degrees of freedom in front of them. In one of these setups, you cant naturally look behind you; you have to rotate in-game, which calls back to all of the negatives that movement itself has. But even the in-game rotation is in-precise; in HL:A, it jumps by roughly 60 degree increments. Imagine there's something 45 degrees to your left you want to center; you can either turn your head 45 degrees left to center it (uncomfortable), rotate your body 45 degrees left (scary), or rotate in-game 60 degrees left, followed by rotating your head 15 degrees right or body 15 degrees right. In small play areas, the body rotations are a slippery slope that eventually ends in you being turned around, contacting furniture, or getting tangled in the headset tether. This is, at least for me, always front of mind; I can't escape the reality that my play area isn't large. So, you end up with these nearly (only nearly) subconscious calculations involving how many times you need to rotate in-game to make neck rotations less uncomfortable.
This is the problem space that any non-room VR game has, and will have, to solve. It is unsolved. I believe it is unsolvable. Even if you can get the player/object interactions down to perfection (this is insanely difficult, and different for every game; HL:A is the first "complex" VR game I've seen get close), even if you can craft a story and world that is both compelling, and works well with the intrinsic movement limitations VR has (no one has done this yet; again, HL:A gets close), even if you can remove slideshow-teleportation movement without motion sickness (I believe this is impossible without something like an omni-directional treadmill); you still run up against most players just not having the space for room-scale VR & N-degree freedom of movement.
VR is filled with technical challenges, and every technical challenge developers have to solve limits their ability to be artists. This is why arcade-style games are the showcase piece for VR. And, in my opinion, will remain that way for a good, long while.
Aren't tethered headsets a thing of the past now? I have a Quest and never had that issue.
The Quest does two things that are interesting, and rather unique from a full market perspective; local rendering, and inside-out tracking.
Local rendering is probably the future for VR platforms. Unfortunately, there's really only one company on the planet with a mobile SoC design capable of driving the performance necessary for truly current-generation VR experiences, and that company is not interested in sharing their technology (Apple). The Quest, with its android smartphone-class specs, is not, in my mind, a current-gen VR headset from a performance perspective. It has other (huge!) advantages which make it an awesome purchase (generally, the best purchase for most people), but performance is not one of them.
I think the jury is still out on inside-out tracking. It may approach a level where it is good enough for most use-cases, while still being worse than outside-in tracking is today. Arguably, its there today. Fundamentally, if your environment is dark, or lacks the many visual intelligence landmarks necessary for the AI to operate, its going to struggle, not to even mention the challenges it has in tracking hand positions behind your back (which is very common in FPS-type games, where you often reach into your backpack to grab more ammo).
Plus, the local rendering, the inside-out tracking, and internal battery, all add weight to the headset, which already cheaps out on the circumcranial support straps to properly distribute weight (many people swap their Quest straps with, say, those from a Rift S or even an Index/Vive, because they're so much better). The Quest is both one of the most and least advanced headsets on the market.
I've heard streaming to the Oculus Quest is basically like owning a Rift. I haven't tried it myself though.
I think one of the problems of VR is one of cost and credibility. Even if I knew you personally and trusted you, there is no way in hell I’m going to float thousands of dollars getting a new gaming PC, VR headset, and customizing my room for the full setup just because someone said it’s amazing. The risk/reward ratio for that is just insane, and not in a good way.
Heck, even $500 for an entry level setup is a pretty dicey proposition, assuming my PC can lift it. $500 can buy me a lot of non-VR gaming satisfaction with effectively 0 risk.
If it was $200, I’d consider it.
Wait 10 years and then ask.
It's brand new, genuinely computationally intensive, tech - it's going to be expensive. The Original PlayStation cost more in today's money than I bought my Vive for.
Also, if you can get a used Vive or similar there is almost no risk. If you genuinely don't like VR then maybe its not for you but I've played a lot different games and I can't think of anything that remotely compares with VR. Super Hot with a mouse is brilliant, Super Hot in VR makes me genuinely excited that I'm going to be around to see the near future. Beat Saber is very good fun, too (quite hard to describe but even in a vive the graphics are very crisp and smooth).
> If it was $200, I’d consider it.
Apparently half life alyx is enjoyable in a windows mixed reality headset. There is also the Oculus Go at that price point although I've never touched one because I have a proper VR headset.
ymmv but I've been able to buy used VR systems like the Vive Pro for $375 on ebay. Just to use them for either driving or flying simulators, VR is already worth it.
That said, there's still plenty to complain about for VR but that doesn't mean it doesn't have mass market potential.
But yeah. It was like $3000 in total or something ‘~’
I find $60 for AAA titles a marginal proposition.
There are options available to try high-end VR before you buy, and ~$200 low-end versions if you prefer going in blind.
I know not everyone has a friend with a high spec rig, but that is improving over time as well.
For a try-before-you-by thing, I'd recommend doing 2 weeks. For the first few days, it was, "OMG, the future!" Then for a few days it was, "Not overwhelming, but still cool!" By the end of the 2 weeks, though, we were happy enough to return it.