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Comment by Shacklz | Hacker News Reader

> Motion Sickness, headaches, sweaty headsets and detachment.

I've bought a Vive when Half Life: Alyx came out and was completely blown away by the first impressions and immersions of that game.

Since then however and after the first "whoa!"-effects faded, every game was exactly what you've just described: Pure disappointment, and my body completely stressed out/sick after half an hour, at best. The only exception is beat-saber, which is a lot of fun for quite some time, but not the kind of game I'd want to play for hours on end.

So far, VR seems gimmicky, and quite frankly is way too much of a hassle to set up to enjoy it often (so many cables!, and I don't have the space for a permanent setup).

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The cable thing is pretty solved with the Quest 2. Zero cables there.

Yeah, if you want to play a subset of games that Facebook has deemed you can play. Still salty that Pavlov isn’t native to quest.

Air Link solves this, but boy is it annoying in practice. Setting down the headset always pushes the floor just out of reach when you come back to it. Which is frustrating in a game that makes you pick things up, like shooters.

Not sure if you are aware but you can get Pavlov Shack for free through the AppLab for quest2: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3649611198468269

I've had some good fun playing it.

Why is SideQuest and AppLab not sufficient for “unapproved” games?

I was pretty disappointed with Alyx. Little manual interactions like the healing stations and the markers and the reloading felt novel. But the actual meat of the game, the combat, was just not very good. Teleport movement breaks immersion. The hardest enemies in the game were the electric dogs. They did this thing where they drastically over commit to shooting in a specific direction and all you needed to do was click to move somewhere else and you were fine. It was super lame, but, at the same time, not actually super easy to execute. It's like we've taken a step forward on graphical immersion and three steps back on game design immersion.

Valve did a good job working with the constraints they had, but my takeaway is that the constraints are just too vast to make a game that isn't clearly hand holding you because your controls and situational awareness are just kind of bad.

I played on an index and would do multiple hours at a time, with no sickness.

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